My family and I love books. We have all kinds of books all over our home. My husband Steve loves to read about history, airplanes, and clothing styles throughout history. My daughter Allison likes to read about people like Malala, The Radium Girls, and science fiction. My son Christopher likes Dungeons and Dragons, science fiction, and sports. My son Daniel enjoys science fiction and fantasy. I absolutely love Stephen King (he writes more than horror you know) and Edgar Allan Poe, but will venture out into almost anything (I recently finished Jodi Piccoult’s Mad Honey - it was very good).
A tradition we had as a family before Allison moved to San Diego with her boyfriend Evan was to go to Barnes and Noble and pick out books to read. My husband would get a bonus from work every year and a portion of that would be spent on picking out books we each wanted to read, and then going to the Cheesecake Factory for dinner afterwards. Let me tell you waiting for a table is much easier when you have just started reading Stephen King’s Fairytale.
Last week I was looking through the titles of the books I have on my shelves, trying to decide if it was time to get rid of some to make room for others. Some, like Stephen King’s The Stand have been read over and over, and will continue to be read over and over. Some, like Eat, Pray, Love have been started, but not finished, and some, like Idiot America were on the “planning to read” list and have yet to be opened.
As I looked at that last title, Idiot America, I wondered what had possessed me to pick up a book with such a title. I reviewed the back cover, which purports to explain how American culture has become so dumb and devoid of ethics. “Wow!” I thought to myself. That’s mighty blunt. I DO struggle with understanding how corporate America and American politicians seem to feel that rules and ethics don’t apply to them. However, I’m not prepared to say they are all idiots (okay, some are, but we aren’t here to discuss that right now).
What this HAS made me think about is how quickly we can slip into thinking people who don’t see things our way are idiots. You hear frequently that living in an echo chamber where you are surrounded by people who think the same way you do is not a healthy way to develop critical thinking skills or have intelligent discourse, but precious few people really take the time to try to appreciate an alternative point of view.
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it,” is a quote my Facebook feed credits to the great thinker Aristotle. I don’t really know if Aristotle actually said this, but I agree with the point the quote makes. We need to make room in our lives for ideas that are different than our own, even if we ultimately don’t agree with them.
You may ask, “Why must we do this?” I’ll tell you why. As Christians, we are accountable for representing truth in what we say and do. Love and truth are cornerstones to the Christian faith. How can we know that we are representing truth in what we say and do unless we challenge our thinking and test it against what we know to be fact? If something is truth, it will remain the truth no matter what anyone says or does. If someone told you the human body does not need oxygen, it wouldn’t change the fact that you would suffocate without it, right? If someone said the body has no need for oxygen, it would not harm you to think about having no oxygen for the body. Harm would only occur if you actually deprived yourself of oxygen.
Discourse dies if we hurl insults and create an atmosphere where we fear judgement and condemnation. Critical thinking ceases to exist where questions and doubts are unwelcome. It seems to me that the kindest thing I can do then is to keep an open mind that is willing to examine why I think what I do, and leave room for others to do the same. In that spirit then, I think I will remove the book Idiot America from my shelf and move it on to someone who may want to think about the implications of such name calling.
