The next post in our project about open-mindedness, written by Hanna, and, as usual, also published in her blog: A Little Blog About Words.
In this post I would like to talk more about the opposite of open-mindedness: Ignorance. Why does ignorance exist? What causes a person to become close-minded and why do we develop prejudices? I think that we need to understand the answer to these questions to be able to prevent that we ourselves become close-minded and to have a chance to try to get rid of any negative pre-conceptions we might have.
I think that the core emotion behind close-mindedness is fear. The majority of our attitudes and beliefs are created during our childhood, before we have many personal experiences to base our opinions on. We become open to things we are familiar with, while our attitudes towards other things to a large extent depend on what people we look up to have told us about them. If we are told by our parents, the media or other authority figures that something is dangerous or bad, we will in most cases accept this and incorporate it in our own ideas.
Sometimes we are aware of our attitudes and have reasons for them; For instance, my parents don’t drink any alcohol and when I was little I was told about the negative sides of drinking from a young age. This resulted in that I formed a very negative and judgmental attitude towards drinking and anyone who devoted time to this activity. I knew why I had this opinion and I took pride in it, but as a consequence I became more close-minded. This scenario is applicable on any type of prejudice, although in many cases the attitudes are formed subconsciously. If you for instance grow up in an environment where everyone comes from the same country and the only things you hear about foreigners are negative, the risk is high that you will feel intimidated when you meet someone with another background. Whether you are aware of it or not, you are likely to develop racist attitudes.
The way I see it, becoming open-minded involves a process of reconsidering your childhood outlook on life. To be able to do this you need to educate yourself and challenge as many of your prejudices as possible. Doing this will both allow you to base your attitudes on informed decisions and hopefully show you that many of your deeply rooted childhood fears are irrational. Acknowledging this is only the first step of course, if you have believed in or been scared of something during the majority of your life, you won’t be able to change that over a night.
However, if you on a rational level know that you don’t need to feel the way you do, that it doesn’t make sense, then you will eventually be able to defeat your close-mindedness! My negative attitude towards drinking remained for many years until I was in my mid to late teens. What made me finally change this idea was seeing that my own friends were drinking. At first this made me feel uncomfortable, but then I realized that it wasn’t as scary as I had always thought and that drinking alcohol didn’t automatically make you a terrible person. I think understanding this has given me a much healthier attitude towards drinking.
When we are trying to make sense of the world, especially as children, it is easy to organize the world into good things and bad things. Such “black and white” thinking is detrimental to open-mindedness. After all, name a group of people who have never done anything bad!? And who is perfect? NOBODY! … Or everyone… depending on how you see it. In this matter I am in total 100% agreement with the excellent musician and comedian Tim Minchin who illustrates this exact point in his song “Cont”:
With that I would like to finish this post by reinforcing Mr Minchin's point: Try to base your opinions on how people act towards you rather than on which group in society they belong to!
In this post I would like to talk more about the opposite of open-mindedness: Ignorance. Why does ignorance exist? What causes a person to become close-minded and why do we develop prejudices? I think that we need to understand the answer to these questions to be able to prevent that we ourselves become close-minded and to have a chance to try to get rid of any negative pre-conceptions we might have.
I think that the core emotion behind close-mindedness is fear. The majority of our attitudes and beliefs are created during our childhood, before we have many personal experiences to base our opinions on. We become open to things we are familiar with, while our attitudes towards other things to a large extent depend on what people we look up to have told us about them. If we are told by our parents, the media or other authority figures that something is dangerous or bad, we will in most cases accept this and incorporate it in our own ideas.
Sometimes we are aware of our attitudes and have reasons for them; For instance, my parents don’t drink any alcohol and when I was little I was told about the negative sides of drinking from a young age. This resulted in that I formed a very negative and judgmental attitude towards drinking and anyone who devoted time to this activity. I knew why I had this opinion and I took pride in it, but as a consequence I became more close-minded. This scenario is applicable on any type of prejudice, although in many cases the attitudes are formed subconsciously. If you for instance grow up in an environment where everyone comes from the same country and the only things you hear about foreigners are negative, the risk is high that you will feel intimidated when you meet someone with another background. Whether you are aware of it or not, you are likely to develop racist attitudes.
The way I see it, becoming open-minded involves a process of reconsidering your childhood outlook on life. To be able to do this you need to educate yourself and challenge as many of your prejudices as possible. Doing this will both allow you to base your attitudes on informed decisions and hopefully show you that many of your deeply rooted childhood fears are irrational. Acknowledging this is only the first step of course, if you have believed in or been scared of something during the majority of your life, you won’t be able to change that over a night.
However, if you on a rational level know that you don’t need to feel the way you do, that it doesn’t make sense, then you will eventually be able to defeat your close-mindedness! My negative attitude towards drinking remained for many years until I was in my mid to late teens. What made me finally change this idea was seeing that my own friends were drinking. At first this made me feel uncomfortable, but then I realized that it wasn’t as scary as I had always thought and that drinking alcohol didn’t automatically make you a terrible person. I think understanding this has given me a much healthier attitude towards drinking.
When we are trying to make sense of the world, especially as children, it is easy to organize the world into good things and bad things. Such “black and white” thinking is detrimental to open-mindedness. After all, name a group of people who have never done anything bad!? And who is perfect? NOBODY! … Or everyone… depending on how you see it. In this matter I am in total 100% agreement with the excellent musician and comedian Tim Minchin who illustrates this exact point in his song “Cont”:
With that I would like to finish this post by reinforcing Mr Minchin's point: Try to base your opinions on how people act towards you rather than on which group in society they belong to!
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