David McElroy

At the beginning of the primary election season last year, a friend here in Alabama asked me what I thought of an obscure Republican gubernatorial candidate. The guy was a state legislator and physician who I’d never heard of before he announced he was running for governor.

“Robert Bentley?” I asked. “Who’s he? He has no real campaign experience. He’s never done anything that anybody’s heard of. He has less chance of getting elected governor than my dog Lucy does.”

Six months later, this obscure guy was elected governor in a landslide. Lucy still hasn’t announced her candidacy for anything.

I spent most of two decades working in Alabama politics among Republican campaigns. I was just as qualified as anybody to be considered an expert about who had a shot. But I was absolutely, positively, 100 percent wrong.

The iPhone is pretty darned ubiquitous these days — including the iPhone 4 that’s with me pretty much 24 hours a day — but many experts predicted its failure when it was announced early in 2007. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer certainly hoped Apple’s new phone would flop, but he sounded as though he was absolutely confident in April 2007 when he said the following:

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them, than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get.”

So why do so-called experts get things so wrong so frequently. Was I less informed about state politics than I thought I was? Was I just an idiot who was falsely sure of his opinions? And what about Ballmer? He’s a very successful head of one of the world’s largest companies. How could he have been so wrong about the iPhone, as compared to his own failing Windows Mobile platform?

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One of the ironies of modern political life in America is that some people can’t get over the fact that a middle-class suburban black family has more in common with its white neighbors than with black families in a poor, uneducated inner city. So well-meaning but unthinking people keep trying to perpetuate political racial segregation instead of letting people decide what they want for themselves.

The latest example of this comes from the county next door to me. Shelby County in on the south side of Birmingham, and it contains much of the metro area’s wealthy and middle-class suburbs. There are pockets of lower-income people, but it’s typically home to a lot of middle class and upper middle class people.

It should be a sign of progress that quite a number of the families in the upper middle class neighborhoods of Shelby County are now black. They’re certainly still a small minority, but it’s common — and it’s not an issue for anyone. For an area that was seen as Ground Zero for racial discrimination less than 50 years ago, it’s huge progress. But some people are now unhappy that those black families — spread out through all those majority-white neighborhoods — don’t see black skin on any members of the County Commission.

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If Jesus wanted to reveal Himself to you, how do you suppose He’d do it? A South Carolina couple is convinced that Jesus is blessing them by mysteriously superimposing His fuzzy image onto a Walmart receipt. If this is the best Jesus can do, the photographic equipment at the right hand of the Father leaves a bit to be desired.

It’s easy to make fun of people such as this — and I’m not discouraging that in this case — but there’s a more interesting point to be made. Most of the time, people see what they want (or need) to see. It’s a well-known phenomenon, although it goes by different names. (This article by Michael Shermer is a good overview of the science behind it, although I have to caution that I think Shermer has a history of being too quick to dismiss everything he can’t explain.)

I’ve seen this in my own life when somebody saw Jesus’ face in a door at a local hospital. (More about that in a moment.)

This tendency to find simplistic explanations for random events affects most people. When folks just see Jesus on their Walmart receipt, it’s not a big deal. But what about cases in which people start seeing irrational things in economics (“Imports are bad!”) and then insist that society be reordered to fit their prejudices? It can lead to the idiocy of the modern state’s economic policies. What about when people see conspiracies by racial or ethnic groups (“The Jews are out to get us!”) and start trying to destroy those people? It can lead to Nazi death camps.

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