Stuff: A brief history of the many times I changed my mind

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A n​ew y​ear approaches, and so I start to think – as I’m sure everyone does at this time – about the philosopher Hannah Arendt, a noted analyst of totalitarianism but also of political life in general.

Arendt believed that the human capacity for change derived from our consciousness of the novelty of our own life: “Since we all come into the world by virtue of birth, as newcomers and beginnings, we are able to start something new.”

This capacity for self-renewal is on display every time that, in response to new facts or stronger arguments, we change our mind. Each alteration is a new dawn.

But such shifts are under-valued today. In a seemingly chaotic era, many people seek comfort in a rigid certainty, dividing the world into good and bad. Debate becomes an opportunity to win, not to listen.

Columnists, who often feel they must have C​orrect O​pinions if they are to justify their status, can find it hard to admit they’ve changed their mind. It creates a vulnerability. But what better way to model good public discussion? And what better time to do it than the new year?

Here, then, in the spirit of personal and public renewal, is a brief history of various things I have previously got wrong.

Marijuana legalisation

Strange to say, as a young man I was sceptical about legalising weed, partly because I bought the ‘’gateway drug’’ argument and partly because I believed that cannabis use caused psychosis. I now think the harms of our current approach outweigh any possible negatives from legalisation, and that some underlying third factor probably causes both dope-smoking and psychosis.

Mixed-tenure neighbourhoods

I once believed ardently that state-housing redevelopments should incorporate a large number of private rentals and owner-occupied homes, to stop them becoming ghettos. Then I read an evidence review that suggested mixed-tenure neighbourhoods, as they are called, often fail. The now-outnumbered state-house tenants feel marginalised, wealthier families dominate the residents’ associations, and local stores begin stocking more expensive products. Although I haven’t turned 180 degrees on this issue, I now mostly think that if there are problems with concentrated poverty, the issue is the poverty, not the concentration, and that we should fix the former.

The King Country

Embarrassing though it is to admit, I was well into my 30s before I discovered this area was named after the second Māori King, Tāwhiao, and not, as I had always assumed, one of the British monarchs. My only defence is that in the era (and area) in which I grew up, the teaching of Māori history was, to put it politely, minimal. Fortunately some self-study, through books like Vincent O’Malley’s The Great War for New Zealand, has since filled in the picture.

Equality of opportunity

I used to think this idea was a conservative subterfuge, deployed to downplay the need to tackle material poverty: “We need to focus on opportunities, not incomes!” Nowadays I agree that equality of opportunity is a core political goal. Lifting incomes remains essential, but as a means to something else – namely, enhancing individuals’ opportunities. After all, the government, whatever its policies and powers, can’t force people to live well; providing the foundation for those opportunities is all it can do. Of course, resources are still central to life chances. When rich and poor kids get such different upbringings, the latter are climbing the mountain of life wearing concrete overshoes. The data are unmistakeable: countries with smaller income imbalances have more equal opportunities. But that’s a subtler position than the one with which I started.

Having listed these changes, let me end with an uncertainty. As a researcher, I think a lot about the welfare system, on which there are two competing views.

The dominant one is that benefits should be conditional: in exchange for taxpayer support, people must do something, even if it just to look for paid work. In the other camp are the thinkers who argue benefits should be unconditional, given out as a mark of the recipient’s basic humanity and requiring nothing in return.

The latter argument appeals to powerful moral values; so too, however, does the conditional view. It embodies the reciprocity that sits at the heart of nearly all human relationships, even – I would argue – familial ones.

I go backwards and forwards on this question, and have reached no settled view. But so be it.

The poet John Keats praised something he called negative capability, the state “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. Doubt is not a weakness but a strength. Without it, we would be locked in artificial certainty. And then we would have lost that most essential of human attributes, the capacity to change.