You must learn to discern

Making the case for intellectual cilantro

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
–Aristotle

Wisdom isn’t a collection, it’s a chemical reaction. It’s not adding books to a shelf; it’s adding ingredients to a soup that’s been simmering your whole life. But you most definitely have a bias, so you automatically reject anything that contradicts your cauldron. This is a weakness. To think freely, you must learn to discern.

Discernment is the willingness to taste each ingredient—even your hated cilantro—before rejecting it from the soup. To ask “what is this?” before “what do I think about this?” You’ll still be permitted to judge, don’t worry darling. You are merely splitting your observation and judgement into two distinct actions.

You might say, “some ideas/people/ingredients (like cilantro) are Obviously Harmful” and require no consideration. Be careful. The category of Obviously Harmful once included mixed marriages, women’s suffrage, and even books. In the future, Obviously Harmful might everything you believe today. Don’t leave out the impossible.

When you fuse observation with evaluation, you commit the fallacy of prejudice. I see it as more of a weakness than a crime, because one who is quick to judge is easy to control. You can brought to fury by exposure to ideas. You bristle at nuance. You become unable to take a joke. And you can become defined by what you are not.

There’s value in thoughtful opposition, sure, but when you declare yourself “never Democrat” or “never Republican,” you are abdicating a kind of responsibility. Your opposition isn’t a stance but a blindfold. When you say, “I’ll never trust an artist who did something wrong,” you close yourself to most humans, and all who lived before you. Don’t be so hard on the past. You too have hurt someone else.

The world is more than just you. Sip before you swig. Take what serves you, leave what doesn’t. Let others take what serves them. Observe. Then judge. Your mind grows stronger not by what it accepts, but by what it learns to understand.