The Reactionary Utopian

Leave My Mind Alone

October 9, 2007

[Originally published by the Universal Press Syndicate, February 6, 1998.]

“Leave your mind alone,” James Thurber counseled. Wise advice, but a nation of self-improvers isn’t about to take it. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste”: That’s more our style. Now President Clinton wants a “national crusade” to teach every junior high school student to log on to the Internet, in the interest of making American education “the envy of the world.” Man!

In an ad for ABC’s evening news, anchorman Peter Jennings offers his philosophy: “If we can open people’s minds just a little, we’ve succeeded.” Oh, don’t be so modest, Peter!

I grew up in a more innocent America, where having a mind, let alone an open mind, was optional. In that dark pre-Cronkite era, Douglas Edwards read the news every evening, and he wasn’t trying to open your mind for you; he just told you what had happened that day. It never occurred to him or any other newsman that their role in the nation’s life was that of consciousness-raising missionaries to the mind.

It’s revealing that Mr. Jennings confuses reporting facts with opening minds. It’s even more revealing that he assumes that his own mind is a model of openness that his viewers would do well to emulate. This explains a lot about the way he colors the news: he sees giving the facts a slight leftward twist not as a failure of journalism, but as its fulfillment. I don’t mean to shoot the messenger, but I wish he could be content to deliver the message without rewriting it for us.

When the latest O.J. Simpson verdict was announced, Mr. Jennings went into a weird riff on race relations whose point, as nearly as I could gather, was that it was somehow unseemly for a largely white jury to convict a black man of a crime. Don’t hold me to that; my paraphrase may be unfair. But I had the unmistakable feeling that he was trying to open my mind again.

After all, I’m a white male. And it’s white males who always seem to be desperately in need of consciousness-raising, at least in the view of those who specialize in raising others’ consciousness. Of course Mr. Jennings is a white male too, but he’s Canadian, which is to say a little more “evolved” than your American white male, who has a lot of right-wing hang-ups peculiar to this country — hang-ups about race, sex, gun control, socialism.

I’ve noticed that the more you evolve, the further left you seem to go. That’s why I try to resist the evolutionary process. By its logic, the most highly evolved being of recent times was Mao Zedong. To my way of thinking, it behooves one to keep in touch with one’s cave-man roots.

[Breaker quote for Leave My Mind Alone: Our tutors]

[Breaker quote for Leave My Mind Alone: Our tutors]

Mr. Jennings shares with the president a view of the American people as a sort of gigantic kindergarten class waiting for their tutelage. Their notion of enlightenment is to have the whole class chanting in unison, “Diversity is good! Diversity is good!”

After all, as the president reminded us, “diversity” is our greatest strength. That must be why he wants the federal government to make sure all children get the same kind and degree of education.

G.K. Chesterton said that the purpose of an open mind, like that of an open mouth, is to close on something. If you still doubt O.J. Simpson’s guilt, for example, are you really open-minded in any commendable sense? Or is your mind simply closed against the evidence?

In fact it’s nonsense to say flatly that a mind should be “open” or “closed.” The real question is when, not whether, to close it. Of course it’s wrong to close it prematurely. But at some point you have to make a commitment about the truth of things.

To many people, having an open mind seems to mean assuming that those who disagree with them must have closed minds. If you assume that, your attitude toward others is likely to be not that of the conversationalist who is curious about the views of his interlocutors, but that of the missionary confronting savages, or Peter Jennings addressing his viewers.

Joseph Sobran

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