Closed Minded Bigots
Posted by Keith_Indy on 31 Oct 2007 at 8:09 pm | Tagged as: Education, Keith's Page, Culture, Domestic Politics
I found this post very apt to a situation we’ve highlighted here on this blog. I’ve noticed this time and time again, and have shut off even trying to change minds when I encounter this behavior. Best to point it out, and move on. You know, really move on, not moving on by banging my head against the wall about dissatisfaction over something that happened years ago.
This coincides with my own experience, not in the university, but in my personal encounters with liberals and those on the Left. Their misconceptions about the Right are rife, and include the very bunch of attributes Prager lists as visions the Left has of virtually everyone on the Right: “mean-spirited, war-loving, greedy, bigoted, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic, sexist, intolerant and oblivious to human suffering.”
The fact that I don’t seem to demonstrate these characteristics and yet I’m on the other side of many arguments tends to throw my listeners into a sort of turmoil that leads them to yell a bit and then close the conversation down, perhaps because it is just too threatening (some of them have actually said as much). The sort of cognitive dissonance that Prager describes is a very unpleasant sensation, one that most people will avoid like the plague.
And I, likewise, have come to shy away from such conversations these days, not because of cognitive dissonance or the idea that my mind will be changed—the arguments I encounter on the Left are hardly new to me—but because I’ve learned that these exchanges almost never lead to anything constructive. Perhaps this is because those with whom I tend to engage are usually quite a bit older than the average college student, whose ideas are still in flux—in fact, they are usually more or less my contemporaries. By that age, the vast majority of people have political beliefs that are set in stone.
And the only cognitive dissonance I experience when talking to them is one I’ve finally adjusted to, although it shocked me at the outset: the fact that liberals/Leftists, for all their vaunted open-mindedness and tolerance of different attitudes and opinions, are every bit as closed-minded as they presume the Right to be, if not more.
You would think that people who were open minded and confident about both their ideas, and their ability to defend their ideas would welcome people they disagree with in their forum. But, I guess, unless they can shout and make a spectacle of themselves, they aren’t that interested in reasoned debate.
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