If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll note that I have made a few changes around here, one of which is the new tagline: Culture / Politics / Religion / Bieber.
Why “Bieber”?
Well, I was toying with the idea of actually writing a weekly post about the annoying little Canadian, but decided instead to treat the term “Bieber” as a kind of catch-all, as shorthand for anything that just gets on my nerves, irritates me, or makes me lose faith in humanity altogether.
What Biebered me recently — that’s right, I verbed it — was a comment someone made when I posted a pic of a book I was reading about Daniel Suelo, a guy who has lived without earning or spending any money whatsoever for the last 14 years. The commenter (who’s a friend of mine who, I hope, will not take offense at my springboarding from his specific comment to what Biebers me in general) said something to the effect of, “He supposedly lives without money but then wrote a book, which will earn him money!”
Now if my friend had paid a little more attention he would have discerned that the book in question was written about Suelo and not by him, meaning Suelo receives no royalties from its sales. But more to the point, what concerned me about the comment was its air of cavalier (bordering on cynical) dismissal of the idea of quitting money, simply because such an idea calls into question the way of life that we have all become accustomed to.
This is a subtle form of xenophobia, a term which literally means “fear of strangers” but which I think can be applied not just to foreign people, but to foreign ideas as well.
While I’m sure most of us would agree that suspicion about new ideas is a bad thing, I do wonder whether we still fall prey to the closed-mindedness that ideological xenophobia exposes. Here’s a good test: Ask yourself the questions, “When was the last time I changed my mind about something big? When was the last time I considered an issue from the standpoint of someone with whom I disagree? Am I willing to let my opponent tell me what he believes rather than being told what he believes by people I agree with?”
Of course, having gone decades without changing your mind about anything doesn’t necessarily make you closed-minded.
Or does it?
There’s actually a term for the fear of new ideas: centophobia (or cenophobia). Neophobia is a good one too. Don’t be afraid to use those instead of xenophobia. (See what I did there?)
I have always used “xenophobia,” and quite frankly, the prospect of changing terms fills me with fear, anger, and secret self-loathing.
I’m too right-wing for this site. And when I tell you what I changed my mind about, you’ll know. I used to hate Brett Favre. When he was in his prime, that is. By the end, I was a full-blown Favre-pologist. (Football, not the other stuff.) But this reminds me of a time I was conversing with an evangelical leader about David Horowitz’s “Radical Son:…” I asked him if he liked it as much as I did, and he said yes, but he didn’t like the “conversionist” overtones, like it was somehow bad inherently to do the thing you’re talking about. Maybe I’m some delightfully ignorant stubborn fool, but I do this all the time, I think.
The topic of abortion has for me over the years become an unexpected way to exorcise whatever inner ideologue. In the last 20 years I’ve gone from agnostic-leaning-choicer to groupthink-lifer to modified-lifer. I like to think I know how choicers think, and as a modified-lifer who has a foot in plenty of groupthink-lifer circles it can be fun to try and broker the choicer mentality to the groupthink-lifers, if for no other reason than to convey that it’s possible to at once retain one’s convictions and avoid slandering the other.
Zrim,
Haha, I always like when abortion comes up and you’re around. You have a way of pissing pretty much everyone off. Takes the heat off me. . . .
I choose to believe that it’s the trait of a truly open-minded person who can piss off everybody in the room. At least that’s what the devil tells me when he says to advocate for him.