Have you changed your mind?

Increasingly online, even on our Slugger oasis, it seems as if a polarity in western culture is rearing its head into every shred of discourse. When it comes to ideas the human psychology has a tendency to make a conclusion (sometimes informed by bias) which becomes our ‘position’ on a given issue. Nowhere is this more obvious than in politics where movement between parties is so rare and so vilified that it resulted in every single MP losing their seat in the new ‘Change UK’ group at the 2019 GE.

When the Facts Change, I Change My Mind. What Do You Do, Sir?

– John Maynard Keynes [attributed]

I have always been open when changing my mind or position on an issue, but like most of us my ego impedes me from admitting it all of the time. In my early teenage years I was a devote Christian, strangely though when I studied scripture intensely as part of my confirmation I grew increasingly sceptical of my own faith. I quickly become a ‘lapsed Anglican’ and today would describe myself as Agnostic on faith.

My politics at the same time fused with the change in my religious identity, I started reading ‘Anthem’ by Ayn Rand in which a future society has scorned technological and scientific progress in favour of a perceived spiritual backwardness. It was dystopian but appealed to the increasing admiration I had for the scientific method and other near-miraculous (ignore the paradox) features of the enlightenment.

Rand’s philosophy is on the Libertarian right, I read Atlas Shrugged and became convinced of her economic philosophy but the harsher edges of her view on foreign policy and social security seemed irrational to me when one weighed up how the combined forces of international law and social security programmes had improved the liberty of people in the twentieth century through increasing living standards.

Later I stumbled upon Mill as part of my legal studies, I started gaining more of an understanding of “Positive Liberty” thanks to the 1950s lectures of Isiah Berlin – a better understanding of ‘justice’ also moderated my views. He was an early ‘public intellectual’ or even ‘thought leader’ in that he didn’t have an overarching philosophy perse (critiques say he was nihilistic) but his individualistic liberalism is quite close to the age we now live in and he spoke in an inviting fashion in ways that Mill or even Bentham fail to.

My journey on a high level could be described as a move from the right to the left. Although unconvinced by Marx, I am intrigued by the writings of Picketty and the need for a serious discussion on the costs of inequality. Today I describe myself as a ‘liberal’ (left-leaning) of the modern or twentieth-century variety.

What has your journey been like? Have you changed your mind? Have you drifted far from where your family stand on the constitutional question, economics or morality? Has your faith changed and informed a political change in you? Please comment below as it would be a great discussion and open up a more vulnerable side in all of us that we don’t always like to expose in slugger comments.

Photo by geralt is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

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