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The face of optimism

Keeping tough days in perspective

Is a mind such a terrible thing to change?

One only has to look as far as the current political races to find evidence that we're increasingly polarized as a nation. As leaders struggle to distinguish themselves from one another, they tend to dig their heels in, shouting louder about what they stand for, instead of listening more.
This trend is reflective of a larger tendency among all of us to hold fast to our opinions, as if having our minds changed was a concession of defeat. But perhaps we're missing out on some valuable insight by not looking at the world from someone else's point of reference.

Scholar Roger Martin is a lifelong student of something he calls "the opposable mind." He contends that, although we are born with a basic ability to hold multiple, opposing concepts in tension in our mind, we tend to condition ourselves from childhood to do just the opposite.

Martin argues that the problem begins in grade school, with the way we teach our children to think. Though we begin early on show children how to read, write and add, the skills of critical thought, rhetoric and analysis often come a decade later or more, if at all.

This vacuum of higher-order thinking trickles over into a culture that, instead of welcoming debate and opposing views, feels threatened by difference. Rather than learning from alternate perspectives, we cling to our own ideals even tighter, casting verbal volleys at the "other side," and if we're lucky, the fight stops before things really get messy.

Gregory Jones, a fan of Martin's work and now the dean at Duke University Divinity, suggests a strategy he was taught in school, and which has had a significant impact on the way he views the world. He was given the challenge of selecting a topic about which he felt very strongly, and then researching and arguing in favor of the opposite view. The exercise pushed his intellectual and emotional skills to their limits, but he came away with a much richer sense of the importance of different viewpoints.

"Such exercises do not ask us to become less passionate or to compromise our views," he says. "But they do help us learn to hold our own views in a deeper tension with alternative possibilities."

There's an old saying that suggests minds, like parachutes, work best when they are open. Being right isn't necessarily the same thing as being wise, and letting go of our hold on the former can lead to more of the latter.