#64: What Does it Take to Change One's Mind?

I recently sent a list of Obama’s failures in the 18 months he has been in office to a friend. Here’s the list I sent:

1) We are 13 trillion dollars in debt;

2) We have 9.7% unemployment;

3) The Iranians are gonna have a bomb and regularly tell Obama to get lost;

4) Obama asks the Russians to help with Iran and they regularly tell Obama to get lost;

5) The Brazilians and the Turks just recently made a nuclear deal with the Iranians and told Obama to get lost;

6) Obama asks the Chinese to help with Korea and they regularly tell Obama to get lost;

7) The Koreans are about to start WW III and regularly tell Obama to get lost;

8) The Europeans are about to collapse financially and regularly tell Obama to get lost;

9) We have a completely open border on the south through which illegals, drug smugglers, and Islamic scum come walzing through;

10)We have a gigantic oil spill in the gulf that continues every day to pollute the waters.

This list has been edited for safe family viewing. Even as I read it now, I realize that I could add more items to it, but that isn’t necessary. The point isn’t to compile a complete list, but only to show that the Affirmative Action Experimental President (AAEP) has, at this point, a catastrophically bad record. The only “achievement” he has had is that of pushing through the health care monstrosity over the objections of the majority of citizens. But even from the point of view of politics and power, it is hard to see how this accrues to his credit. First, the bill hardly resembles what he set out to pass, second, it barely passed even though he has a majority in both houses, and third, it may well be the cause of a Republican resurgence in November and his serving (thank God!) only one term. Some victory.

What remains interesting in this grisly spectacle of a once mighty nation being led into implosion by a feckless incompetent completely out of his depth is that the his polls have remained around 47% positive with a fair bit of stability. This indicates the existence of a large population that is immune to facts. Now we know that blacks voted for him virtually unanimously, but they are only 20% of the electorate. This means that there are still around 27% who are undeterred by his failures. How come?

I think it is helpful in trying to understand political phenomena to find parallel phenomena in non-political arenas. In this case, I am reminded of the decision issues that have faced people at times of scientific revolution and of W.V.O. Quine’s epistemic metaphor of the “web of belief.”

Quine likened our collected beliefs to a web. Each knot in the web counted as a single belief and the strings between the knots were the logical connections that tie our beliefs together. For simplicity’s sake, let us assume that when a belief (knot) is given up, all the beliefs from it to the periphery must also be given up. Therefore, on this metaphor, the beliefs that are closer to the web’s periphery are less essential to web’s integrity than those close to the center. This is clearly an overly simple model, but it serves the purpose of emphasizing the interconnectedness of beliefs and that it is rarely the case that a belief can be given up without giving up a lot of others.

This is the fact, for example, that underlies the standing objection to historical counterfactuals. People sometimes ask such questions as “What would have happened had Hitler not opened a second front on the East?”. The well trained historian will usually respond that this is an unanswerable question, though he will also often be unable to explain why. It is unanswerable because we do not, and cannot, know what other facts of Hitlerian and pre-Hitlerian history would also have to be changed by the assumption that he did not attack Russia. In order to answer this question, we would have to be able to construct a complete alternate world set of beliefs in which the past was such as to lead to an alternate Hitler who decided to not attack Russia. This we cannot do, except as in the form of fiction. But in an alternate possible world, there are no truths to be discovered, and thus there are no beliefs to be rationally forged.

Now when great thinkers propose revolutionary ideas to their established world, they are often resisted. The sages of Copernicus’ time resisted and denied the doctrine that the sun lies at the center of what we now call the solar system. It is easy to malign them as stupid reactionaries defending their turf, and while this contains an element of truth, it is also the case that everyone always must make a cost-benefit calculation when they face an assault on one of their beliefs.

The sages had the Aristotelian method of calculating the positions of the moving celestial bodies. It was as accurate as their instruments were capable of confirming. While there were advantages to going the Copernican route, there was also the huge disadvantage of having to relinquish an immense amount of their theological belief, if not the whole. And while we might scoff at this now, the actual people having to make this decision considered their theology as much a part of their knowledge system as their science. From a cost-benefit point of view, it could easily be argued that the rational person would have resisted the Copernican thesis. Exactly when to give up a belief is not as simple a question as one might think.

I think it is very much this kind of thing that underlies liberal progressive apparent immunity to fact. If the liberal is to give up the belief that the AAEP is the country’s savior, he must also question the AAEP’s platform of big government solutions, of re-distribution of income, of peace through appeasement, and of American capitalist badness. But when a person gives up this much in a single blow, he is left quite adrift and feeling helpless. He doesn't like this experience, shrinks from it, and searches for ways to avoid it.

The play of evidence and counter-evidence is always a fluid and complex matter in which many considerations play a part, and some of them purely pragmatic. When facing adverse evidence, a person always has choices. Denying the truth of the putative evidence; introducing an alternate hypothesis for the evidence; or denying that the evidence actually counts against the belief under attack.

Most of our opinions and our decisions have a trained, conditioned quality about them, and we rely on those conditioned responses not only forming our responses to new issues, but even in such matters as choosing our friends. Giving up a belief close to the center of our web of belief involves turning over our world, and no one does that lightly.

But these reflections must serve to increase our admiration of the various intellectuals who actually began as commie true believers and came to see the light. We can only hope that more and more of such intellectually courageous people begin to surface.