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Jan. 15th, 2011 08:16 pmThe changing of beliefs is interesting: you adopt one new tenet, either because you find you logically need to or can't abide not to emotionally, and then start to notice how by implication this starts switching you around on a lot of other positions you'd held pretty lightly - then tend to notice that by implication of those having changed some strongly held positions must now switch too, ones where if you'd realized they'd be compromised you might not have agreed to that initial new belief, but now that it's gone native and the momentum of change inside you is proceeding downhill from it you can't stop being suddenly now different back here too.
I wonder what the lynchpins are, the ones that would change a person fastest and most for the better. In the religion area, for example: what would you most easily be able to convince a committed believer of to make them, at worst, a less committed believer? What teachable moments can be made plain most readily, and how many at a time, and in what order to maximize benefit.
At USC I was once teaching a discussion class (from a pre-set syllabus) where the topic was affirmative action. And I immediately found that none of the teenagers in front of me had actually heard of it. When I explained it and then asked who was in favor of it I found essentially no one was - the one black student didn't raise her hand either way and basically shrank into herself for the rest of the class, possibly afraid she'd be singled out for comment but I think I also detected some dismay at being in a sea of thus-inclined white people.
I'd been confused during that whole course about how to present my own opinions, whether to just lay them on the table or what. (Imagine how foreign this role was from what I'd thought I would be doing in English grad school; I'd tested out of these classes on the AP exam back in high school and scarcely knew they existed.) But here I just had to or the class was dead, and everything it could conceivably accomplish dead - I was being evaluated, incidentally, but the professor doing it ended up being sympathetic.
I wasn't prepared with many facts, so I set out finding out just what the opposition was: all that term I'd had a habit of asking them the pros and cons. They couldn't think of any pros (!), but I managed to find that the common element of most of their objections was that affirmative action is racist. Flat out racist. There were only two or three people who felt very strongly about this, but it was what the others came up with when pressed for an explanation.
Where were the lynchpins? The most obvious one to me is that this was several universes away from the actions we normally call racist. I had people list acts of racism and then asked if it belonged on the list, which it very comically did not. So then I proposed that at the very least we should divide the category into 'hard' and 'soft' racism. And then I asked what else counted as racism of that latter sort and people were stumped, and I picked that moment to start in with the justification - what I even remembered of it, this issue having been so long settled in my own mind. I tried to stick to economics they'd readily believe: how the rich get richer, how people starting with nothing in a climate of racism tend to keep having nothing, how most schools in the area were segregated until their parents' lifetimes, how many homes were fatherless because of prison, military service, early death. Even after direct institutional racism was out, property provides a boost (these kids' families mostly had some), the absence does not. Without specific figures - there were just a handful in the readings provided - that was all I could do.
And it was enough to raise a lot of frowns and shut up all but one determined arguer - not that anyone was convinced, they were just in that dissonance stage where the previously-held belief needs a couple days to close the dent - who clung very hard to how it was unfair, and when I pointed out that the effects of the earlier unfairness were unfairly ongoing kept trying to bring it back to racist, hence untouchable status, and I'd have to point out again how a new word would probably be needed. And he knew that 'racist' didn't apply but that without the word there was no magic. I was close, close to non-propagandistic propagation of a good belief. But the time ran out. I later convinced the same guy of the rightness of gay marriage, though he'd have come to that on his own: he was the libertarian male type, and in that environment will probably always be. But at least he was listening. Actually most people were listening, but he best seemed to realize that arguments had to either be won or lost, even in his own head, based on facts.
I can't remember what the evaluator advised. The class had been a real blindside, and I really was struggling with that strange form of teaching apparently being asked of me. Obviously having statistics, quotations ready was the best I could have done. But which? What were the lynchpins? Realizing how the magic of provided phrases, genuine propaganda, was something people were using against even them, that was something we dealt with a lot that term. They were unhappy about it, as that's a part of the education process that's almost purely disillusioning. An attack on the grownup world. Which was something I atatcked by instinct at that age, and I remember most of my friends doing so. I wonder what happened to that? Do cell phones given in childhood act the way a rope famously acts on a baby elephant?
I wonder what the lynchpins are, the ones that would change a person fastest and most for the better. In the religion area, for example: what would you most easily be able to convince a committed believer of to make them, at worst, a less committed believer? What teachable moments can be made plain most readily, and how many at a time, and in what order to maximize benefit.
At USC I was once teaching a discussion class (from a pre-set syllabus) where the topic was affirmative action. And I immediately found that none of the teenagers in front of me had actually heard of it. When I explained it and then asked who was in favor of it I found essentially no one was - the one black student didn't raise her hand either way and basically shrank into herself for the rest of the class, possibly afraid she'd be singled out for comment but I think I also detected some dismay at being in a sea of thus-inclined white people.
I'd been confused during that whole course about how to present my own opinions, whether to just lay them on the table or what. (Imagine how foreign this role was from what I'd thought I would be doing in English grad school; I'd tested out of these classes on the AP exam back in high school and scarcely knew they existed.) But here I just had to or the class was dead, and everything it could conceivably accomplish dead - I was being evaluated, incidentally, but the professor doing it ended up being sympathetic.
I wasn't prepared with many facts, so I set out finding out just what the opposition was: all that term I'd had a habit of asking them the pros and cons. They couldn't think of any pros (!), but I managed to find that the common element of most of their objections was that affirmative action is racist. Flat out racist. There were only two or three people who felt very strongly about this, but it was what the others came up with when pressed for an explanation.
Where were the lynchpins? The most obvious one to me is that this was several universes away from the actions we normally call racist. I had people list acts of racism and then asked if it belonged on the list, which it very comically did not. So then I proposed that at the very least we should divide the category into 'hard' and 'soft' racism. And then I asked what else counted as racism of that latter sort and people were stumped, and I picked that moment to start in with the justification - what I even remembered of it, this issue having been so long settled in my own mind. I tried to stick to economics they'd readily believe: how the rich get richer, how people starting with nothing in a climate of racism tend to keep having nothing, how most schools in the area were segregated until their parents' lifetimes, how many homes were fatherless because of prison, military service, early death. Even after direct institutional racism was out, property provides a boost (these kids' families mostly had some), the absence does not. Without specific figures - there were just a handful in the readings provided - that was all I could do.
And it was enough to raise a lot of frowns and shut up all but one determined arguer - not that anyone was convinced, they were just in that dissonance stage where the previously-held belief needs a couple days to close the dent - who clung very hard to how it was unfair, and when I pointed out that the effects of the earlier unfairness were unfairly ongoing kept trying to bring it back to racist, hence untouchable status, and I'd have to point out again how a new word would probably be needed. And he knew that 'racist' didn't apply but that without the word there was no magic. I was close, close to non-propagandistic propagation of a good belief. But the time ran out. I later convinced the same guy of the rightness of gay marriage, though he'd have come to that on his own: he was the libertarian male type, and in that environment will probably always be. But at least he was listening. Actually most people were listening, but he best seemed to realize that arguments had to either be won or lost, even in his own head, based on facts.
I can't remember what the evaluator advised. The class had been a real blindside, and I really was struggling with that strange form of teaching apparently being asked of me. Obviously having statistics, quotations ready was the best I could have done. But which? What were the lynchpins? Realizing how the magic of provided phrases, genuine propaganda, was something people were using against even them, that was something we dealt with a lot that term. They were unhappy about it, as that's a part of the education process that's almost purely disillusioning. An attack on the grownup world. Which was something I atatcked by instinct at that age, and I remember most of my friends doing so. I wonder what happened to that? Do cell phones given in childhood act the way a rope famously acts on a baby elephant?
