What has happened to the American mind?
I am not sure there is a single set of answers that can be offered. What is certain, though, is that in the spheres of erudition and intellectual pursuits, the well appears rather dry in many places.
The proclivity of people to allow ideologies and political creed to enter into their thinking and conversations about even the most innocuous topics is responsible, in some part, for a squandering of the resources of the human mind.
Then there is the attenuation of the First Amendment to the Constitution which increasingly looks upon disagreeable speech as hate speech.
"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in "Self-Reliance."
Agreement with other peoples' ideas is nice if we agree after we have searched deeply in our souls for concurrence, but a weak embrace prejudices our own genius and stymies our stride.
Things that are touted to have certainty must be tested in our minds until they have established a personal certainty.
In other words, the path to certainty is colored by many rejections.
The bane of political correctness is that it does away with rejections altogether. Likewise, ideology asks us to wave a certain flag in a certain fashion inside a certain corridor of thought.
We can walk with thoughts we agree with, and there are many of them, but we should be careful about walking with a basket of thoughts that are proffered to us by others.
"No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature," Emerson wrote.
I have always found conformity to be distasteful.
I would not wear a green, polka-dotted tie just to be flashy and different, but should my fancy strike a fashion for just such a display, I wouldn't be averse to it.
The path to a man's truth is not dictated by the clothes other people are wearing.
Just as a room full of monochromatic color tires the eye, a pool of concurrent thought produces a dullness of the mind.
I must quote from "Self-Reliance" this entire passage, for it appeals to my sense of identity that is rooted in uniqueness:
"Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the center of things."
What our time demands is a thinker with a capital T, and an actor with a capital A.
If the wells are dry around the conversation of our times, it is because we have allowed other people to write on our slates.
In the final analysis, a man's life is worth little if he lives in a place where his words and thoughts have no sting or sunshine.
A mind may allow entry to all that come its way, but only those things that are true to its soul should be allowed to take residency and find expression.
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Published Newspaper Columns On Travel, Museums, Art, Movies and Music, 1998-2019
Não FicçãoThese columns were published in the El Paso Times between 1998 and 2019. This selection focuses on the themes of travel, museums, art and music.
