I have been thinking back to a great social psychologist Milton Rokeach. He was a political liberal and nonreligious, who believed that liberals in the 1950s-1970s were open-minded and conservatives were closed-minded. While he was preparing his classic, The Open and Closed Mind, he decided to test out his hypothesis with his university colleagues. He studied how professors reacted to students. Liberal professors consistently praised students that agreed with them as “open-minded.” They consistently judged as “closed-minded” the students that disagreed with them and who tended to be conservative.
Rokeach was shocked that his fellow liberal professors were so closed-minded. He did some more study and concluded that liberals of his era tended to be more close-minded than conservatives. He and others confirmed this in all sorts of ways including surveying reading habits. Liberals tended to only read liberal news outlets while conservatives tended to read some liberal outlets. Rokeach then suggested that it would be wise for him to devise a way to find and gather together those liberals and conservatives that were open-minded. He never really got to this part of his research.
Buckley published a similar conclusion in his God and Man at Yale. The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom’.
I found in the Nixon era, which Rokeach also studied, that the national news media were rather monolithic in their liberal and a-religious approach. Less so than now, but still acted like the conservatives were the enemy. People like Mark Shields were Kennedy liberals but more open-minded than today.
Today, we tend to have monolithic closed-mindedness among both sides. I believe the conservatives became more this way because of a decades’ long fight against closed-minded liberals. Actually, what happens is that the process is circular: a reaction against the Other underlying all. To adapt the Marines’ slogan, our goal at A Journey through NYC religions is to find the few, the strong, the open-minded, the Marines for the making of a new America.
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