C B I

Among my many defects of character is one that is hard to bring under control. It is contempt before investigation (CBI). It is the death of learning and it comes in many forms. The least virulent strain is something like the feeling many have when they look at their first raw oyster. These things can’t be good, just look at them. No oysters are ever tasted and a potential favorite gets no chance. I once introduced guacamole to someone who aggressively asserted that they did not like guacamole…despite the fact that they had never tasted it.

More troubling is the strain of CBI that creates our prejudices, promotes stigma and forces our fellow humans into alien status. People dismiss whole populations that they make no effort to understand. It can lead to Dunning/Kruger syndrome, the state in which people with limited skill and insight believe they are super competent geniuses. Chaos ensues.

My recent trip to the Middle East made the dangers of CBI very clear. I landed in Tel Aviv with a pro-Israel bias fueled by a heady mix of ignorance and propaganda. Travel in the Occupied Territories and in Jordan changed this to a more confused and conflicted understanding of who was right and who was wrong. This is the price you pay for learning…you are no longer certain and you can’t continue to be intellectually lazy.

Now, I am very careful about my opinions. I know what I don’t know. I have no opinion about abortion- for example- because I was born without a womb…I will never know the fear and anxiety – the grief and horror – a woman feels when abortion is considered. I do not deserve an opinion. When a minority friend tells me what it means to be Black or Latino, I can only listen. You have to have, “your ass in the grass” as my Vietnam vet friends would say as they explained what really went on.

It is critical to know what you don’t know and the willingness to know, coupled with the effort is your duty. I like what Charlotte Bronte wrote in Jayne Eyre : ” Prejudices, it is well known, are the most difficult to remove from the heart whose soil has never been loosened by education. They grow there as firm as weeds among stones.” My Buddhist hero, Thich Nhat Hanh does a timely spin on the Injunction in the eightfold path regarding, “right thinking.” He suggests the cultivation of mindfulness, concentration and insight. Both Bronte and the Monk make their point in earthy terms (soil, weeds, cultivation) that suggest the bedrock, earthy nature of true knowledge.

As I work in the basic earth of my own knowledge I hope to pull the weeds of pontificating and pedantry…I want to be free of CBI.