A friend of mine used to say he believed in keeping an open mind, but not a mind that was so wide open that his brain fell out. By this he meant he preferred to abide by his private biases rather than risk being shoehorned into a logical trap from which he was compelled to reexamine his own values and beliefs.
The supposition of absolute trustworthiness of one’s own wisdom, hard-won as it is through brutal experience (or sensible-sounding indoctrination), rationally unassailable and morally superior, is hardly unique to my old friend. By age twenty nearly all human beings have accumulated a personal philosophical marrow which they horde and defend deep in their souls. Few ever stray far from the safe circle of dim light cast by their core beliefs into the perturbing darkness of an indifferent and confusing world. And few ever contemplate the fact that the equally compelling siren’s song which guides the life of a neighbor is often enough in frank contradiction to one’s own assumptions, which likewise go unchallenged year after year.
We all know plenty of people who are unwilling or unable to consider the world from any point of view other than the side or team or dogma or cheerleading podcast with which they’ve already aligned themselves. We ourselves are such people. Since we can’t all be right regardless of the strength of our convictions, if we ever want to get any closer to understanding the disorienting world in which we live, it’s our own hypnotic convictions which we must make an effort to doubt.
While it’s not easy to sincerely consider all conceivable viewpoints, it’s true that the way we apprehend the world changes over time. Our beliefs do evolve. A fundamental assumption of strict rationalists is that this occurs because a steady accumulation of new facts are found to be inconsistent with preexisting models, and so the models themselves must be modified to fit newly collated evidence. But is this representation accurate? Is intellectual advancement a continuous progression of data integration, or is it a discontinuous step function? Are vision-changing insights continuous, or are they disruptive, novel breakthroughs?
Are there truly equally valid, alternative ways to understand an emerging concept, even if they are mutually exclusive? Perhaps. If so, then it’s advisable to try to maintain an open mind to alternative interpretations of reality and of experience, even when these disjunctive points of view conflict explicitly with our own most cherished assumptions about how the world works. The problem’s never been with reality, but with our pigheaded resistance to accepting reality when it fails to conform to the expectations which are products of our stubbornly intolerant belief systems.
We’re all riddled through with unsuspected biases and prejudices. We judge everything and everyone around us constantly in accordance with stereotyping behaviors we scarcely know we harbor. Our challenge is not to feel this assertion of our prejudicial inclinations as a threat or an accusation, not to become defensive, but to see it as a consequence of our humanity and to rise to the challenge of doing our best to hold our biases and our prejudices at bay. To open our minds even if our brains do seem like they might fall out. They won’t, but we might, indeed, have to reevaluate ourselves, and we might, indeed, become different people in the process. But that’s nothing to fear. That can be a good thing.
Tagged: bias, consciousness, Philosophy, prejudice, reality
