• Learn how to change our minds.

• Learn how to change our minds.
What can this mean? We change our minds all the time. Right?

Some woman was complaining in a letter to the editor that the schools waste too much money on immigrant children. I wrote a long reply, but my colleagues cautioned, You won’t change their minds with a letter. Only too true. We have each come to our political conclusions out of a dense fabric of experience and training, which takes more than one thread to unravel. What’s more, the strength of our commitments may have little to do with the merit of the underlying ideas.

We may build the structure of belief slowly, adding bits and pieces as we find and fit them, a sort of mental Hooverville. Some POWs in Korea started collaborating with their captors on very minor issues, to make their own lives a little easier, and ended up as traitors. Once the subjects of the Milgram electrocution studies started giving little shocks to supposedly uncooperative victims; having bought into the small stuff, they ended up committing and justifying much larger crimes.

The procedure starts rather innocently as an experiment in memory and then gradually escalates. Once subjects begin to give shocks and to raise the shock levels, there is no longer a natural stopping point. By the time they want to quit, they are trapped. . . . In order to break off, they must suffer the guilt and embarrasment of acknowledging that they were wrong to begin at all. And the longer they put off quitting, the harder it is to admit their misjudgment in going as far as they have. It is easier to continue. Imagine how much less obedience there would be if subjects had to begin by giving the strongest shocks first (Atkinson et al 739).

The whole U.S. invasion of Viet Nam, whereby you and I murdered a million or so people, started out with very small interventions that somehow always required escalation. So one key is, name what's really going on at the start. The best time to stop a crime is never to start at all.

When our belief structures are dense enough, they can easily withstand the collapse of this or that support-- new science findings contradicting old assumptions, for example, or the newly exposed crimes of popular politicians. We spent so many years admiring Senator Ted Stevens, or Joe Stalin for that matter, that we simply shrug off unpleasant evidence as trivial or the product of conspiracy.

We may react even more strongly when we have invested our hopes in certain outcomes, but know they are unlikely. One day I heard some guy blathering on the radio about how Obama was going to force us to enroll in government health programs, then implant surveillance chips in us. Usually I'm interested in the far reaches, but this guy made me so mad I just turned off the radio. His attack wasn't remotely plausible, but I think what made me mad was that health care legislation was about to come up once again in Congress, with only a bare chance of success, and I didn't want attacks like this one to derail it. When political workers disrupt folks' fondest dreams, no matter how unrealistic --perhaps especially when they are unrealistic, even desperate-- of course we are going to turn them off and drive them away, unless there is a better dream available. If a person is so down and out that all she looks forward to is winning the lottery, telling her the odds would be like shooting her dog.

Sometimes we have no personal stake in an idea, but we commit to it for no other reason than that we’ve declared ourselves in public. That’s the point of all our saluting rituals and gang signs: get us committed symbolically, and the material investments will follow. Quite often our beliefs become so much a part of our sense of self and the “I” we present to the world, that changing our minds must seem like a kind of exile, or suicide. And for someone to question our ideas-- why, that’s just about the same as torching our homes.

All of which makes me very hesitant to talk politics with others. I don’t want to set people in a defensive crouch, nor do I want them making snap judgments because I raised a question they hadn’t dealt with before. Psych research indicates that, once we’ve declared ourselves, even about topics in which we have no stake, we tend to dismiss any evidence contradicting our position. “Results confirmed that only the subjects who engaged in explanatory activity retained a belief . . . . once developed, the schemata became independent of the data that originally gave rise to them” (M.J. Smith 117).

At the same time, there are stages of understanding and circumstances of talk where we are all open to learn. We are continually faced with problems we have to solve. To extend the construction metaphor, there are times when we’re not so defensive, when we’re still mixing and pouring ideas, before the concrete has set. One such time is the economic crisis starting late Bush; despite our frantic efforts to stuff it in old conceptual boxes, it didn’t fit very well, and people had to try new explanations. Political education can be most effective at points like that. As always, the nature of the answers depends on the questions we ask.

Even without extraordinary crises, we can encourage each other to divorce our political choices from our core identities. As discussed above, this is hard because our relationships and standing in the community depend so much on consistent behavior. So one of the elements of safe space for discussion is that we can lay out our ideas without risking our sense of worth and identity. If we can respect each other as partners, if our status in the community doesn’t depend on everyone accepting our ideas, then we can talk without our statements becoming fortresses we have to defend. We’ll be readier to learn from each other.

There’s an additional element that I’m still trying to understand. Metzgar (203-4) suggests that personal transformation is a particularly middle class value, and somewhat foreign or absurd to the steel workers he grew up with. (Though Ehrenreich notes how clumsily some professionals adjust to falling status when they lose their jobs-- 2005 p. 209). Certainly, while everyone complains about politics as usual, no one I know is eager for the personal changes that a new politics might require. Well, I’ve read writers who seem pretty comfortable with cultural change, maybe even eager for it, but I am not. Nevertheless, there's no doubt there are attitudes and schemas that help us prepare for and take advantage of change. Acknowledging from the start that democracy could mean changes in our heads as well as in our institutions might help prepare us to reconstruct our stories.

There is a religious tradition of being “born again.” From everything I’ve heard, that means the decision to subordinate personal priorities for the sake of obedience, sometimes to the point of denying or despising our own human nature. In claiming to be born again we fall back on previous religious investments, and seek personal salvation in following rules set by the powerful. That’s one kind of change. No doubt many Christians would put a different emphasis on the experience, but I don’t see how they can dispute these elements. The very language of being saved emphasizes receiving and accepting. My own preferences are to develop the skills to recognize, negotiate, choose and build what’s best for me and my community.

If I had a covey of graduate students at my beck and call, I’d set them to researching the old and new stories about Viet Nam-- how our attitudes changed in the run-up to the war there, and in the decades since the U.S. lost. How much did folks really buy in to the whole Cold War / falling dominos rationale, how much killing did we expect and accept, how did we process the fact of losing the war, and even before that, the rebellion in the ranks of the guys on the front lines? (Recent gauzy recollections don’t much mention all the soldiers who ignored, intimidated, or sometimes killed their officers.) Did the anti-war work simply solidify the war boosters’ determination, or raise the stress level till even militarists wanted to back off? How did war boosters explain the atrocities to they own selves?

I don’t hardly hear anyone defending that war in hindsight. I hear lots of cussing the politicians who presided over the catastrophe. I hear sometimes the old stab-in-the-back** refrain: We coulda won, but the politicians tied the soldiers’ hands, coupled with references (mostly untrue--see Lembcke) to how spiteful the damn’ hippies were when the veterans returned. How much did the people who liked the war in 1964 ever take responsibility for their thinking at the time? I think there was probably a lot of learning, but I don’t really know, and I don’t know how covert the learning has been-- if we don’t have to acknowledge our mistakes and commit to avoiding them next time, then looking back is useless. I read that the military changed a lot in consequence. So much so that one stated rationale for the Iraq war was to cure our soldiers of their post-Viet Nam caution, to get over our national hesitation about napalming people of color.

The reason I’d like to know more about how we reconstruct that war in our minds is to better understand how we unchain ourselves from once passionately held ideas. The more we know about how we invest in our stories in the first place, the more we’ll be able to back off if they turn out to be wrong.


• Remember with purpose.
It’s not just Bill O’Reilly, but much of the mainstream media who recall Kennedy as the the champion of civil rights, M.L. King as the saint martyred by Malcolm X, Viet Nam vets as addicts spit on by hippies, Reagan as the most popular president, Clinton I as the liberals’ shining hope, and Iraq II as justified by our state of knowledge at the time. Then there’s all the things they don’t remember at all, like who put the Taliban in power, or the Central Americans you and I helped murder in the 1980s, whose sisters & grandchildren we see cleaning toilets and mowing suburban lawns, whose very presence here provokes paroxysms of racist rage.

Of course, to remember accurately, we have to keep our eyes open in the first place. The problems we face didn’t appear out of nowhere. A lot of the folks who were so shocked by the 9/11 murders somehow failed to notice the thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel every year, on the U.S. dime, or the billions of dollars worth of weapons we lavished on the jihadists in the 1980s. In 2003 I thought, maybe our protests will not stop the war, but we have to go on record, so that as disaster deepens the death-dealers will not be able to rewrite history. That March I heard a union staffer make the point of how much labor’s resistance to the second Iraq invasion owed to the fight, twenty years before, against the AFL’s complicity in the Central America wars.

Similarly, the modest steps we’re taking now to deal with climate change are possible because many of us remember an earlier wave of environmental action, and how much time we’ve lost since those early warnings.

Fletcher and Gaspasin (91, 143) make the point that much of the labor movement has surrendered to the idea that corporation-controlled globalization is inevitable, forgetting the very specific decisions that were made to direct it in a very particular direction (e.g. Clinton I’s decision to push through trade agreements with no protections for workers or the environment). (In the education biz we are hectored time and again that the current generation of students is different from the 10,000 that have gone before, that video games are the wave of the future, naturally and inescapably, and that the prudent teacher will hasten to turn herself into one. Same idea: we are helpless jellyfish flushed here and there by vast tides beyond our ken or control; we best concentrate on staying afloat.) 5 or 10 years from now, let’s remember that it was not Obama, unions, immigrants, gay people, homeowners or government regulation that caused the economic crisis that intensified after 2007, but rather rich people given a license to steal by the Halliburton government.

Remembering is important not only in retrospect, but looking forward as well. And here we understand that however much we learn from the past, the future will not repeat it exactly. So when we promise, Never Again!, we’re not just committing to resist Nazi genocide --Adolf is dead, dontcha know-- but mass murder in Southeast Europe, Southeast Asia, Central America, Central Africa and wherever the next terrible murders start to happen. By this light, our promise Never Again! has been more full of holes than Halliburton’s rationale for invading Iraq. Maybe we should raise our fists in unison and chant, Now and Again! or, Once in a While!

There can be a useful deterrent aspect to looking ahead. Earlier I wrote that our stories tend to become fixed in concrete once we declare them publicly. If we know that, ten years down the road, plenty of people are going to remember what we do today (and this is one way the ‘net does help), maybe we won’t be so quick with the Sieg Heils. Maybe we’ll decide to leave the swastika armband in the sock drawer-- and won’t have such a hard time switching to a better brand later.
We might also recall who we owe the good things we enjoy today. It’s like that bumper sticker: Unions, the folks who brought you the weekend. Women, the people who brought us the increased legal equalities we have today. Every thing I like about my community came from the hard work and vast suffering of previous generations. But even for the beneficiaries, it's easy to forget to whom we owe these services, and easy to deny them to others. Metzgar wrote about his dad, who came to have contempt for striking workers who got food stamps, despite his own decades of work to achieve benefits for workers (3-4). A lot of people work hard to put the Labor back into Labor Day. How about a Social Security Day, and a Food Stamps Day?

Here in the U.S., our bosses pretend that they gave us our relative wealth and freedom, but really we took it in spite of them. We need to back up all the Clarence Thomases, the rightist bloggers, the talk show Total Women who luxuriate in the advantages of democracy, while spitting on the workers, women, and people of color that fought for it. Let's remind the folks who are pretty satisfied with the way things are --they might complain about the dirty politicians, but overall feel pretty lucky to live in the U.S.A.-- that every advantage we have came from people fighting for them, and that we can lose them in a minute if we don't pay attention.

We can also remember that, no matter how rotten the situation becomes, our ancestors faced problems just as bad, or worse, and kept working to fix them. As Minnie Bruce Pratt found out more about the atrocities on which her privilege rested, the centuries of murder done in the name of protecting white women, she also found out more about the generations of white women who had fought against the killers, agitating against slavery, running the underground railroad, campaigning against lynching. "In my looking I found all these women who had come before me, whose presence proved to me that change is possible: and whose lives urged me toward action" (46).

Remember with purpose! Recall what happened, what we thought at the time, where we got the information. Document our experience. Compare our ideas then to what we think now. Challenge the sanitizers and mythologizers. Ritualize what we learn-- not the dead rites of dying institutions, but the passionate pondering of what we have seen and done, so we do it better next time.

** so-called from an earlier version, much beloved of the Nazis: Germany would have won the First World War if not for the treachery of German Jews and democrats.