TEACHABILITY

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVII, 19 November 1927, Page 9

TEACHABILITY

The Open Mind

“A Closed Hand Cannot Receive }

“The firefly only shines when on the wing ; So is it with the mind: when once we rest, We darken.”

“The way of life is like other roads in this, that from time to time there are places where where the road is ‘up’ for investigations, and perhaps for relaying.” —H. Simpson’s “Altars of Earth.”

"Some imagine that they must remain immutably fixed in everything they have determined. But it is first necessary that the determination should be a sound one.”

—Ruskin, “Ethics oL the Dust.”

, was once accused of airing a view in flat contradiction oi the doctrine he had expounded many years before. “My dear,” he replied, “Do you think any teacher could be worth your listening to, or anybody else’s listening to, who had learned nothing, and altered his mind m nothing, from seven and twenty to seven and forty ?” But perhaps the truth remains for most of us that the biggest difficulty in life at times is just to change our minds. Preachets use the word “repentance” often. The Greek word, Metanoia, of which the word “repentance” is a translation, means nothing more nor less than a change of mind — doing a right-about-turn and admitting you are wrong, it is one of the most difficult tilings in the world to achieve.

AN INDIVIDUAL NECESSITY.

In the Great War, the much vaunted Hindenburg line was Germany’s undoing. From Germany’s point of view it was an impregnable obstacle; absolutely unassailable by the most intrepid troops. But from the point of view of the acute observer, it was Germany’s indication to the world that she was digging in, having reached the limit of her resources. As a matter of cold and sober fact the tanks, on that glorious day of November, 1917, broke through the alleged unbreakable line. lt*i precisely so in the life of the individual. To dig yourself in to a carefully constructed system of ideas and habits of mind means not only that you have determined your own limits and renounced your fundamental mental duty, to keep moving, but also that you are at the mercy of the first vigorous attack by means prepared while you were asleep in your dug-out.

Just as victory comes sooner and in a more decisive way by open warfare, so intellectual achievement is attained more definitely by an open mind that keeps moving.

Tolstoi put it in an exaggerated way once, when he said: “The clergy of all religions have told me of their belief that they alone were right and all others wrong, and that all they could do for those in error was to pray for them.”—An exaggeration, however, that gives a good example of minds dug-in, closed, settled and self-contained. But all the best stories in the world (the story of the Prodigal for example) are accounts of people who had the courage and the honesty to change their minds when it became evident that their former ideas and methods had been out-lived. A SOCIAL REQUIREMENT. Gustave Le Bon, in his book entitled “The Mind of the Crowd,” gave some fine examples

of the truth that the man in a crowd is not the same intelligent being as you find him when he is by Himself. Taking illustrations from the French Revolution, he indicates the existence of what he calls the mass-mind, and shows how men under the imluence and impulse of the urge of a mob, will do things and think things that would be absurd to them were the thoughts or things presented to them each as an individual. And sure enough, .it may be difficult in some cases to get an individual to admit a mistake and honestly change his mind, but it is an easy task in comparison with the effort to root out certain prejudices and “complexes ’ that are peculiar to social life as such. “Laissez i'aire”—“This will do”

—“Heave it aiune —Tuese aie tne characteristics of mucii oi our communal Hie, convicting us all of lack oi pusniui energy ana progressive instinct, 'me pioneers or science and enterprise have oiten peen Hie victims oi ridicule and persecutions on the part oi the society m wincn tjliey happened to live, and mat because oi the fact tnat society's mind was already made up. ihe church excommunicated me man who hist dared to say that the earth goes round the sun, ana not vice versa, as the Church taught. A NATIONAL SAFEGUARD. If you turn now to flunk of national habits of mind, you will find in such cliches as “my country right or wrong,” piecise examples of national prejudice, or as we prefer to call it, the shut mind. Let us say you are a Scotsman. (That may be either your misfortune or your glorious privilege), in that case there are tew non-Scottish national cnaracteristics that will rouse your enthusiasm, and corroboratively, there are few faults you will be able to find in the national habits of your own people. Let us say, more generally, that you are a Britisher, either by birth or by extraction. Does it not mean, very often, that you go in for such a movement (again let us say) as the League of Nations, in a missionary spirit—endeavouring to raise up the poor heathen of other countries who speak barbarous languages (barbarous because they are not English) and to show them how they ought to act and teach them how they ought to think'! It is a wrong spirit. It is wrong because it denotes the attitude of a settled mind that has no room in it for a new idea. The joke of this matter is that every nation may go to the Assembly in a similar missionary spirit. The truth must be recognised sooner or later that no nation has the monopoly of truth or of right government, and that amicable relationships in world-politics will develop only when the nations, by opening their minds, learn from other nations and seek to lay asite petty inter-racial prejudices.