A lot of people act as if mockery and denunciation are effective ways to convince others that they’re wrong. Not many of them, though, come out and endorse this principle. A Liberal Currents article called “Deradicalizing the Center” offers qualified support for it, though, and it’s not just a rant. It contains a lot of good thinking. I’d like to take a look at it to see what the author claims and argues.

Libertarian and right- and centrist-liberal hand-wringing about censorious tendencies on the political left, especially on college campuses, was at a fever pitch in 2016. Speaker series and think pieces speculated that the future of free speech would be in trouble if young adults weren’t convinced to leave de-platforming and safe spaces behind and embrace open inquiry.
 
I think that many libertarians hoped that the story of Derek Black could act as a how-to manual for deradicalization that fit tidily with our priors. There’s no need to censor or censure someone whose views we disagree with. The key to building the trust needed to change someone’s mind is friendship.
 
It’s a beautiful idea. The problem is that it’s not what happened. Rising Out of Hatred, by Eli Saslow, details how Black was ostracized and cut off from the tight-knit campus community at New College. He even wondered about his safety on campus a few times. He read hundreds or thousands of vitriolic comments on the school’s message board. He moved off-campus in response to the outrage over his outing.
 
Libertarian commentator Robby Soave wrote, “Ostracizing Derek wouldn’t have made him any less racist: on the contrary, it would have driven him further into the arms of the white nationalist movement.” But that’s wrong. Black himself says that the ostracism about which libertarians and centrists can be such scolds was in his case indispensable. While it was his friends that ultimately convinced him to change his views, “Campus condemnation was the only reason I spoke to those people.”

In Janet Bufton’s view, the ostracism, vitriolic comments, and fear for his safety were the most important elements in making Black change his mind. That might be true, but if so, he changed his outward expression out of fear more than conviction. If the KKK gets him into a dark room for a while, he might change his mind right back.

But there’s that last bit: “it was his friends that ultimately convinced him to change his views.” Bufton’s idea isn’t that hostility alone will persuade someone, but that if most people who find someone’s views despicable ostracize them, those who are left will be the ones who’ll win them over to better ideas.

I’d like it if this were true. My inclination, when I encounter people with despicable ideas, is to have as little to do with them as possible. I’m not very good at one-on-one persuasion. It would be nice to think I’m building a better world that way, but I just don’t find it plausible.

To get more of a sense of where this former white nationalist is coming from and whether he’s sincere, I watched the first half hour or so of Derek Black’s talk on YouTube. He seems sincere, though I’m no expert on such matters. Here are a couple of bits from his talk:

in 2010 I went away to college across the state and had this experience of being condemned, of being reached out to by some people and being away from my community. And that’s the thing I’m going to touch on several points in tonight’s talk, that I think the way we should understand changes in fundamental ideology isn’t things that are really deeply felt as beliefs. We should understand them not as a network of facts and understanding but as an attachment to your community. And that was my experience of being outside the community that I’d grown up in and therefore able to hear the arguments, able to hear the voices of people who were devalued in my worldview prior to that point, and I think that if we at the end of this understand a drastic change in ideology not as stumbling upon a book, although factual arguments played a huge role, but as becoming attached and thinking of a new group, an additional group of people as being in your orbit, within my orbit, and within the circle of people who I cared about.
 
…
 
[talking about an open email discussion of his presence on the campus] The largest response that I could see on this email thread was, ‘Is there some way we can get him to leave the school?’ Trying to assert that this is a community where we do not make white supremacists feel safe, but it is a community where we make people who feel threatened by a white supremacist feel safe. And the way to do that is to assert the value that we are not a space for that. The administration made no comment, and there was another, smaller subset of people who made this message that maybe, maybe we can challenge him, maybe we can get him to change his mind, and maybe being here is just the thing. And I think, I want to pause right there and say that looking at that situation it seems quite obvious that it’s going to ultimately be the people who reached out, who talked to me, who are the key factor. And I definitely can’t downplay the role of people who had these deep conversations with me in the next few years in the story. But I also want to just flag in this moment that that campus condemnation was the only reason I spoke to those people.

He’s saying that peer pressure plays a huge role in shaping people’s beliefs. Unfortunately, that’s often true. Black came from one of the most influential white supremacist families in the South, and he grew up with the idea of race struggle. People who grow up with an idea and a community that ardently supports it don’t easily change their minds. But he doesn’t say that his change was solely a matter of contact with a different community. He says he was “able to hear the arguments” and “factual arguments played a huge role.”

That’s what makes the situation asymmetrical. Opponents of white nationalism have facts and reason at their disposal; the KKK has only lies, myths, and fear. The question is how you get people to listen to your facts and reasons. If it weren’t for that difference, the only question would be who could more effectively grab his ear.

Depending on which of Black’s remarks you focus on, you can read his statements two ways. You can focus on the condemnation being what made him amenable to the arguments, or on the persuasive attempts themselves. Bufton focuses on the former. But if we look at the choice as being to condemn or to engage and assume every person did one or the other, it’s surely clear that every person who chose engagement over condemnation made the more effective choice.

However, those aren’t the only choices or even the most common ones. Most people, when in the company of people whose ideas they don’t like, prefer to “agree to disagree.” This is the least stressful choice, it recognizes that most attempts to change people’s minds fail, and it leaves open the possibility of finding common ground on something else. The difficult question is what to do when someone’s ideas are so bad that it’s not a legitimate choice. Also, there are two ways of agreeing to disagree: You can say “I think you’re wrong” without getting hostile, or you can say nothing.

When someone’s ideas go beyond a certain point, saying “I think you’re wrong” is a necessary minimum. It’s difficult to do. Today’s climate of discussion makes it harder than ever, as you always wonder if people will call you a Communist or Nazi for disputing their dogma. The return for the effort is low. As someone with minimal social needs, I find it easier to disengage from people than to try to persuade them.

But I can recognize the value of those who attempt it and have some persuasive skills. I can write articles that lay out the arguments for a position, and maybe they can support their cases by pointing to my writing. What I’m not great at is reaching out to people on a personal level so they’ll recognize why a different view makes more sense. People who are really good at that are rare, but I’m not even average.

Deciding how to engage with people is especially tricky when they mostly sound reasonable but occasionally say horrible things. Are they repeating nonsense that isn’t a part of their central worldview, or are they letting their mask slip? Bufton focuses on the latter and warns of the dangers in granting them legitimacy. That’s certainly true in some cases, but how do you tell them from people who are just uncritically repeating what their parents have said? It can be hard, especially with people who aren’t public figures.

It’s well known that hostile challenges generally make people hang onto their ideas more firmly than ever.

When we try to change a person’s mind, our first impulse is to preach about why we’re right and prosecute them for being wrong. Yet experiments show that preaching and prosecuting typically backfire — and what doesn’t sway people may strengthen their beliefs.

Listening to people and answering their arguments seems to be a more effective method. When you do that, though, you open yourself to the risk of finding their arguments persuasive. This can be scary, especially if you think their strategy is to persuade you by sugar-coating their fundamentally horrible views. You need to have enough confidence in your position that you’re willing to take the risk. Looking at it from the other side, isn’t it possible that Derek Black’s strategy of sounding reasonable was the first crack opening him to reasonable ideas?

For me, this is all hypothetical. I’m too comfortable with closing the door on fools and too old to change. But I can admire the people who can do it, and I don’t think lack of condemnation is the biggest problem we face today.

I’ve ended up rambling a lot without giving a firm answer to the article I started writing about. I’ll leave it at that anyway.