On Changing Your Mind

Essentially

Recently, I’ve come up with a question most people seem to have trouble answering —

When was the last time you changed your mind about something significant?

Give it a moment.

Think about what that change was, and why it came about.

If your answer is, I haven’t changed my mind about anything substantial since I became an adult, isn’t that amazing?

And if you can easily say, It was this big shift, last week, and it was because of this, doesn’t that say something interesting about you?

I’ve been asking this question in the context of environmental activism. It’s always the big question —

What can we do to change people’s minds? How can we bring people along with us?

Not people as an abstract but this or that idiosyncratic person.

Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay’s How to Have Impossible Conversations has been useful reading.

They insist that the first thing you need to do, if you want to persuade someone of something, is absolutely not to try to persuade them — it’s to try to establish rapport, commonality.

Talk about anything but The Subject. Get them to see you as human.

Sharing stories is a way of doing this.

Quite often, I am asked to speak about writing, or storytelling, in the context of climate.

If you want to change someone’s mind, tell them a good story.

That’s what a lot of activists believe. But when I ask whether it was a story convinced them to become an activist, they don’t all say yes.

Usually, if it was stories at all, and not facts or images, it was a number of stories over a number of years. Which means that every one of those made a small contribution. Therefore stories are worthwhile.

There’s hope in that.

Here is a small example, from my own life.

I have always hated the music of Brahms.

I found it completely unlistenable — brassy, brash, in some way psychopathic although overtly emotional, and with obsessive intervals (fourths, I think).

This wasn’t because I didn’t hear him, growing up. My mother loved Brahms.

When I spoke to her in the hospice, during her two weeks, she asked for part of Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem to be played at her funeral. And it was.

I think the words were a message to those she knew she was leaving.

As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.

Here is the recording she wanted —

This must be one of the reasons I decided to listen to all five episodes of Radio 3’s Composer of the Week series on Brahms, written and presented by Kate Molleson.

And those programmes changed my mind completely.

Some of the pieces Kate Molleson played will, I know, be music I listen to until the end of my life.

I heard every note in a different way.

It wasn’t the Requiem did it; I’m not sure if I will ever be able to like that. It was going from Brahms’ life to his music and back. It was recognising what he wrote out of immediate emotional need, rather than a coldly deliberate attempt to be a great composer.

My conscious reason for putting myself through something I thought I’d hate (five hours of Brahms) was not the memory of my mother, it was that I always — when the opportunity is there — try to look closely at my antipathies.

Why does this disgust me?

I hated and dismissed D.H.Lawrence, until I went back to him, again and again. My hatred troubled me, because I knew there was something in him that other people valued. (I’ve spoken about this in a talk I called ‘Souls’.) Am I wrong? Is this my blindspot?

Starting to write this entry, I thought that’s what I’d say. That I’ve often made a deliberate effort to change my own mind when I felt it might need changing.

I didn’t plan to mention my mother’s death.

But the reason I’m the kind of person I am is because of her. She brought me up to question my own opinions. (Perhaps this was the scientist in her — she studied Biology.)

Isn’t this a necessary skill for children to learn? Isn’t it a beneficial humility and flexibility, even if it doesn’t seem to be about validating them or building their confidence?

No, I really didn’t mean to write about this.

(I was wrong about Brahms, Mum.)

You’ll have to put the other bits together yourself.