A STATESMAN'S SPEECH
Sir,-Mr. Malton Murray’s reference to my "closed mind" suggests that it is about time someone debunked the cult of "the open mind." Can any’ man in his five wits have am open mind about the multiplication table or the date of Waterloo? Obviously not. So it is all a question of where you are going to draw the line, of deciding when to keep your mind open and when to close it. Thus there is no reason why one should not judge, with a mind firmly closed, that the Massacre of St, Bartholomew, Hitler’s extermination of the Jews and Stalin’s liquidation of the kulaks were
fession of open-mindedness on these issues would merely betoken.the absence of moral convictions, sac Me By the way, has Mr, ‘Murray a ly ask himself whether he has an opermind on the question whether he should have an open mind? If he has access to the files of the New Statesman he will find in one of the early issues of 1953 (February, I think) an interesting poem in which Michael Polanyi describes what happened to a man who took this question seriously.
G.H.
D.
(Palmerston North).
(This correspondence is now closed.--Ed.)
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 803, 10 December 1954, Page 5
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200A STATESMAN'S SPEECH New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 803, 10 December 1954, Page 5
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