By DONALD DeMARCO
Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most eccentric philosophers of the modern world, in a field that has more than its share of eccentrics, argued, to the consternation of Bertrand Russell, that it could not be proven that there was not a rhinoceros in the room. Russell thought his young associate in logic was a “fool.” Wittgenstein, however, wanted to keep an open mind. Perhaps a rhino was really there, although no one had seen it as yet.
The value of an open mind is to see what is there and grasp, apprehend, or close the mind on its proper object. There is no point in keeping the mind open and never grasping or understanding anything. The mind was made for truth, not eternally avoiding it. So too, the mouth was made to open and close so that food could be eaten and digested, and the hand was made to open and close so that it could grasp and hold on to things or let them go.
The person whose mind is perpetually open and never closed knows nothing. He is what is called an “ignoramus.” Such a person, one might think, would be the last person in the world to be dogmatic and assert his superiority over others. Nonetheless, human beings, like Ludwig Wittgenstein, can eschew the obvious and insist on the improbable.
This past year in the National Football League, 99.3 percent of extra point attempts were successful. Ivory Soap advertises its produce as 99.44/100 percent pure. It is fair to say that over the course of history and throughout the world 99.5 percent of human being believed that mom and dad provide the best arrangement for raising a child. No one is penalizing kickers for making extra points, and no one is chastising the Ivory Soap Company for its high grade of purity.
Yet, even making a suggestion that mother and father represent the best arrangement for rearing a child these days can be met with scorn, ridicule, condemnation, and the need for re-education. How does one suddenly become an oddball for respecting the time-honored view that having a mother and father is in the best interest of the child?
Richard Page is a 68-year-old British justice of the peace and a Christian. He has been condemned by the country’s highest legal authorities and sentenced to a day-long re-education program in order to rid himself of the dangerous belief that a child is better off being raised by a mother and father rather than by a same-sex couple. He had expressed the apparently insidious view that “because a baby comes from a man and a woman it made me think the child would be better off with a father and a mother than with single-sex parents.”
Here, Page was alluding to biology. Unfortunately for him, he closed his mind on the notion that biology can provide a blueprint for child care. One should keep an open mind about science as well as the sociological studies than indicate that a child does, indeed, fare better under the guidance of a mom and a dad.
For this sin of not keeping his mind open, Page was suspended from the bench. “They said I had a closed mind because of my Christian beliefs,” he reported. “They said I could not put my Christian beliefs above the rights of single-sex couples. They said I had to open my mind. But I think when you order someone to open their mind, then you are the one with a closed mind.”
The punitive lawyers were extending the topsy-turvy world that their compatriot, George Orwell, described in his novel 1984: a nightmare society in which ignorance was strength, slavery was freedom, and war was peace. Justice Page was hardly imposing a closed-minded, Christian view on people. He was open to biology, sociology, history, and common sense. Apparently Orwell, who preferred knowledge to ignorance, also suffered from not having an open mind.
The open mind that never closes itself on the truths of reality poses a great danger to society. It represents what José Ortega y Gasset once described as the “sovereignty of the unqualified.” It is a concept that is ideological in essence and belongs to that arbitrary and pernicious world or political correctness. As it is put into practice it constitutes incarceration without walls. It is the truth that makes us free, not an arbitrary ideology.
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(Donald DeMarco, Ph.D., is a senior fellow of HLI America, an Initiative of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College & Seminary in Cromwell, Conn. Some of his recent writings may be found at HLI America’s Truth and Charity Forum.)
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