During my senior year of high school, I took a trip with my
family to the east coast to look at colleges. On our way up
the coast we spent a night in New York City. It was my first
time in the Big Apple, and I remember being positively delighted
by the endless stream of new sights and sounds coming my way.
This was at a time when I had very little idea where I saw
myself going to school and what I thought I should study,
and though I devoted countless desperate hours to school research
and brainstorming, it only served to further stress me out.
Standing in Times Square, at the corner of 7th Avenue and
46th Street, I watched waves of people pass by. Watching these
people stride obliviously past had a profound calming effect
on me that took a while to figure out. I realized that I had
been daydreaming about them as they passed, trying to figure
out where they were going to and where they were coming from
and why, what the big issues in their lives were and how they
were dealing with them. It struck me that probably all of
them couldn’t have cared less about what was going on
in my life. I had become so self-involved that I had lost
sight of any sort of bigger picture. Thinking so much about
those New Yorkers brought me back out into the world again;
it gave me some necessary perspective.
Becoming too self-absorbed is dangerous. Single-mindedness,
which when taken too far leads to an inability to consider
the needs of others, is a poor strategy for surviving in a
world that does indeed have other people also trying to get
by. Taken way too far, it causes blindness to reason and an
unwillingness to negotiate that begets things like terrorism.
But we don’t have to take it that far for self-absorption
and single-mindedness to cause problems. Any time we are so
sure we are right that we suspend our willingness to hear
others’ points of views, we also cut ourselves off from
differing ideas that could potentially enrich our own understanding
(Hegel’s dialectic synthesis, in a way). To my mind,
then, left-wing radicals are as bad as right-wing reactionaries
if their scope is so narrow that they cannot entertain differing
opinions.
At Pomona we often refer to ourselves as being in a bubble,
a term that encompasses two ideas. The first is that we are
cut off from the real world—too self-absorbed with campus
gossip—and the second is that there’s a dominant
mode of thought between 2nd and 8th street in Claremont: we’re
all (on this view) knee-jerk liberals who prop each other’s
ideas up without ever taking the opportunity to seriously
examine them.
It’s interesting that we could even consider ourselves
cut off from the rest of the world. With high-speed internet
access from our dorm rooms, we have at our fingertips the
capability to access any of hundreds of different online newspapers
throughout the world. The problem is not that we’re cut
off from the world but that we cut ourselves off because we
become too self-absorbed to reach out of the bubble.
What’s the solution, then? Determination. We have to
want to become involved with the large world outside Pomona.
We’ve got to recognize that the rest of the world is
relevant to our life here. There has to be the courage to
actually challenge—and hopefully, through that challenge,
to strengthen—our ideas by seeking out other contradictory
points of view.
Expanding our cultural reach doesn’t have to mean reading
the International section of the Wall Street Journal. It can
be as simple as thinking carefully about an idea that you
would otherwise dismiss. Or recognizing that the world doesn’t
operate in polarities but in shades of gray, and that no idea
is ever the right one for all time. One needn’t stand
in Times Square to find people different from oneself, with
new and edifying opinions of their own.
