An essay on open-mindedness…

What does it mean to be truly open-minded. Open-mindedness is a popular concept (often coupled with its buzzword cousin tolerance) strewn about in our society with reckless abandon as a way to win support for political leaders or try to convince people of their own self righteousness. To be truly open-minded is it necessary that we attend gay pride parades, or that we immerse ourselves into the million man march, or other such alternative movements, or do we need only to tolerate those who are different than us, and not take hostile stances to those within our population? Which of these must we abide by to attain this state of rhetorical nirvana? I say neither.

Before I dive into my ideas about this topic, let me first address the backdrop upon which they were drafted. I have spent my entire life in a Christian family, going to Christian church and celebrating Christian holidays. I am a Christian. Now before you dismiss me as nothing more than a Bush-loving, gay-bashing, bible-thumping bigot, let me say that I believe the modern church has misplaced much of its focus. The vigilant stance taken by many of my fellow believers has completely tarnished the reputation of Christianity outside of its community. I believe that as a rule, Christians are well-intentioned, but I do believe that many have been led astray by a few who preach nothing but fire and brimstone, and spew messages of intolerance. I could go on for quite some time about my beliefs regarding what the pulpit should be focusing on, but that isn’t what this essay is about.

With that out of the way, I can actually address the question I posed to start this essay. When it comes to open-mindedness there seems to be two distinct camps. The first of the camps that I will address is embodied by the idea that to be open-minded towards other cultures, we must embrace these cultures. To be completely blunt, the advocates of this idea are typically idealistic liberals who actively campaign for increased rights and tolerance for minority groups. While it is in many cases noble to take this stance (such as the abolitionist movements in the 1850s or the civil rights movements which followed a century later), for the issue of open-mindedness this stance is overzealous. The reasoning behind this stance is typically that the best way to gain tolerance for a group is to embrace that group and learn about the individuals within and the true motives behind alternative movements. The fundamental problem with this is that when you live in a country which endorses no religion or system of beliefs as we do, there are bound to be people who will naturally disagree with these movements regardless of how well-informed or familiar they are with them. For example, despite the fact that I feel I am able to maintain my open-mindedness, I believe that homosexuality is not morally right. I will discuss later on how I am able to maintain my own beliefs without becoming intolerant of my fellow man. My point with this example is merely that regardless of exposure or education, people will still disagree on issues of morality, so the idea of immersion being the best way to achieve open-mindedness is ludicrous.

The second popular ideology behind open-minded, and closely related to its cousin tolerance, falls within the camp that chooses to just ignore those that are different. This is a popular choice among younger generations of Christians (and followers of other religions too) who have a desire to not be branded as bigoted while still being able to maintain their personal beliefs. This idea of ignoring those different from oneself is fundamentally flawed by the fact that one cannot open their mind, when they put up complete barriers to even acknowledging entire segments of the population. It’s like saying that I am an expert on types of cereals, even though I only eat Frosted Flakes just because I don’t think about the other varieties of cereal. It’s clear that there are other types of cereals to be considered, just as it is clear that there are a whole world of people different from me who all play important roles in my world.

The solution to this issue, I believe, is incredibly simple if you actually think critically about what open-mindedness is. Open-mindedness isn’t characterized by embracing everybody’s culture and lifestyle choices at the expense of our own. Equally so, it is can not be characterized by isolating ourselves from our fellow humans beings when it is convenient. Open-mindedness is a simple concept, the idea of not prejudging others. It isn’t a problem isolated to groups who like to tout themselves as discriminated against such as homosexuals and racial minorities. No. It is a problem that extends to every facet of every subculture on the planet. Prejudgment is exactly the same when someone characterized as a blue-collar is immediately considered to be stupid as it is when a homosexual is unfairly characterized as an in your face pervert. The only way that anyone can be truly open-minded is to view people based on who they are, without applying predetermined critiques to them.

This isn’t a political issue at all. Republicans and Democrats are guilty of this alike, as are all political movements that seek to polarize the population into groups. If we hope to ever live in harmony with our fellow man we must learn to respect, not stereotype, our neighbors regardless of their race or lifestyle.

A response to C.S. Lewis…

To christen the new blog I have decided to post a paper I wrote for my English class taken last fall in which I confront C.S. Lewis’s arguments made in his essay “The Poison of Subjectivism”. In case your curious, this was my only non-A in the class(a B+), for the cited reason of my overuse of rhetoric. Enjoy.

The Poison of Subjectivism: A Response

In “The Poison of Subjectivism”, C.S. Lewis tackles the idea that morality is not something dictated by mankind and his feelings, but rather dictated by a constant moral compass, objective across all humans. This is why, he claims, that there are any universal applications of morality at all. After all, were there not legitimate standards for how we measure morality then why would such things as murder and rape be considered immoral, considering that in most case they are merely an attempt by the perpetrator to pursue the life, liberty and happiness portrayed as so important in the Declaration of Independence. Lewis affirms his idea that true morality cannot be subjective by establishing the argument that societies which utilize widespread subjective morality have actually been empirically proven to be immoral by practical reason. Lewis’s flagship example for this argument is Nazi Germany. He argues that subjective morality was responsible for the genocide that resulted from the Nazi’s rule in the 1930s and 1940s. According to Lewis, it is the dictation of popular morality by the sentiment and feelings of people that was responsible for these atrocities, that they were allowed to happen because of the flawed moral ground taken by the Nazis of Germany during that time period. Throughout this essay, the most significant and reoccurring theme of Lewis is that morality is something which cannot change, that it is absolute. He extends this with his argument which separates true morality and false morality with the distinction of whether the morality is found by practical reason, or whether the morality is justified by personal feeling and sentiment. In responding to Lewis’s essay, I would present the argument that practical reason, as Lewis defines it, is based entirely on sentiment and feeling, and thus that there is no difference between subjective morality and true morality, and furthermore all morality is subjective in nature.

Throughout the essay, Lewis bases his entire list of claims against moral subjectivism with his claim that true morality is based on practical reason, not sentiment or personal feeling. Reading through the essay a first time(skimming it to be honest) I was left with one burning question regarding Lewis’s claims, what the hell is practical reason? In an attempt to answer my question I went back through the essay reading more closely and found one line that directly confronted it, “By practical reason I mean our judgment of good and evil”, on page 100. Our judgment of good and evil? Lewis’s alternative to moral subjectivism, his escape from having us guide morality with our feelings and sentiments, is that we should use our judgment of good and evil? According to dictionary.com, judgment is defined as “the formation of an opinion after consideration or deliberation”, a definition which establishes Lewis’s all important “judgment” (our savior from subjectivism) as nothing more than opinion. Can we (or even a great thinker such as Lewis) realistically perpetuate the idea that the opinions of individuals are completely void of personal feelings? No, of course not. Whether or not we as humans want to acknowledge it, most of the decisions we make on a day to day basis are not objective. I did not choose to write over this essay because I felt an uncanny moral obligation to do so, but because I felt I could more adequately(and hopefully interestingly) respond to this essay than the other options. The concept of mankind making judgments completely objectively is a joke. Whether conscious or not, none of our decisions(or more importantly our opinions) allow us to forego our own personal experiences in finding them. Lawyers know this. When selecting jurors for a trial, a lawyer tries to pick those which would have comparably favorable experiences regarding the crime for which his client is accused. For example, let us hypothetically assume that a man is on trial for raping a woman. When selecting jurors, if given the option between a woman who is a rape victim herself or a man who doesn’t know anybody who’s ever been sexually abused, the defendant’s attorney is going to pick the man with no experience of rape. Why? Both of these people are likely to believe that rape is bad, and Lewis would have you believe that would be enough to make them equals as jurors, but despite this agreement on the heinous nature of rape, it is a near given that the two individuals will view its severity in different lights. The first individual would likely view rape as the most heinous of crimes, that to be raped is a fate worse than death. The second would certainly agree that rape is bad, but would someone who has had no experience at all relating to it really be likely to consider it a worse crime than murder? No. Lewis might argue in this situation that a moral constant has been struck, that rape is bad because in their judgment, both jurors thought so, but in reality these two jurors would have struck no moral agreement because they disagree on the severity of a moral breech.

In Lewis’s essay, he demands that objective judgment be obtained to deliver a verdict of morality, and that all humanity should be capable of using this objective judgment in exactly the same way. The flaw in this argument is that objective judgment is not something possible in humans. At best, from a Christian perspective, we can act as God would, a God that describes himself as selfish, and who is clearly subject to the same emotions as humans. At best, we are governed by our emotions.