Julian Sanchez has an excellent post on the need to re-examine your own ideas from time to time.

Consider the way our views normally evolve. We sort of hunker down in our ideological bunkers trying to fend off various attacks and challenges. Sometimes an especially forceful argument will require a modification in the fortifications—and on rare occasions, we’ll even be forced to abandon a position. Which is to say, we learn from other perspectives largely in a defensive mode, through a kind of Darwinian selection of arguments. But what if instead we tried to use the insights available from our own perspectives, not to defeat or convert the other guy, but to give his argument its best form? This might sound like giving aid and comfort to the enemy, but even in terms of the Darwinian struggle, there’s value to being able to show how your view trumps even the optimal form of the competition. Think of chess: You can’t see your own best move unless you have some sense of what your opponent’s best response would be.

But the more intriguing possibility is that a smart progressive’s good-faith reformulation of libertarianism might be something that the libertarian, too, could recognize as an improvement—and vice versa. We shouldn’t expect this to happen if our basic values or pictures of how the world works are as radically at odds as our rhetoric sometimes suggests—but I rather doubt this is the case. Typically, when we’re not at battle stations, we recognize that the other guy’s values are genuine values; we just give priority to different ones.

Read the whole thing, because Julian has some terrific insight here. One thing that always bothers me about contemporary political discourse is the way people dig themselves into their trenches and never bother to test their ideas against the real world. My politics are a lot different than what they were when I was in college. Hell, my politics are a lot different than they were five years ago. As I read more, study more, integrate more, my ideas evolve. They change. They become, I hope, a closer model to reality.

I think that what Julian is proposing here is a really useful exercise, because it’s easy to get caught up in the political “my team vs your team” mentality. Lord knows I’m guilty of that more often than I should be. But it truly is important to actually consider the other team’s ideas. To examine them. To test them. And if it turns out the other guy’s right, the correct response is to change your mind.

Like most of life, politics is an arena where we’d all be a lot better off thinking like scientists rather than ideologues.

Image Credit: Jake Bouma