pegkerr | Changing hearts and minds

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Changing hearts and minds

I have been thinking a great deal about a rather large, amorphous subject the last few days. Various threads of thought about a wide variety of subjects has led to this post, including:

-- the painful processing I had to do to get over the last election as I wondered about how Americans can have such vastly different visions of what direction our country should take. How do we come together?

-- reading Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think by George Lakoff

-- the heated rhetoric about the Schiavo case

-- thinking about the Islamic fundamentalist worldview vs. American world view

-- a post here I made a while ago about my encounter with a man who felt differently than I did about mothers working outside the home, which I recently reposted at feminist here

-- a post I made about trying to change a coworker's mind about gay civil rights

-- a post wayfairer made about coming out to some students she was tutoring (and how one's viewpoint that "I hate gays" abruptly changed to "okay, I hate gay men, but lesbians are cool") when he realized that oops, his tutor was gay.

There are places in the world where if people disagree, they solve the disparity of opinion by trying to kill the people on the other side. I would hope that there are better ways of sorting out opinions. We write our various essays/rants here in LiveJournal not just to vent, but because we want to influence others to come to join our point of view (at least I do). But it seems to me that a lot of public discourse, at least in America today, isn't trying to do that. If we're lazy, we friend those on LJ who think only the way we do, and we listen to our favorite radio stations, and we have our favorite columnists who tell us what we already agree with.

There was an article in my paper today about Ann Coulter. People go to hear Ann Coulter not because they want to be persuaded by her arguments, but just to hear her bash the opposition. But I rather doubt that Ann Coulter has ever changed anyone's mind about anything. It's rather difficult to listen to "discourse" which basically boils down to: "Anyone who doesn't agree with me is venal and stupid."

Is anyone ever listening anymore with the possibility about changing his or her mind about anything?

Tell me about something, some issue, that you changed your mind about. (Abortion? Gay rights? Stem cell research? Or . . . ?) Share your experience of what led you to change your mind. And I don't mean "I used to sorta feel this way, but now I sorta feel the other way." I'm interested in people who have radically changed a very strong opinion about something. I'm not interested in re-hashing the particular arguments or starting a flame war on the issue, whatever it is: I'm interested in what made you alter your opinion. Was it gradual or sudden? Did the people you cared about (who initially believed as you did) disapprove when you started thinking differently? Was it prompted by something that you read? Someone that you met who either made you think of the issue because of the way they lived, or because of something they said? How do you feel about yourself, looking back at what you believed in your past.? Was it easy or painful to do? What else changed for you when you changed your mind? Do you change your mind less often now?

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I've changed my mind about capital punishment. I used to think it was a pretty good idea for particularly heinous crimes (although NEVER for political ones). Now I think it is almost always a bad idea. The main thing that influenced me on that was probably the Innocence Project. I had thought that there were enough safeguards in our legal system to make it very unlikely that someone would be executed for a crime they didn't commit. I no longer believe that. I was somewhat influenced by the movie, "Dead Man Walking," although not hugely. And, to be completely pragmatic about it, I think that it's bad for America's position in world politics.

When I was 17, about 1991, I visited Bryn Mawr College, as a prospective student. They were going through an upheaval related to an episode of harassment of a lesbian student, so there were a whole hell of a lot of supportive pink and black triangles around.

I looked at them, read the newspapers hanging around, nodded to myself, and said, when I came home from the visit, "It's a very nice place, but there's an awful lot of lesbians there." I had the vague idea that this was a Bad Thing. That, in fact, one Should Not Be Gay.

Then I went to a camp about math, for the summer. One of the RAs, Lexi, was this extremely pink haired woman who was very friendly. At one point, she sat down next to me while I was reading 'This Bridge Called My Back' (yes, that's the first feminist book I ever read), and asked me what I thought of Martina Navratilova.

I was like, "Um, she's a good tennis player?" I really didn't have much clue that Martina had been (in)famous for coming out (and having Judy Nelson sue her for like, non-official divorce funds).

Despite this rousing start, Lexi (and most of the other RAs; the place was a colony that summer), just by living their lives as out lesbians (or in my personal RA's case, bisexuals), kind of proved that lesbians /weren't/ out to eat my non-existent children. My hallmates and I (we were the older bunch) had some pretty specific and intense discussions about the subject. They were, to a person, all much more homophobic than I was, and their arguments made me think. A lot.

Then I went home, and talked to my dad about it a few times. He said, basically, "Yes, don't be a lesbian. Lesbians are bad people. And here, read this, it'll tell you why not." 'This' was a health book that, um, told me nothing at all about why not. Since I had had quite evident proof that lesbians (and bisexual women) are not, in fact, bad people, I sort of eyed this series of conversations warily.

Then I went to Bryn Mawr for my frosh year (it was better than any of the other places I got into, that's why), and fell in with a bunch of queer activists, and came out to myself as bisexual, and there you go.

Several years later, I, the sheltered Unitarian Universalist, was persuaded that even fairly evangelical Christians were not, actually, closed minded idiots, by dint of living with two of them for the summer.

There are others, mostly having to do with diversity politics, but anyway. Basically, I get to know people as individuals, get to know what they think, and learn from them. The end.

Seems to me I was much more favorable towards capital punishment many years ago. I *still* think some kinds of deeds can't be recovered from, but I'm now quite convinced that our society, specifically our judicial system, can't reliably identify people who have committed those deeds, so.

I was a lot more moderate about gun rights 30 years ago. Probably, without having thought about it much, even thought that restricting access was mostly a good idea. Over time, it became more and more apparent that restricting access didn't work, and if you somehow magically succeeded in restricting access, you'd just reduce all the thugs to clubs and knives -- putting most people *even more* at their mercy.

I was a lot more favorably inclined towards government-run safety nets 30 years ago. The more I watch and think, the more it seems to me that people factor the lowered risk into their calculations, just like with anti-lock brakes, thus making the price pretty much unbounded. Also, the government uses such things as an opportunity to intrude in lots of unexpected ways into people's lives, and puts small-minded controlling bureaucrats firmly in charge of a growing underclass. I have moved more and more towards thinking the government is not my friend and not to be trusted, let alone relied upon.

I've definitely changed my mind, in the past few years, about the viability and respectability of (entirely consensual) polyamory and group marriages. I've always been very fiercely monogamous in relationships, and Jen is the same way; and for quite a few years the only people I knew who showed any interest in polyamory, etc. were, not to mince words, a handful of lechers really desperately looking for excuses for threesomes.

But there are quite a few people (in fandom and publishing, no less) who've been making polyamorous arrangements work, some for years or decades. I've crossed paths or LJs with enough of them by now to realize that my initial impression of the culture was skewed; there are households out there where this sort of arrangement goes on in perfect love, sincerity, and dignity every day.

It's sure as heck not my thing, but I no longer look at it through the "It wouldn't work for me so it shouldn't possibly work for anyone else" filter, which is where a great deal of fussy-minded moral bossiness comes from...

radically changed a very strong opinion about something? I'm not sure there has ever been anything.

Well, I grew up as a theist, and now I'm a non-theist. But that was more a slow development than a radical change.

I used to think that it was not true that if school health facilities make birth control available, students will take that as approval of their having sex, but my two oldest kids, when they were in high school, both told me that yes, that's exactly what students think. That didn't change my mind about whether birth control should be available, but it changed my mind about how students (at least some) would interpret the availability.

As I've mentioned before, I generally don't "believe" things. My opinions are mostly along the lines of "this is what I think right now, based on information and experience to date, and always subject to change with new information and experience." So my posts--even my rants--are less aimed at getting people to join my point of view than at exploring that point of view and opening it up to argument.

When I was younger, I was an ardent pacifist (as, interestingly, my fourteen-year-old son is). Now I believe that there is such a thing as a just war, that some fights must be undertaken in self-defense or to protect the weak and vulnerable. (Our current Iraq venture, however, does not, to my mind, fall under this rubric.) One factor that led to this revision in my beliefs was a deeper study and contemplation of history, and of actively imagining what it would have been like to live, for example, in Europe as Napoleon or Hitler were advancing. The other major factor was my leaving-behind of the Christian ethos (which I did believe required me to embrace pacifism unreservedly). As a Pagan, I had to confront warrior deities and warrior energy in a way that Christianity had not demanded. I learned, for example, that Mars was the god of war because he was first-off the god who presided over the beginning of the agricultural year--it was therefore his role to protect the crops and those who tended them. In contemplating mythology and its connections to the lives of the ancients and also to my own life, I learned that, as my husband once phrased it, "There are not just things worth dying for; there are some things worth killing for." I've come to see this as a fact of life--one I don't like, but one I have to accept in this imperfect world.

Thanks for initiating such a thought-provoking discussion.

I stopped knowing everything about six or seven years ago, when I hit my twenties. It was an immense relief. All that omniscience had gotten to be a bit of a burden. I still lean progressive-libertarian, but as a teenager I was a flaming libertarian and no excuses accepted for more moderate viewpoints.

I think the major thing that changed is that I started thinking about politics in terms of how to get there from here. I never really believed that the ends justified the means, but I used to let the means and the side effects get kind of misty in my head, sort of an "after some time, things settled into the ideal way they'd figured out." Now in some ways means and likely side effects are primary: we probably won't eliminate illiteracy, for example, so what exactly are we doing to our school systems right now? How does this or that choice affect the kids who are in school this very minute, and the ones who are coming along five years after that? All that started to look more real and important than what an ideal school system would look like in an ideal and totally redesigned world. Also falsifiability got to be a good deal more important: how will we tell if something we've tried isn't working? As a teenager I was very good at seeing ways in which government programs weren't working (fish in a barrel, in many cases), but not so good at seeing ways in which their replacements or their lack might also not work.

Like dancingwriter, I used to be a pacifist (for many years) and wrote extensively about pacifism, and now I believe that there are instances where the use of armed force is necessary to protect innocent people and the interests of justice. (Also like dancingwriter, I do not believe the current Iraq war is actually such a case).

I had a sort of abrupt change of mind with a long lead-up. During the war in Bosnia, I clung to pacifism by my fingernails, reaching a kind of minimalist pacifism in which eventually I (and some others I was working with) took the public position that we could neither support nor oppose military intervention. During the Kosovo war, I'd got to the point where I was prepared to admit that there might be situations where I could imagine myself supporting military action, but that the particular form of action taken in that case was not one I could actively support, though I also did not oppose it in public.

Then came the referendum in East Timor, in which I was deeply involved, and the militia rampage that followed. Up to about 4 a.m. on one particular morning I (and therefore the NGO that I was more or less running) called for an increased international presence, but not an armed presence. At that 3 or 4 a.m. moment, as I was fielding frantic e-mails and phone calls from in-country, including many reports of deaths, my pacifism just snapped and broke forever. I phoned the East Timor desk officer at Foreign Affairs at home (waking her up) and in the course of an extensive conversation told her, among other things, that my NGO would do anything in our power to facilitate getting armed peacekeepers on the ground. In the great scheme of things, of course, the position of any NGO was pretty unimportant, but it was a major turning-point for me. It took me months if not years to fully assimilate the intellectual consequences of really not being a pacificst anymore; it had been part of my theoretical framework for living for so very long, and not having that framework makes everything much more complicated, but it would be insanely hypocritical to try to change my mind back now.

Most of my thinking-changes have been gradual rather than abrupt--I think for me it takes time, to process and work through such changes.

I can trace realizing non-violence could often be workable to reading Ursula Le Guin's Eye of the Heron, though the book itself was a bit heavy-handed--and though this was something I'd been thinking about for a while. I realized abruptly that non-vioelence was not passive; and I Went from seeing it as something that really can be viable: not always, but much of the time. (But then there's been a slower shift, as how much "much of the time" is for me grows steadily greater.) (And another slow shift, as I realize the too-quick assumption that non-violence isn't an option often makes us not fully consider the range of options out there.)

Something more minor I've gradually changed viewpoint on: fanfiction. Used to see it as a waste of a professional writer's time and a flagrant violation of copyright. Now see it as mostly a fun and positive thing (even if it's not a thing I really do anymore, with a few exceptions), and a very gray area of copyright. Drastic change there--but one that evolved over 5-10 years.

This probably isn't going to gain me any popularity points, but I went from being totally in support of homosexual activity as morally acceptable to thinking that while gay people should not face discrimination or legal restrictions, that homosexual activity is morally wrong. I had my original view because many of my friends were coming out of the closet, and I wanted to support them, and I was also very heavily influenced by Paul Monette's writings. However, as I started researching more theology concerning the human person and sexuality, I changed my mind, realizing that on any other moral issue I would support my friends by making it clear I didn't support their decision (to do drugs, to have premarital sex, to steal, to cheat, whatever) but love them. And I haven't lost any friends because of this, I don't make a big deal about it, but I remember being in a meeting with my spiritual advisor a few years ago and flat out telling him there was no way I could ever be with the Church on this teaching, and after a few months of prayer and research, I was won over. Specifically, reading David Morrison's Beyond Gay and some of Christopher West's commentaries and explanations on Theology of the Body changed my mind.

I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood, did Hebrew school and all the rest of it. I think I always understood that Moslem != terrorist, but did absorb the general belief that the religion oppressed women and did tend to foster an extremist mindset. I still think that's true in a lot of particular Islamic sects, but I don't exactly what (who) convinced me it didn't have to be true of all of Islam: my then-coworker Nadeem. We actually had a group at that time that had a lot of religous discussions: our lead was a Baptist, another coworker was a Buddhist, and then there were Nadeem and me. Nadeem was always patient, always honest, and explained a lot of things I hadn't known about his religion: some of Mohammed's teachings about respect to women, the rules about tithing, attitudes to what they call the other Peoples of the Book (Jews and Christians) and many others.

It's pretty obvious there are a lot of extremists who have turned Mohammed's teachings into hate and oppression anyway. WHat I didn't know before was that it didn't have to be that way and that the hatred wasn't built into the original teachings.

At that job and since, I've often been the only Jew in the area. I've had many conversations where people begin, "I've met other Jews but didn't realy know them well enough to ask questions. Do you mind if I ask..." If I do as well in that role as Nadeem did, I will have contributed to understanding and hopefully, someday, peace.

I would also like to add, on the theme of whether anyone really listens, or is just waiting to have their turn to convince you, that my dad's side of the family is Pentecostal and really, really doesn't like that I intend to enter religious life. Suddenly my aunt and cousin who rarely even speak to me are constantly telling me that Catholicism is a cult, I'm not a Christian, the Church is evil and devoid of the Holy Spirit, etc. And I really don't care if they think that, but they feel like they have every right to interfere with my life and try to change my mind. I think my cousin's husband and job are both worthless, but she's an adult. I have no idea how they think they have any chance of changing my mind, and I've repeatedly told them I don't want to argue about it, but they insist.

They both also read Ann Coulter.

I changed my mind about firearms control. I thought they were a bit of a waste of time, for the usual reasons. Then I moved to the USA, and started comparing the murder rates in the US with the other western countries I've lived in. The USA is a first world country with third world murder rates.

Hello--I'm not a Live Journal user, so I'm posting anonymously. If you'd like, you can call me "Nan." It's the name I use in my daily life.

I'd like to share two quick anecdotes about changes in my own thinking. When I was a young teenager, I read several very important books in my own life--Beauty, by Sheri S. Tepper and The Last Herald-Mage books by Mercedes Lackey. Beauty, through its horrific portrayal of a dangerously overpopulated future and short-sighted conservative political forces in the present actually convinced me that abortion may not have been the have been the evil I had always thought it was. Lackey's Last Herald Mage books centered on the first sympathetic portray of a homosexual character that I had ever read.

Since that time, my thinking has changed somewhat. I no longer fully buy into Tepper's arguments--but I'm still firmly pro-choice. And I don't enjoy reading Lackey all that much, but her books retain a fond place in my memory.

These two writers changed my thinking and my life. Even if I no longer enjoy their books, I will never forget the formative influence that they had on my character.

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Changing hearts and minds

Something I've Changed My Mind About

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