OP-ED: The open-minded middle ground is a place to take refuge
What’s my takeaway from decades of exposure to the myriad ideas I’ve gotten from books?
The eclectic compilation of literature in our home library ranges from the complete works of Mark Twain to one of the creators of CRISPR technology, Jennifer Doudna, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for gene editing. I have tried to synthesize their collective content to determine what they’ve meant to me.
There are dozens of books about running organizations, self-help, deep science, leadership and plenty of biographies and autobiographies, including Jerry Seinfeld, Lee Iacocca, Abraham Lincoln, Steve Jobs, and Mel Brooks.
Seinfeld says, “Knowledge is what you know, wisdom is knowing whether or not to say it.”
Albert Schweitzer said, “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.”
Lincoln said, “The best way to predict your future is to create it.”
Jobs said, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
But my favorite is Mel Brooks who said, “Hope for the best, expect the worst. Life is a play. We’re unrehearsed.”
How do we convert all this information into workable knowledge? What have we learned from exposure to the writing contained in these books that has had a positive impact on our lives?
During my lifetime, I’ve met thousands of people who have almost zero intellectual curiosity, people who get their information from hearsay, tabloids, reality TV, and graphic novels. But when it comes time to talk to them, I’m either stunned by how dug-in they are on their beliefs, or how absolutely right they are in their interpretations and conclusions.
There’s book knowledge and life knowledge.
The one thing I’ve learned from books is to keep an open mind, to be both humble and flexible, because no one has all the right answers.
As a child, I longed for stability and guardrails in the form of yes and no, black and white, go or no-go answers that gave me absolute direction and certainty for my decisions. My church, parents, teachers, and their rules were the basis of my survival.
By the time I got to high school and was exposed to classical literature, music, some abstract thinking, and the questions each evoked, I knew I was headed into a sea of change, challenge, and hopefully meaningful discoveries of new ideas and premises.
Then I hit college where philosophy, literature, and science classes all took a piece of my belief system and forced me to seriously question where I was going and why. And that was a very good thing.
I learned about situational ethics, semantics, verbal slanting, abstract music, and art. These exposures taught me that no one way is the right way, and we can design our futures. They taught me the importance of being open-minded. But I was hungry to learn, and that was important because it was Plato who said, “Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.”
What I hadn’t learned was survival politics. How do you survive in a life that is much more like high school than college? Who has power? What do they do with that power? It was Sun Tzu in “The Art of War” who said, “Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”
It’s time for all of us to explore what we’ve read, been taught, and heard, and realize that the open-minded middle ground is a place to take refuge while we sort out the realities of our newfound selves, and work toward peaceful co-existence.
This journey is hard enough. Let’s be friends and embrace our commonalities. And always remember, some of the most important things we learn is not from these books, and the most rewarding life is a purpose-driven life.
Nick Jacobs is a Windber resident.