In praise of changing your mind

We are strangely hard on people who change their minds. We keep a whole drawer of words for it, and none of them are kind: flip-flop, U-turn, backpedal, gone soft. To be caught believing something now that you did not believe five years ago is treated as a small exposure, as if consistency were the same as integrity and the discovery of an error were the crime rather than its correction. I want to argue the opposite, that a person who can change their mind in public is doing something rarer and braver than a person who never has to, and that the contempt we pour on it is one of the quietest ways we hold ourselves back. Consider what we are actually asking of the person who holds their line. We are asking them to have been right at the moment they first made up their mind, which is to say the moment they knew the least they would ever know about the question, and then to defend that early guess against everything they learn afterwards. Put like that, the loyal position is the absurd one. It treats the beliefs of your less informed past self as sacred and the evidence of your better informed present self as an embarrassment to be managed. A mind that works properly should be changing all the time, in small ways constantly and in large ways occasionally, for the plain reason that the world keeps handing it new information and a mind is a thing for taking information in. The person who has believed exactly the same things for thirty years has not necessarily been steadfast. They may simply have stopped listening, and steadfastness is the flattering name we let them keep. None of this means every reversal is admirable. There is a difference, and it is the whole of the matter, between changing your mind because you have thought harder and changing it because the wind changed and it suited you. The first is the slow, slightly painful business of noticing that an argument you disliked was stronger than you allowed, and letting it move you. The second is not really changing your mind at all, because the mind was never the thing doing the work. But we have grown so afraid of being accused of the second that we have made the first almost impossible to do honestly, in daylight, without apology. We punish the honest reversal so thoroughly that people learn to defend positions they have privately abandoned, which is a far worse state to be in, and a far more common one. The real loss is not the public figure who shifts position under pressure. It is all the people, in every ordinary argument, who realise halfway through that they are wrong and keep going anyway, because to stop and say so has been made to feel like a defeat. It is not a defeat. It is the only move in any disagreement that actually makes the total amount of truth in the room go up. I have come to think you can measure a person by how they say the sentence I used to think that. Some people cannot say it at all. Some say it as a confession. A few say it plainly, almost with pleasure, the way you would report any interesting fact about the weather, because they have understood that being wrong yesterday and right today is not a humiliation but the entire point of having a mind in the first place. Those are the people worth arguing with, and they are, not by chance, the ones almost impossible to shame.