Where does open-mindedness end, and integrity begin?

Being open minded is indeed a noble character trait. It fosters tolerance. It is useful for our personal growth, and the evolution of our ideas to be able to temporarily put aside our own belief systems to try to understand those of others.

However, it is important that we also have our own belief systems in the first place.

In my experience, the modern “marketplace of ideas” can be navigated in two ways. You can be steadfast in your own beliefs, and actively curate a personal echo chamber where everyone you deal with confirms and amplifies your own opinions.

The other approach is to “be open-minded”, to honestly consider every opinion, to try to understand the respective worldviews of competing perspectives and value systems.

This approach often starts with positive intentions, and it has value. But entertaining every individual viewpoint fairly, equally and without prejudice eventually becomes overwhelming. We can find ourselves tossing upon a sea of ideas, blown hither and thither by other people’s principles that may or may not be relevant for us.

How then, do we chart our own path through that sea of ideas? How do we find the third way, the north-west passage between open-mindedness and categorical fundamentalism? Ah, by having principles of our own!

How to arrive at those principles, though?

Here the most useful tool would be critical thinking.

We need to be open-minded enough to consider other points of view. But we also need to be critical enough to dismiss those that are bullshit.

We should apply these principles to ideas that are new to us, but also to those we have inherited via our families, our communities and the cultures we have emerged from.

Otherwise, we are simply passive vessels, unquestioningly carrying forward a set of principles from the past, probably determined to imprint them on the next generation before we fade out. In this case, humanity becomes like a massive, eternal game of pass-the-parcel, where we hand down some teachings to our children ad infinitum.

This doctrine cannot be allowed to stand. It risks ultimately leaving humanity facing an onslaught of existential, life-or-death challenges, armed only with a set of intellectual tools from the first century.

While these may have value, they simply must be augmented. Christianity its very self has updated its doctrine every few centuries. In this fast-moving world, we need to be doing that with our own set of beliefs every day!

Our beliefs must constantly be questioned, but we need to believe in something!

Being chained to a set of fundamentalist tenets from the past is dangerous, but it is equally dangerous to believe in nothing.

Truth relativism is the philosophy that that there is no objective truth, that what is valid and true “depends on your perspective”. Its cousin, moral relativism, holds that what is right is also dependent on one’s culture, background or point of view.

All of that may be true, in the shifting seas of life. But in trying to sail through them towards some dry land of understanding of our role, and to attain some sense of purpose and fulfilment, we must stand for something. We need a rudder of principles, a ship’s wheel of personal values to direct us.

To live our lives actively – to be helmsmen, and not desperate sailors cast adrift.

Being open-minded can help us achieve that. But sooner or later, we have to believe in something to give our lives direction.

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