In April a man in the Thursday group at the county library said that he had thought about what we discussed in March, and that he now believed the opposite of what he had argued for two hours. He said it plainly, in about eleven words, and then waited.
Nobody said anything for what I would guess was four seconds, which in a room of nine people is a long time. Then somebody said, generously, that it took courage to say that, and we moved on, and I have been bothered by the whole exchange ever since — not by him, by us.
Because he had not asked for courage to be attributed to him. He had reported a change in his view, which is the thing we all claim to be there for, and the room had no way to receive it except as a performance of humility.
I have been trying to work out what a room ought to do, and I keep arriving at the observation that we have no ritual for this at all, and that the two we do have are both bad.
The first is recantation. The person who changes their mind performs the change: they announce that they were wrong, they name the error, they thank the person who corrected them. It is socially legible, everyone knows their part, and it converts an intellectual event into a moral one. The cost is that it makes changing your mind expensive — you must pay in status for the privilege — and so people do it less, and when they do it they tend to do it about small things where the payment is affordable.
The second is not changing your mind visibly at all: absorbing the argument, revising quietly, and never mentioning it, so that a year later your position has moved and nobody can identify the moment. This is enormously common among careful people and I do it constantly. Its cost is that it removes from public view the only evidence anyone has that argument does anything, which means every observer concludes that argument does nothing.
So we have one ritual that taxes the act and one that hides it.
What would a third look like? I genuinely do not know, and my attempts to design one all come out grotesque — some sort of announcement, which is just recantation with better manners. It may be that the answer is not a ritual but the absence of one: that the correct response to a man saying he now thinks the opposite is to ask him a question about the new position, immediately, as though he had always held it. No acknowledgement. No courage. Just: then what do you make of the thing about the harbour.
That would treat the change as unremarkable, which is what it should be and is not.
I tried it in June with somebody else and it did not work, and I am not sure whether it failed because the idea is wrong or because one person doing it in a room that expects the other thing reads as coldness. He looked, briefly, as though I had not been listening.
The man from April told me afterwards — in the car park, which is where the actual seminar happens — that he had almost not said it. I asked what he had expected would happen. He said he thought people would be pleased, and that they had been pleased, and that this was somehow the problem, and he could not explain further and neither can I.
