The Lighthouse Lecture

It had been Professor Helen Ashby's own idea to give her farewell lecture in the lighthouse, and by half past six on that Friday evening in June she was beginning to regret it. The old light on Mercy Point, a few kilometers down the coast from Hobart, had not guided a ship for forty years. Its keeper's cottage had been turned into a small museum, and its round stone base into a room that could, with some optimism, seat ninety people. A hundred and twenty had come. They sat on folding chairs, on the stairs, and on the floor, in coats and scarves, while the wind off the Southern Ocean rattled the windows.

She had taught philosophy at the university for thirty-four years. The lecture was called "On Changing Your Mind", and she had prepared it with the care of someone who knew it would be the last thing many of her former students heard her say. There were forty-two slides. There was a quotation from Montaigne, a diagram she was rather proud of, and a short video clip of a debate she had lost, badly, in 1991. She had rehearsed it four times. She was eleven minutes in, and had just reached the diagram, when the power went out.

For a moment there was total darkness and a gasp from the stairs. Then phones began to glow, one after another, like a field of small cold stars. The museum's volunteer, an elderly man who had been a keeper's son, appeared with a box of candles and a lighter, apologizing as though he had personally summoned the storm. Within a few minutes the room was lit by perhaps thirty flames, flickering on the curved stone walls. Somebody laughed. "Well," said Professor Ashby, "at least we are in the right building."

She looked down at her notes, which she could no longer read, and then at the dead screen. Afterwards, several people told her that what she did next was the most impressive thing they had ever seen a lecturer do. She herself described it as the only option available. She put the notes face down on the lectern, stepped out from behind it, and said, "I was going to spend the next forty minutes persuading you of something. I think instead I will spend them admitting how I might be wrong."

Her argument, stripped of the slides, was simple enough. Changing one's mind, she said, is widely praised and very rarely practiced. We admire it in principle and distrust it in others, calling it weakness or inconsistency. Yet the capacity to be persuaded by a better argument is, she suggested, not a flaw in reasoning but its whole purpose. "If you cannot imagine any evidence that would change your view," she said, "then what you hold is not a view. It is a possession."

Then she did what she had always told her students to do, and what she had rarely seen anyone do in public: she argued against herself. She granted that a person who changes their mind too easily is not open but merely unanchored. She conceded that some convictions ought to be held firmly, that there are things one should refuse to be talked out of, and that the language of "open-mindedness" is sometimes used to wear down people who are right. She admitted that her own career contained several occasions on which she had changed her mind for bad reasons, and at least one on which she had refused to change it for good ones.

A former student, now a lecturer in law, raised his hand from the stairs. Was she not, he asked, simply making her argument unfalsifiable, by conceding every objection in advance? There was a ripple of laughter, and she laughed too. "That is a fair hit," she said. "Let me try to earn my conclusion rather than simply survive to it." The distinction she drew was between conceding a point and abandoning a position. To concede, she said, is to say: you are right about this, and I must now hold my view more carefully. To abandon is to say: you are right, and I no longer hold it at all. Most honest disagreement, she suggested, consists of the first.

By now the storm was at its height. Rain struck the windows in sheets and the candles bent in the drafts. She spoke without notes for nearly an hour, moving slowly around the room, stopping now and then to answer a question or to let one hang unanswered. The diagram, the quotation and the video clip were never mentioned again. Nobody seemed to miss them.

Her closing argument, which several people later tried to reconstruct from memory and from a rather muffled recording on somebody's phone, ran roughly as follows. A lighthouse, she said, does not tell a ship where to go. It tells the ship where it is, and where the rocks are. What the captain does with that information is up to the captain. "I have spent my life trying to be a lighthouse," she said, "and I have very often been a fog. If there is one thing I would ask you to take from tonight, it is not anything I believe. It is the habit of asking, of anything you believe, what would it take?"

She stopped there. For a long moment, nobody moved. Then the applause began, and went on for some time, and was still going when, with a buzz and a flicker, the power came back on and the screen behind her lit up, unhelpfully, with slide number twelve. The room dissolved into laughter. Professor Ashby turned, looked at the diagram she had been so proud of, and said, "No. I think I have changed my mind about that one."

The recording, such as it was, circulated widely among her former students. The university later asked whether she might be willing to give the lecture again, properly this time, with the slides. She declined, politely. Some arguments, she wrote in her reply, are best made only once, in the dark, with the weather against you. She now lives in a small house on the coast, from which, on clear nights, she can see the empty tower on Mercy Point, and she says it suits her very well.