Daryl Davis
Image: The Guardian
Image: The Guardian
Have you ever tried to reason with someone whose mind is made up? Good luck with that. You can argue until you're blue in the face, but it's rare for people to change their minds, no matter how great your arguments are.
But there is a simple way that people easily change their beliefs: by experiencing the opposite.
One would assume that people who had joined an extremist organization dedicated to white supremacy would cling tightly to their beliefs. But for over 200 Klansmen, the simple act of meeting a friendly black person was enough to change their views on black people as a whole. Blues musician Daryl Davis has "what some might call an interesting hobby. For the past 30 years, Davis, a black man, has spent time befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan." Davis talks about his initial experience meeting a Klansman that started it all:
"I recognized the logo on there, the Klan symbol and I realized this was for real, this guy wasn't joking. And now I'm wondering, why am I sitting by a Klansman?...
If you spend five minutes with your worst enemy — it doesn't have to be about race, it could be about anything...you will find that you both have something in common. As you build upon those commonalities, you're forming a relationship and as you build about that relationship, you're forming a friendship. That's what would happen. I didn't convert anybody. They saw the light and converted themselves." …
[Davis] says once the friendship blossoms, the Klansmen realize that their hate may be misguided. Since Davis started talking with these members, he says 200 Klansmen have given up their robes. When that happens, Davis collects the robes and keeps them in his home as a reminder of the dent he has made in racism by simply sitting down and having dinner with people.
This is shocking and counterintuitive, but it replicates. In a similar story, the son of a KKK Grand Wizard and creator of Kids Stormfront, a junior version of the white supremacy magazine, broke away from the movement after meeting blacks and Jews in college. After an entire lifetime steeped in white supremacist beliefs, it took simple direct experience to highlight that reality did not match his theories.
We all like to think we've rigorously thought out our beliefs, but most of us are not too different. We form hypotheses about how life works and about why things are the way they are, forgetting about our lack of actual experience with the thing we're drawing conclusions about. It's a problem that affects not just KKK members, but intellectuals, housewives, and every human being alive.
It's why thinkers and intellectuals have a well-known tendency to become disconnected from the real world, and why academia is often sneered at as an ivory tower. There's a saying that "only the smartest people could be so stupid," an idea immortalized in William F. Buckley's quip, “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.”
What's the solution? The antidote to inaccurate theories is always reality. But without engaging in real life and the experiences that will present counterevidence, people believe inaccurate things for a long time - possibly forever. Had these KKK members not met Daryl, who intentionally sought them out, it's not likely they would have ever changed their minds about non-white people.
Similarly, an academic friend of mine says that Columbia University is the most grounded Ivy League. It's something about New York City, where it doesn't matter how rarified your work is or how wealthy you are - you still have to take the subway to work and avoid being harassed by pandhandlers and alter your route to the grocery store to get around the four-block-long vaccine mandate protest. It provides a grounding in real life that many academics will never be forced to engage with.
It's obvious, but harder to implement in real actual life. Engaging with people outside your bubble is uncomfortable. It's only natural to gravitate towards people like yourself; it's a safe and comfortable space where everyone knows the same people and laughs at the same memes and gets excited about the same things. Economist Bryan Caplan writes about his bubble of libertarian economics PhDs:
I live in a Bubble Within a Bubble. You might even call it my Imaginary Charter City. I’m not just surrounded by Ph.D.s; I’m surrounded by libertarian economics Ph.D.s. I’m not just unfamiliar with NASCAR; I forget the very existence of professional sports for months at a time. I don’t just (not?) watch shows for yuppies; I manage my entertainment to make sure that I never hear a commercial… Unlike most American elites, I don’t feel the least bit bad about living in a Bubble. I share none of their egalitarian or nationalist scruples.
While Caplan relishes his cocoon of economists whose greatest pleasure is dissecting Rothbardian theory, it's a dangerous place for an economist to be. Lots of people do think watching baseball is more fun, and forgetting that will lead to inaccurate models about the world. The key to staying grounded in reality is to consciously spend time first-hand, on-the-ground experience with the thing you're thinking about.
It's obvious, but it's not. Several years ago, I read about a study by a group of high-profile academic psychologists that said, essentially, that having to discipline a young child is always a sign that the parents have done something wrong. The top comment was, predictably, "Have the authors ever met a toddler?" Platonic toddlers in academic theory do all kinds of things that real toddlers don't. Lord Rochester's apocryphal admission attests to it: “Before I got married, I had six theories about bringing up children. Now I have six children, and no theories."
If you're studying Trump voters, don't read the sixteenth article in the New York Times on the topic. Instead, rent a room in Kentucky for a few months and talk to people. Go to bars on Friday night. Go to football games. Go to church on Sunday mornings. Talk to people about what matters to them. You’ll understand a lot more.
If you're not religious, do you have a personal relationship with any religious people? Or if you're religious, do you know any atheists? Surprisingly, many people cannot answer in the affirmative.
One Bay Area psychiatrist observes:
According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.
And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.
If you're financially well-off, hang out with less wealthy people sometimes. Take the city bus instead of an Uber. Shovel snow for someone on a wintery morning for $20. Put yourself on a rigid budget so that you have to work within the limitations of someone who earns far less than you.
If you're educated, hang out with people without advanced education; you might find them wittier, smarter, and more content with their lives than you expected. As economist Adam Mastroianni points out, some skills make people much happier in life than career and schooling.
My grandma does not know how to use the “input” button on her TV’s remote control, but she does know how to raise a family full of good people who love each other, how to carry on through a tragedy, and how to make the perfect pumpkin pie. We sometimes condescendingly refer to this kind of wisdom as “folksy” or “homespun,” as if answering multiple-choice questions is real intelligence, and living a good, full life is just some down-home, gee-whiz, cutesy thing that little old ladies do.
Many thinkers aren't frequently forced to be outside of the intellectual sphere. “A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts," wrote Alan Watts, "so he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion.” Touch grass once in a while: go fishing, or try building something more challenging than an Ikea bookcase, or speak to someone in another language. Take a class in a practical skill aimed at beginners. The guy you may have been quick to judge for his beliefs or background? He's out there reeling in fish after fish, while the fish are taunting you by eating the bait right off your hook. Strike up a conversation - chances are he'll be more than willing to share his expertise. He might even give you tips on gutting and fileting your catch.
If, after truly understanding your opponents’ perspective, you still think you're right, you've learned how to win them over to your way of thinking.
“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.”
- Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
You've also become a tolerant person who can befriend and respect people who disagree with you.
Above all, these ideas boil down to one: humility. Humility is understanding that you could be wrong, and accepting that no matter how smart and experienced you are, you don't know everything. It's about learning to understand people who disagree with you, and genuinely seeing their perspective. It's knowing that reality is a rich and beautiful tapestry that always has the capacity to surprise you.
In the words of Hamlet, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Thank you to Severin Wiggenhorn, Yitzchak Moshe, Esther O, and Andrew Kirk for reading drafts of this blog post.
