Two years ago I got a phone call out of the blue from an old college friend Cassius, to tell me that K—a mutual friend back in the day, with whom I had absolutely not kept up any contact—had recently died. Cassius and I went on to have a long talk about a lot of things, catching up on 37 years of past history. (Besides this post, see also this one.) During this talk (among a lot of other topics) Cassius filled me in on what had happened in the interim with K and Mrs. K.
K and Mrs. K had gotten together while I was still a student. K's previous girlfriend had been a good friend of mine (but never my girlfriend), and the woman who later became Mrs. K had been a radical political lesbian. (I remember one spring festival on campus where she wandered around topless; her overall frame was small and her breasts were proportionally sized, but they were beautifully formed.) But somehow she and K hit it off … and then fell into bed together … after which K ended things with his former girlfriend to focus on one woman at a time. Not long thereafter K and his new girlfriend moved in together, and in due course they married. That's how far my knowledge went before I talked with Cassius.
What I learned was that since then, K had found work in some lucrative corner of the computer industry, and was able to retire at around the age of 50 (so roughly a decade before I did) to a life of elegant leisure and collecting art. Also, some time during the intervening years the K's had migrated from the left-wing politics which had been conventional on campus (back when we were all undergraduates) to something that Cassius characterized as right-wing. He didn't go into a lot of detail, but I assume this meant that they voted Republican rather than Democratic.
Cassius did say that once—only once—he asked them about their political migration, but that the conversation was not informative:
Cassius: I don't get it. You used to be on the Left. What happened to you guys, anyway?
Mrs. K: We finally opened our eyes!
Obviously this didn't explain a lot. And to judge from what Cassius told me, he never had a deeper or more meaningful conversation with them on the subject. He concluded that their politics changed when they started making a lot of money, out of pure self-interest.
I suspect Cassius was wrong. Or at any rate I suspect there was more to the political conversion of the K's than naked self-interest and a desire for lower taxes. But I totally believe that Cassius thought it was a simple question, and I totally believe that the K's were unable to explain themselves to him.
Here's why.
Of course there are a lot of reasons why someone might adopt this or that political position. But I think in many cases the "reason" is a little inchoate. More specifically, I suspect that in many cases someone's political commitments are made up of dozens or hundreds of pictures—mental snapshots that show the world to be a certain kind of place. And once it is clear to someone that the world is Like This, it is an obvious corollary that the best political position is one which treats it Like That.
What this means, though, is that a political commitment is never a primary choice. It always depends on a certain understanding about the Facts of the World. And if this is true, then when someone changes his political commitments it is because his understanding of the world changed first.
In principle, this should mean that when someone asks, "Why did you change your political position?" the correct answer is to provide him with several years' worth of snapshots—bite-sized pieces of information—to show him how your understanding of the world has changed. Then when you are done, the question, "Why did you vote for Candidate X instead of Candidate Y?" answers itself. Once someone understands what kind of world you think we live in, he cannot possibly be surprised at how you voted.
But nobody ever does this. By definition, the conversation would take years. Instead, the most natural way to answer the question is to say something snappy that relies on your current understanding of How Things Are. And for anyone who already sees what you see, that's plenty good enough.
The problem is that the person challenging you doesn't see what you see. This is guaranteed by definition: if he did see what you see, he'd already vote like you do; and in that case he wouldn't be asking you this question because the answer would be obvious to him. So when you give your snappy answer based on your clear recognition of things that look to you like obvious facts, none of it makes any sense to him at all. He doesn't see the facts you do, so your references make no sense to him, and your snappy retort falls flat. All he can understand for sure is that you don't see the world in the way that looks obvious to him. Since his view of the world is indeed so obvious to him, he assumes it is universal. Since you apparently do not share his understanding, he concludes either that you are stupid or that you are answering in bad faith. It does not occur to him that there might be genuinely valid ways to understand the world besides his own; and, sadly, your snappy response doesn't give him enough to work with.
The net result is that you cannot communicate to him why you have changed your mind. Maybe if there were some way to communicate to him all the hundreds of mental snapshots—and personal experiences—that have reshaped how you see the world … maybe in that case you might have a chance. But otherwise, I think it must be very, very difficult.
Most of the time, let's call it "incommunicable."
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