The art of admitting our mistakes

…and why the refusal to do so has become one of the defining features of modern politics.

The painting below by Paul Cézanne demands our consideration. It cannot be passively observed. The glassy patch of water in the lower right-hand corner is where the painting – ‘Reflections in the Water’ – gets its name. Our eyes are naturally drawn to the thick tree on the bank whose ghost is captured on the surface of the pond where the foliage gives way, but really it is the slim sapling, unreflected, unbroken, rising boldly along the canvas’s left edge, that is the true subject of this piece. It is a triumph of subtlety and nerve.

Except that I’m wrong. I’ve been looking at the painting on its side and forming a completely inaccurate impression. Oh well. I’m probably not the first. There is an unconfirmed story that this painting by Cézanne was hung sideways for thirty-one years in London’s National Gallery. The origin of this gossip is from the economist Oswald Toynbee Falk (1879–1972), who lays the blame at the feet of one of its trustees, John Hugh Smith, exactly the kind of person who would in those days have had a hand in such decisions. I can find no corroboration of the story, but I do hope it’s true.

Of course, an establishment as prestigious as the National Gallery would be unlikely to admit to such a galloping blunder. And anyway, as I’ve said, the sideways version has much to recommend it. If there’s a moral to this story, it’s surely that once we commit to an error of thinking for too long it can be mortifying to correct ourselves, particularly if public humiliation is to be the outcome.

It strikes me that the culture war is largely characterised by groups of intelligent people investing in delusional ideas with such gusto that to backtrack would be a kind of social death. One might sooner teach a mule to moonwalk than persuade a celebrity who has championed gender identity ideology to admit that human beings cannot change sex. After demonising women for insisting on single-sex spaces, making excuses for the medicalisation of healthy children, and encouraging the dismantling of gay rights – all in the name of progress – it must be tremendously difficult to admit that it was all for nothing.

For many, the response to being corrected is simply to deny there was any mistake at all and to double down. This is certainly the position of the Green Party, whose representatives are now wholeheartedly wedded to the absurd proposition that human beings have an innate gendered soul that can be misaligned from their body. Their supporters are even congratulating them for their doggedness in the face of reason and evidence, so there is no incentive to course-correct.

Consider the party’s deputy leader, Rachel Millward, who, on this week’s episode of the BBC’s Question Time, was asked by Piers Morgan whether women could have penises. ‘Do you know what, Piers?’, she replied, ‘I think you have a unique, strange obsession with people’s genitalia’. Owen Jones reposted the exchange with the comment: ‘Obsessing over people’s genitals is weird, actually’. A predictably asinine piece in the Metro ran with the headline: ‘Piers Morgan brilliantly shut down after asking “weird question” on BBC’.

Of course, the chance that anyone involved in this debate sincerely believes that their opponents are obsessed with genitals is close to zero. As much as I disagree with Millward and Jones on just about everything, I have to credit them with more intelligence than that. So why are they lying? What is going on here?

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