Persuasion I

What's the best reason for changing your mind? How about because you were wrong? Maybe you didn't know the most relevant facts, or maybe you were making a mistake of logic. Watching a debate might offer some fact or explanation that persuades.

Mostly, though, we don't change our minds much on important matters, and when we do change, the change is at a glacial pace. Among the most significant changes of my lifetime were the change in racial attitudes and the change in attitude toward gay people. Relations between the sexes have changed greatly as well.

Each of these changes took place over at least one or two generations, and none of them has been very complete. Some of the change is just due to the older attitudes dying out with the people who held them, but not all or probably even most.

I vividly recall hearing of (or seeing?) an interview with an older Southerner who said he had been anti-black and had persecuted blacks all his life, but his perspective was now changed by the fact that he now had two half-black grandchildren. That might have been a Saul on the road to Damascus moment, but the glacial change is more common. People see attitudes changing around them, and that fact makes them more susceptible to change.

Fact and logic play a very minor role in such change, I think. What changes is mostly ones openness to hearing new fact and reason. The rise and triumph of abolitionist thought in England has to be a classic case. William Wiberforce and a few other passionate and persistent men and women changed the mind of a whole nation. They in turn had been persuaded, in part, by the eloquent testimony of ex slaves and that former slave ship captain who wrote "Amazing Grace" - a great movie, btw.

Rather similar events drove the much later abolition in the US, and the civil rights movement of my youth.

Such liberal changes are driven mostly by empathy. Conservative and reactionary change tends to be driven by fear. Anger plays for both sides.

Our attitudes are greatly shaped by those around us. That's one reason why the right-wing noise machine is so essential to the survival of reactionary Republicanism. If most of your fellow citizens think you are nuts, and your leaders continually lie to you, and they and you *are* nuts, its hard to maintain your attitude without a protective cocoon of social lunacy.