On being wrong…
One of the things I’ve had at the back of my mind, encouraging me to start blogging again, is the idea of writing a series of posts about things I’ve changed my mind about over the years. I have a few goals with this:
- Personally, it’s a convenient way of staking out what I actually believe in, which may not be as obvious as I think it is, especially in terms of the themes that connect disparate ideas. An awkward conversation with my uncle a couple of months ago, in which I wholly failed to explain why the shift from environmental advocacy to the well-being movement was not only logical but also a much smaller jump than it looked to him, brought home how poorly I’ve been doing this lately.
- There’s some value in specifically setting out what I believe in now, because it’s so easy to assume that something someone said a decade ago must still be what they think today. Another conversation highlighted the importance of this one – in this case a long slow email discussion with an old friend about why I don’t love The Economist like I used to, in which he mentioned that he doesn’t exactly know what I believe today since we’ve only been able to speak infrequently in the 9 years since I left Britain.
- In the grand scheme of things, this feels like my little way of chipping away at the absurd prevailing media culture in which it’s unacceptable to accept ever having been wrong, and changes of opinion are regarded as mortal weakness. In the spirit of Dougald Hine‘s beautiful New Public Thinking project, I think it’s important to have the courage to admit I was wrong in public. My doing this won’t have the impact of, say, a politician doing it, but every voice shifts the Overton Window a little, and at least I can afford to do this.
- Some of these will also serve as a sort of mea culpa to people who I argued with at the time, but later realised were right. If that were the main purpose I wouldn’t need to say this publicly – it’s the other reasons that have me putting these in a blog.
…About the marriage equality campaign
For most, if not all, of the time I’ve lived in the U.S. marriage equality has been a big political issue. I’ve always found it absurd that marriage can be restricted to a particular sanctioned combination of genders, and I don’t even understand why a homophobe should care about gay marriage. But I have in the past been quite critical of some of the more radical, aggressive, impatient campaigners, feeling that their pushiness set back the cause and they should be subtler and less pushy. Over a few years, I’ve slowly been convinced that not only was this a misreading of the correct strategy, it was also something I had no right to say as an outsider to this campaign.
I hadn’t intended to start this series with this topic, but as it happens I read Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail today. I am a huge admirer of Dr. King—in fact, I can’t think of anyone I admire more—so his words tend to be particularly persuasive to me. The letter is just like his speeches, in that it’s almost perfectly written, with the combination of a an impeccably logical argument, a patient listing of unarguable grievances, and a continual building of the rhetorical pitch. I couldn’t read it without hearing his voice in my head and being carried along with him.
In this instance, it wasn’t that his words started the process of change, but they formed a sort of capstone, summing up the reasons why I’ve changed my mind about this. There were two parts in particular. The first:
Jack Baker and James Michael McConnell apply for a marriage license in Minneapolis, Minnesota, 18 May 1970. From the Minnesota Historical Society
I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
From this I took a sharp rebuke against the idea that I, as an outsider to this particular liberation struggle, can ever tell the group fighting for nothing more than rights I already have that they should slow down. It’s one thing to be an outsider and appreciate that a group is discriminated against and suffers as a result. It’s quite another to understand what it feels like (something Dr. King’s letter is particularly eloquent about) and have a sense of the history and depth of the grievance. Without being able to gauge that, I should have just shut my trap.
For the full significance of this, back to Dr. King:
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I don’t really need to explain the parallel here, do I? I have gradually become convinced that when I’m being the [privileged outsider] moderate it’s important to just step aside and let the people who really understand the issue speak.
To be honest, I feel a little stupid about both of these issues. They’re things I should have been able to see 10 years ago. There’s a third mistake, which I feel much less stupid about and which will be a bit of a sub-theme in these posts: misreading a situation in the U.S. because I mistook it for being exactly like the somewhat equivalent situation in Britain, where I grew up.
The marriage equality movement in Britain has mostly been content to work in a more gradualist way than their counterparts in the U.S., and it’s mostly been rewarded with slow but steady progress. So naturally when I moved to the U.S. and saw this argument going on with so much more energy but so much less visible progress, I assumed that they’d be better off copying the Brits. It took the viciousness with which homophobia was exploited as a turnout booster in the 2004 elections for me to understand just how much worse things were here, and it took me a few more years to really see the impact of separate but “equal”. Only after some years of seeing how things really work over here, and learning about history that’s barely taught in British schools (“what do you mean, things happened in the U.S. between independence and the Cuban Missile Crisis?”) could I understand why the strategy and timing that made sense in Britain just don’t transfer.
When I see similar issues today, I am mindful of this misjudgement and do my best not to prefer the “negative peace which is the absence of tension” to real progress.
Nice piece, Eldan. Thanks for sharing. Human fallibility, yes. And the virtue of recognizing one’s misjudgments.
I wonder, though, whether there isn’t a middle path. We need the ‘what is it like to be…’ accounts, but we also need to take reflexive stances toward such accounts. The first perspective is vital because it alerts us, among other things, to the extent of the grievances. Yet the second is no less vital since it compels us to reflect on whether we have good enough reasons for acting one way as opposed to another. It also allows us to evaluate whether X is working, justifiable, wrongheaded, and so on. One could imagine, in the best of cases, a certain equilibrium achieved between the first-personal perspective and the self-reflexive stance.
Andrew,
I mostly agree with you, and I unequivocally do when it comes to questions of one group’s rights impinging on another’s. Where I specifically think I’ve gone wrong in the past is to effectively tell groups I’m not part of that they need to be more patient, when it’s always a tall order to ask someone who is suffering to be patient about the end of that suffering.
The issue of admitting you’ve changed your mind has come up a bit lately, and it’s reminded me of an old post of mine:
http://blog.iangilman.com/2004/10/foolish-consistency-is-hobgoblin-of.php
Here’s to adaptation!
Yes, that post definitely strikes a chord with me. I distinctly remember the “Kerry is a flip-flopper” meme being the first thing to get me thinking about how much our culture punishes those who ever change their mind, and how bad a thing that is. You were evidently a few steps ahead of me, though. At the time I only saw it in terms of the importance of people being able to learn from new information, but much more recently I’ve started to think in terms of the amount of change that happens in the real world, and the ability to adapt to that change.
I wonder, sometimes, if I’m not even worse, as an “insider moderate.”
This week I was giving a talk on Geriatrics in the LGBT community (at least the research on such), and I spent a great deal of time considering the existence and increasing existence of GLBT-only/targeted retirement communities. On the one hand, I think they’re likely lovely (and are certainly expensive) places, but I do worry about the creation of “separate and inequal” spaces. Kelly pointed out that the current population of older LGBT persons could likely benefit from such a protected space, as they came of age pre-Stonewall. At the same time, my LGBT generation would be better suited to integration, I think, and the increase in respect/acceptance through interaction. But it’s an interesting gray area – how to bridge the needs of the older generation with the needs of the new, and whether or not those needs of individuals conflict with the needs of the group.
All that to say that I would be interested to hear your thoughts on “safe spaces” for various disenfranchised groups.
I think there’s a world of difference between the “outsider moderate” and “insider moderate”, because you as an insider are choosing to be a moderate about something that you have direct experience of. To my mind that gives you a completely different degree of entitlement to say “let’s compromise” or “let’s slow down”, because you talk as part of the “us”, whereas I was only ever able to talk about a “you” that I wasn’t part of.
That grey area is very interesting to me. I’m not sure I have anything particularly insightful to say about safe spaces myself, just because I have the privilege of having never needed one myself. In general I can see how they’re sometimes essential, and how part of success for a liberation movement is to not need one any more, and I suppose there has to be a stage in the process when people feel a conflict between wanting safe space and wanting the community to stop separating itself.