To Change Your Mind is Human
It often feels like changing your opinion is a death wish. Your family or friends have created a mutual pact or a collective trust to believe in the same things and stand by them, outsiders be ostracized or criticized as lesser-than. What happens then when you change your mind? You risk alienation; you could find yourself proverbially naked on a cold dark road by yourself consuming new information. Do you have the courage to be a rationalist, someone who can absorb new information and have the bravery to say “I have a renewed perspective, I’m updating my prior held beliefs?”
I was inspired by Bari Weiss when she wrote a two part series on writers and pop culture icons that have changed their minds in 2021 on various topics or gone against institutions to establish their own voice. Bari left the New York times after spending decades fending for its institutional clout to then go off on her own in 2020 and establish her own voice. She was tired of representing and defending the institution in a half-held belief that didn’t perfectly align with her beliefs. She felt like NYT was changing its stance and she didn’t agree with its overtly one-sided progressivist agenda. Her power was in her voice as an individual and she had the courage to go it alone in a change of heart away from the institution that had historically represented her opinion.
Bari and Nellie Bowles, who both stepped away from the New York Times, speak to the change of mind and deprioritization of prestige. “But do you know what's better than prestige? Play, risk, challenge. What’s better than prestige is writing what you mean. And, maybe the new thing we’re building will become prestigious one day, and in a hundred years some ambitious young writer will quit in a huff and write this same thing, and that will be great for her. All I mean to say is there is a lot to want in these short lives, and prestige is the least interesting thing on the menu. It took me too long to learn that. ”
Bari chronicles others who have changed their beliefs in the last few years:
Tim Urban who is a proud atheist changed his opinion on religion.
“I’ve spent most of my life thinking “the more atheists, the better.” Looking back, this now feels like a “be careful what you wish for” hope. It’s easy for non-religious people to look down on religion, but we take for granted the extent to which a good society is good because of the moral structure it provides. Over the past few years, it’s been made starkly clear that a world without the major religions is not a world without religion—it’s a world with a bunch of new religions sprouting up and quickly capturing millions of “atheists.” These new religions—many political—have not been put through centuries of trial and error, and the moral structures they provide often stoke the worst parts of our nature.”
Karol Markowitz on changing her mind on New York
“We had moved to New York from the Soviet Union when I was small. We were Jewish refugees. And freedom was the focal point of our new lives.
But something broke during the pandemic. The conformity of our age took hold in my corner of Brooklyn and did not let go. You could not question irrational mitigation policies. You could not say what we all knew to be true: That double-masking outside does nothing. That we don't need to bathe in Purell. That it is bad for kids not to be in school. I loved New York so much, but loving it over the past two years has felt like pleading the case for your terrible boyfriend to your friends. “He takes a little while to open up. Really, he’s not so bad.” You hand over your best picture. “That’s him? You’re putting up with all of it for this?”
I will—I already do—miss my glorious, funky, singular New York. But the point of New York was its freedom. I want my kids to feel the way I felt in my hometown in the ‘90s. So we’re moving to Florida.”
Chloe Valdary changed her mind on Critical Race Theory
“I believed—and preached—that critical race theory was a kind of archetypal evil, a modern version of Original Sin that required all of us, as people of good faith, to eradicate it, root and branch. Then, embarrassed that I was railing against CRT without completely understanding it, I read “Silent Covenants,” a book about education by Derrick Bell, who, along with Kimberlé Crenshaw and others, was one of the originators of critical race theory. I was surprised to read Bell’s argument promoting school choice for black and white Americans alike. Bell also laments what he calls “racial balance remedies,” or the conflation of equality of opportunity with the notion that racial parity (the idea that an institution should perfectly match the racial breakdown of the community it serves) as the only measure of “anti-racism.”
What these writers share is humility. To change is to admit we’re fallible, fumbling along, and that still we reach. It’s to be hopeful and human and alive.