Author’s Note: This essay has been brewing in my mind for months. It’s a little wonky, I’ll admit, but I hope it’s readable and maybe even relatable. Mostly, it’s an attempt to understand how ideas become convictions, and how convictions can quietly become part of who we are.

The older I get, the less interested I become in winning arguments.

I’m much more interested in understanding how reasonable, compassionate people can look at the same events and arrive at profoundly different conclusions.

We like to think we form our opinions by carefully weighing evidence and reasoning our way to a conclusion. Sometimes we do. More often, especially on complicated issues, the process is far messier. We inherit ideas from people we respect, institutions we admire, and communities we trust. Most of the time, that’s not only reasonable, it’s unavoidable.

But every so often, I find myself wondering whether that same process can also lead thoughtful people to conclusions they might never have reached if they had started with a blank slate.

Over the past year, one conflict has repeatedly drawn me back to that question: Israel and Gaza. The reason isn’t that I expect Israel to get every military decision right. Democracies rarely do. Nor is it because I doubt the reality of Palestinian suffering. I don’t. Anyone who can look at the images of dead children, grieving parents, and neighborhoods reduced to rubble without feeling a profound sense of sadness has lost something essential.

The question that keeps nagging at me is something else.

How can so many thoughtful, compassionate, well-educated people come to embrace ideas and movements whose values they would reject in almost any other context?

I don’t expect everyone to become a Middle East historian. I certainly haven’t become an expert on every issue that matters. The modern world doesn’t allow that. Every day brings another crisis demanding our attention and, apparently, our judgment. Ukraine. Artificial intelligence. Immigration. Climate change. Iran. Public health. Israel and Gaza.

No one has the time to master them all. So we do what every complex society has always done. We outsource much of the work of understanding the world. I trust my cardiologist to read an EKG. I trust TurboTax to understand the tax code. I trust the engineer who designed the bridge I drove across this morning.

Public life works the same way.

Most of us are never going to read original historical documents, military doctrine, academic journals, or competing legal analyses before forming an opinion. We have jobs, families, aging parents, grandchildren, mortgages, and lives to lead.

So we depend on others to help us make sense of an increasingly complicated world. We notice Pulitzer Prizes, prestigious universities, respected historians, newspapers with long-established reputations, and friends whose judgment has proved reliable over time. We don’t do this because we’re lazy. We do it because no one can become an expert in everything.

For much of the twentieth century, the list of trusted guides was relatively short. Newspapers. Universities. Historians. Journalists. Authors. The evening news.

Today that landscape is almost unrecognizable.

Those institutions still matter, but they now share the stage with podcasts, documentaries, think tanks, advocacy organizations, Substack writers, YouTube channels, TikTok, Reddit communities, influencers, and whatever happens to appear in our social media feeds.

The sources have multiplied. Time hasn’t. That simple reality has changed the way ideas move through our culture.

A few months ago, while thinking about all of this, I found myself remembering a book I first read in a Journalism 101 class more than forty years ago.

Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic.

Published in 1970, it was........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)