The mark of an educated mind: Defending the Goves
Michael Gove’s wife recently posted a picture of one of their bookshelves onto Twitter, and Owen Jones was quick to question why they owned a book by David Irwing, an infamous Holocaust denier, insinuating that the Goves themselves adhered to such a horrid belief.
‘It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it’. This quote is attributed to Aristotle, one of the most renowned philosophers of Ancient Greece, a civilization that embodied reason and logic at its epicentre.
The message Aristotle is conveying is that, if we are to increase our intelligence, and our understanding of the world, we must encounter different opinions which are unknown to us. This even includes opinions we recognise yet openly despise. We do not have to agree with such opinions – they are not surgically imposed on our brains by mad scientists when we read of them. Instead, we treat them like counterarguments to challenge our own points of view, asking ourselves why someone would genuinely hold these beliefs (Aristotle refers to this as the entertainment of a thought).
If the counterarguments are strong enough, we incorporate them into our own understanding of the world. This explains why opinions change many times over the course of a lifetime, as new information is constantly introduced to our minds. Without this, we remain in a state of ignorance, handcuffed to groupthink, and unable to think for ourselves.
Of course, such wisdom has been disposed of in the modern era.
Case in point: Michael Gove’s wife recently posted a picture of one of their bookshelves onto Twitter, and Owen Jones was quick to question why they owned a book by David Irwing, an infamous Holocaust denier, insinuating that the Goves themselves adhered to such a horrid belief.
Why do some people in this world think that every idea that one comes across must be accepted and immediately incorporated into their own worldview? Has modern society lost the level of tolerance required to listen to different opinions (short answer – yes!)?
If this outlook is applied to the Gove bookshelf, then it would be diagnosed with a severe case of what George Orwell would term ‘double-think.’ For example, there is also a book titled The Bell Curve, which asserts that intelligence, and consequently success in life, is partly determined by inheritance, which includes racial differences, leading some to conclude that the book intends to stoke racial resentment against minority groups. On that same bookshelf is also a book written by Colin Powell, the former National Security Advisor to Ronald Reagan (who just so happens to be African-American).
So why do the Goves own this ideologically diverse library? Well, they wish to have educated minds, and to venture outside the grounds of the personal beliefs fortress – or even out of general interest. Many own Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf for the very same reason. Are all these people Nazis for daring to own this literature? I think not.
