A thousand years before her birth, al-Ghazali, the Persian philosopher, meditated on precisely this problem. Of the irreversibility of breaking with past beliefs, he wrote, “There can be no desire to return to servile conformism once it has been abandoned, since a prerequisite for being a servile conformist is that one does not know [oneself] to be such.” But when someone recognizes his former beliefs as false, al-Ghazali continued, “the glass of his servile conformism is shattered—an irreparable fragmentation and a mess which cannot be mended by patching and piecing together.” Instead, he
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