Mistakes, Changed Minds, Changing Course
Lucinda Garthwaite, ILI Director
“That was my mistake, and I’m sorry.”
Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author and podcast host, ended his October 2024 TED talk with those words. He was referring to a position he’d take in his bestselling book, The Tipping Point. In it, Gladwell had championed the NYC police practice known as “stop and frisk” that meant anyone who seemed suspicious could be stopped by police, searched, brought in for questioning, even arrested and jailed “under suspicion” of a crime.
I imagine readers of this newsletter can see how that could go terribly wrong, and it did. But at the time, the widely accepted belief was that “stop and frisk” had ended a crime wave. Gladwell amplified this belief in his book.
Eventually a lawsuit resulted in a judgement that ended the practice. Many braced for crime to return. It didn’t. It kept going down. The data became inarguably clear. “Stop and frisk” didn’t work. But despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, people still believed it did. Gladwell asserted he bore part of the blame for this. “I was the one who wrote this book,” he said, “saying this was the greatest tactic ever in stopping crime.”
He goes on to say his mistake was in his certainty. “I wrote, ‘I know this is what happened. What I should have said was, ‘This is what I believe happened.’ ”
Acclaimed Christian theologian Richard Hays wrote in his 1968 book The Moral Vision of the New Testament, “Homosexuality is one among many tragic signs that we are a broken people, alienated from God’s loving purpose.” For decades, seminarians and others embraced that proclamation.
Before he died this month, Hays corrected himself in The Widening of God’s Mercy, written with his son and published in September 2024. “The biblical narratives throughout the Old Testament and New trace a trajectory of mercy,” Hays wrote, “that leads us to welcome sexual minorities no longer as ‘strangers and aliens’ but as ‘fellow citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.’ ” (quoting the New Testament book of Ephesians)
Speaking at the Center Peace Conference in Dallas, Texas last fall, Hays said, “When you come across something that is wrong, the thing to do is to confess and seek forgiveness.”
Education historian Diane Ravitch famously and publicly changed her mind about the charter school movement and standardized testing. In the early 1990s, Ravitch was a vocal, conservative proponent of both. Later, she reevaluated that stance. In 2010 Ravitch went public with strenuous cases for public schools and more holistic ways to understand student learning and school performance. About that change of heart, she wrote, “Many people have told me that I should have known better, and they are right. I should have. But I didn’t, and I am trying to make up for it now.”
Gladwell, Hays and Ravitch offer examples of public people publicly changing their minds. Not all of them actually apologized, and arguably each might have done more, sooner, to address the consequences of their mistakes. Hays’s and Ravitch’s changes of heart ignited no small amount of controversy from all sides.
Notwithstanding all that, they each saw the danger in attachment to certainty. They accepted new realities and changed course.
And none of them changed their bottom line. Gladwell remains committed to applying his craft to improving the human condition. Hays never wavered from his belief in the value of a Christ-led life, nor the authority of Christian scripture. Ravitch never let go of her fierce belief in education as a critical center post of democracy.
But because they were willing to let go of certainty to attend to emerging realities and understandings, they found new ways to contribute to the kind of world they hope to see.
There’s a lesson in this for me. I too have been attached to certainty about how to go about change. For many years I gave too little attention to nagging doubts about approaches to change in which I wholeheartedly (and often self-righteously) engaged. So I didn’t ask questions, and I couldn’t see new realities.
Questions like, What if some practices associated with Diversity, Equity and inclusion are no longer working? What if their flaws now outweigh their strengths? What if strategies that focus on social identity and privilege will not shift the tide of change toward liberation for all?
Those kinds of questions are risky. Questions about strategy can be misread as admissions of error about the change I seek. So it’s tempting to double down in my former stance, to retreat to certainty. But that will not serve my bottom line, a world in which all are able to thrive.
The best way to drive change may be to change course; indeed it may be the only way.