I've blogged this story before: When I was in about to start Grade 9, my then-best friend called me up and said "We have a problem. The Grade 9 gym teacher is a lesbian!" That's basically how my homophobia worked at the time. I hadn't ever heard homosexuality described or spoken of as anything other than a problem or a shame, and it didn't occur to me to question that. Because everyone was talking about it like it's something bad, I unthinkingly assumed it must be bad.
I think that's how a significant quantity of ignorance and closed-mindedness works. You only ever hear of things spoken of a certain way, and perhaps it doesn't occur to you to question the underlying assumption.
The solution, which I don't know how to execute, is to encourage people to question the underlying assumptions. This is tricky, because you don't want to come on too strong and put them on the defensive. For example, you might have noticed an ongoing theme in my blog that bugs are yucky and puppies are cute. My personal neuroses aside, this is an automatic reaction that a lot of people have. When I write blog posts with the underlying assumption that bugs are yucky or that puppies are cute, the vast majority of people accept those givens. If someone wanted to convince people that bugs are cute and puppies are yucky, they couldn't just outright say it because people's automatic reaction would be "WTF?? You're insane! Get this looney away from us! Save the puppies! Kill the bugs!" It's such a shocking attack on what we dearly hold to be most basic truths that our reaction would be violent and visceral. To make it work, the pro-bug anti-puppy lobby would have to sort of plant the seed of a suggestion and let it grow until people feel that they have come to realize independently that bugs are cute and puppies are yucky.
So, when faced with ignorance and closed-mindedness, we have to somehow figure out how to plant the same seed of questioning heretofore-unquestioned assumptions. I don't know how to do that.
(But don't go around breeding bugs and exterminating puppies please, okay?)
1 comment:
I frequently do the gentle-suggestion approach to assumptions and ignorance, but only if I sense an openness of mine. Maybe not a wide-open-anything-goes mind, but a receptiveness to new thoughts, and to other points of view.
If the mind seems to me truly closed, locked in, I either walk away (mentally or physically, depending on context), or get more aggressive (useless, but it makes me feel better).
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