“And there is another form of priggishness, too, with which we can dispense – the humbug of being unbiased. No one can grow to adult age without forming a set of opinions; heredity, environment, education and experience all condition us; the happiest are those who have allowed their opinions and beliefs to grow naturally; the unhappy are those who accept intellectually a system with which they are out of sympathy.”
I came upon these lines in Evelyn Waugh’s Robbery Under Law (1939), his account of two months spent touring Mexico, and promptly applied them to my own experience with reader comments: “This does sort of devolve into prejudice without much to support it.” Better interesting prejudice than bland open-mindedness. I’m in good company. Theodore Dalrymple devotes an entire book, In Praise of Prejudice, to the subject:
“Good and bad, beautiful and ugly, are built into the very structure of our thoughts, and we cannot eliminate them any more than we can eliminate language, or a sense of time.”
ADDENDUM: Dave Lull suggests this epigram by J.V. Cunningham:
"This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained
Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained."
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No resolution there. Aye, right to say broadmindedness is itself no sufficient provider of knowledge, truth or reasonable outcome but for all that this does not make bias a sufficient harbringer either. Both broadmindedness and bias are mere turns of a fallacy when used singularly as an attempt to justify belief, argument etc.
Therefore broadmindedness is as useful as an instructive as bias is. They both share same sided characteristics.
So why pick one as superior over the other?
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