The Year of Living Erroneously

By Andrew Sullivan Sunday, Dec. 21, 2003
    • I do not know the way," Frodo Baggins, the unlikely hero of The Lord of the Rings, declares of his mission to destroy the fateful ring of J.R.R. Tolkien's imagination. In the cinematic epic that gave us the artistic exclamation point to 2003, Frodo spoke for many. This was surely the year in which we ambled hopefully, foolishly, gamely into the dark. Some would like to ascribe the many human failings of the year to willful deception. Bush lied! But cover-ups are not as common in human history as screw-ups. This was, rather, a year in which we all got it wrong. It was the year of living erroneously.

    Where, after all, are the prizes that the West's Mesopotamian adventure was designed to find? The weapons of mass destruction — the thousands of tons of unaccounted-for anthrax and botulinum toxins and all the other deadly weapons we were fighting to destroy in Iraq — have not yet been found. Yes, a great deal of Saddam's WMD infrastructure is there, and his record of deploying them is a matter of history. But the weapons themselves? We haven't found them after months of looking. Bush's fault? If it was, then the fault was shared by almost every Democrat, the U.N., the New York Times, the Clinton Administration, the British government and on and on. They all believed that Saddam's Iraq was armed to the mustache with concealed deadly weaponry. Saddam's fault? He too, it turns out, might have been mistaken, having been deceived by scientists and generals too scared to tell their tyrannical boss that the cupboard of toxic weaponry was somewhat bare. So the war that dominated the year, the war that liberated millions, the war that finally captured one of the most horrifying mass murderers in history, was at least partly built on a series of deceptions, mistakes and failures. By everyone.


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    It's useful to recognize this in a hubristic, technological age. We still don't know a lot. We screw up. We fail even as we succeed. We do not know everything. As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pronounced, there are "known unknowns," and then there are "unknown unknowns." Some things are actually quite hard to fix because the systems behind them are intricate, complicated and created by humans. New Yorkers and the inhabitants of a whole swath of North America spent a delirious, humid night in the complete dark in August, and for hours no one had a clue why the power grid had crashed or how on earth to fix it. The glitch that guaranteed that the space shuttle Columbia would disintegrate on re-entry occurred at lift-off, and none of the rocket scientists at NASA saw it coming. A sizable proportion of military deaths in Iraq were caused not even by enemy combat but by accident, human error, friendly fire.

    And when human trust is a part of the system, the potential for errors on a grand scale increases. 2003 saw one of the most respected journalistic institutions on the planet — the New York Times — confess that it had published dozens of stories by a young reporter, Jayson Blair, that were completely or partly made up. Fact checking hadn't caught his deceptions; editors who had warned about him were ignored; what seem in retrospect to be glaring inconsistencies in his stories were regarded as true and valid by some of the biggest names in the field. Other stories that seemed legit at the time — the rescue of Jessica Lynch springs to mind — became so amended, corrected, spun or rewritten that even now it's a little hard to remember what the truth of the matter finally was. We were all convinced that Captain James Yee, the Muslim military chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, had been secreting classified documents in his luggage and possibly spying for Syria. That is, until it turned out that the documents might not have been classified, and he may have been guilty of only an extramarital affair. We all believed that postmenopausal hormone-0replacement therapy was a win-win medical breakthrough, until research found it, er, wasn't.

    It felt at times as if we were all on a massive reality show like Joe Millionaire in which a critical fact, like Joe's enormous fortune, was subsequently revealed as phony. Except we all are the producers and viewers of this particular reality. And like watching reality shows, we have adjusted our vision to the new twists and turns of fact and fiction. The most astonishing aspect of the Jayson Blair scandal, after all, was that many people who had appeared in Blair's fictitious accounts didn't complain about the inaccuracies because they didn't expect any better from the press. Their skepticism was so deep it saved them from disillusion. Like Frodo, they knew what they didn't know — and didn't expect others to be any less fallible. Which, after a year like this one, is the surest form of knowledge we still have.