Closed minds, – By Kehinde Yusuf
*Photo: Prof Kehinde Yusuf*
“The mind is a terrible thing to waste.” This timeless statement is the motto of the United Negro College Fund founded in 1945 by the African-American Microbiologist Frederick Douglass Patterson. As noted by Marian Johnson-Thompson in an article in a 23 February, 2023 publication of the American Society for Microbiology, it “remains an indelible phrase in the fabric of our nation to encourage and support those who lack educational and training resources.” It is not only the minds of those who lack those opportunities that are a waste. Equally wasted are closed minds.
But, what does it mean to be closed-minded? According to Cambridge Dictionary, to be closed-minded is “not willing to consider ideas and opinions that are new or different to your own.” In other words, a closed mind has fossilised ideas marked by an inability or refusal to think deep. As the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English puts it, “if people, ideas, systems, etc., fossilise or are fossilised, they never change or develop, even when there are good reasons why they should change.”
Closed-mindedness is linked to incredulity which Oxford Languages defines as “the state of being unwilling or unable to believe something.” This definition implies that closed-mindedness can be willful. Many times, such closed-minded incredulity is presented as being ‘principled’. So, those who lapse into such insidious incredulity also suffer the delusion of thinking that what ails them is an unwillingness to compromise their ‘principles’. In human societies, closed-mindedness is ubiquitous and has continued to harm both the closed-minded as well as their targeted victims.
So, it is pertinent to ask here, “Does education open a closed mind?” Unfortunately, the answer is, “Not necessarily.” In fact, ironically, some of the most despicable closed minds or bigots are people who have been highly-educated. This makes it pertinent to distinguish between ‘being highly-educated’, or ‘being learned’, from ‘being well-educated’ or ‘being properly-educated’. A pigheaded, highly-educated person would not rise above the level of a magisterial ignoramus. Examples can be found in television and newspaper analysts and they exist even in academic settings. This is the case because education is essentially socialisation. So, if a person has had extensive exposure to toxic socialisation in school, their string of academic certificates can only be a magisterial testament to mental incapacitation.
This fact is recognised by the Yoruba saying, “Ìwé yàtọ̀ s’ọ́gbọ́n.” (‘Learning is different from wisdom.’) This means that it is possible to have ‘an unwise knowledgeable person’, and they are often narrow-minded, fossilised in thinking, incapable of admitting new facts, asinine in outlook, operating in a bubble, incapable of accurate self-perception, arrogant in perspective, suffused with negativity, and above all prone to unhappiness. A closed mind is therefore characteristically a sick mind.
In world history, one of such closed minds is Paul Joseph Goebbels, a PhD holder in Philology – the study of languages and literary texts – who was Adolf Hitler’s chief propagandist and who was remarkably skilled in public speaking. He was reported to have deployed his oratorical skills in propagating virulent and genocidal propaganda. History records it that in the end, he committed suicide through cyanide poison.
The title of Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda newspaper was, in English translation, “Attack”. Can you find a comparable propaganda media outfit in Nigeria today, which has a name syllabically similar to “Attack”, and semantically consonant with inciting insurrection? In Nigeria’s highly adversarial political climate, you can often find pitiable presumptuous political analysts with closed-minded views flowing like lava from their mouths.
A closed mind can be self-propagating, but some of such minds are reversible, especially if the closed-mindedness is willful. However, some appear to be irreversible, seemingly because it may be said that the key with which they can be unlocked has been long lost. So, it is difficult for them to admit, acknowledge or accommodate any new or alternative facts, views, opinions or perspectives. It is easier to reverse or open a closed mind, if the closed-mindedness is not coupled with arrogance. In this regard, those who created the terms ‘intellectual humility’ and ‘intellectual honesty’ deserve commendation for their perceptiveness and foresight.
Even in international fora like the United Nations, elements of closed-mindedness are discernible, especially with respect to the veto – the power by any one or combination of two or more out of five member countries to override the decision of the around 200 remaining countries. This power to veto has been condemned by some of the leaders of the non-veto-wielding countries and they have called for scrapping it. For example, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, as Prime Minister of Malaysia, stridently campaigned against the veto power.
For example, he said as follows at the 74th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on 28 September, 2019: “Almost three quarters of a century ago five countries claimed victory in the Second World War. On the basis of that victory they insisted on the right practically to rule the world. And so, they gave themselves veto powers over the rest of the world in the organisation they built – an organisation they claim would end wars in the solution of conflicts. The veto power – they must know – was against all the principles of human rights which they themselves claim to be the champions [of]. It killed the very purpose of the great organisation that they had created. It ensured that all solutions to all conflicts could be negated by any one of them. Broken up into ideological factions they frustrated all attempts at solving problems. Each one of them can negate the wishes of the nearly 200 other members. It is totally and absolutely undemocratic. Yet, there are among them those who berate other countries of the world for not being democratic or being not democratic enough.”
What Dr. Mahathir Mohamad was accusing the 5 veto-carrying countries of is what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’, and which Oxford Languages defines as “the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioural decisions and attitude change”. The appeal to good conscience as Dr. Mohamad did in his UNGA speech is also akin to what in Yoruba Language is encapsulated in the proverb, “Ẹni tó bá sùn laa jí; ẹnìkan kìí jí apirọrọ. ” (‘It’s only a person who is really sleeping that you wake up; nobody wakes up a person playing possum [i.e., pretending to be sleeping.]’)
The closed mind phenomenon also manifested in the Arab Spring which started in 2011. The agitators believed that it was only in dislodging their incumbent leaders at that time that their liberation and advancement lay. Now that some of the agitators have achieved their aim, stories abound of widespread disillusionment. In the specific case of Libya, the killing of Muamar Ghaddafi has ended up turning the erstwhile stable and prosperous country into a basket case of sorts. Similar closed minds who could not reconcile themselves to the fact that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu defeated their candidate, went to the Defence Headquarters to invite the army to take-over the government in order to stop the then-President-Elect from assuming office. Some of such closed minds also seem to be perpetually crouching in wait for bad news about Nigeria. It excites them whenever anything they perceive as negative happens to the country. Whenever anything positive happens to the nation, such perverse minds try to minimise or give it a negative twist.
Closed-mindedness and its related phenomenon, group think – uncritically jumping on the bandwagon of the opinions of some vocal elements in society – can also be identified in the ongoing efforts to review the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as amended). One of the refrains by a category of commentators and analysts is “Elections should be won at the polling booth and not in the court.” This seems to be an attempt at a mental shortcut. The analysts, ostensibly pursuing partisan goals, claim that when the court has determined that there is fraud in an election, the court should only order a rerun. It is not certain whether those who hold this view have sufficiently exercised their intellect. When the court has determined that a particular candidate had the majority votes in an election, how just and democratic would it be to direct that the election be rerun? Would that not constitute double jeopardy for the person who was cheated in the first place to ask them to face their electoral tormentors afresh?
Is the constitution review an effort to ensure that future elections in the country are freer, fairer and less litigious? Or is it that some vocal or influential people think that the person they didn’t like won in the 2023 elections, because certain provisions were not in the constitution then? Are they trying to be like the dog in the Yoruba proverb which went to hide the knife after it had been used to cut its ears? Are they being wise after the act, as an English idiom would put it? Are they trying to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted?
Interestingly, it is not only in race, politics and religion that closed-mindedness manifests. It manifests even in science. Pharmaceutical research is one area in which it is found in the form of sexism – the inequitable treatment of the sexes. In fact a 14 July, 2016 feature article by Sharon Florentine in CIO.com is wittily titled “Rats! Sexism is really everywhere.” The article deals with the preference for male rats in the efforts to develop new medicines, using the excuse that hormonal fluctuations could make research using female rats unreliable. Researchers have debunked this claim. According to Rebecca Shansky, as reported by Hannah Devlin, the Science correspondent of the Guardian (of London) on 31 May, 2019, “People like to think that they are being objective and uninfluenced by stereotypes but there are some unconscious biases that have been applied to how we think about using female animals as research subjects that should be looked into by scientists.”
Hannah Devlin further reports that one of the consequences of using male mice and thereby focusing on male humans is that “across all drugs, women tended to suffer more adverse side effects and overdoses.” Another element of closed-mindedness is that it was also reported that some of the younger researchers were reluctant to accept the use of more female rats in their research, because, while in training, they were taught using largely male ones.
As intractable as close-mindedness may seem to be, special mind-liberating training and retraining can yield positive results. Specifying that being sufficiently broad and equitable in scientific methodology is a requirement for grant eligibility has also been found to be very effective in accommodating change. Above all, taking personal responsibility, reviewing one’s own ideas and attitudes regularly and effecting necessary change in outlook would always be of immense value in tackling closed-mindedness.
