Winfried, I really resonate with your description:
>How can these two be balanced: Sufficient protection and necessary
>openness? Is turning hot feelings into curiosity, as I suggested
>intuitively, a good way to do so?
For me, turning emotional (negative) reaction into curiosity has always
been an important way to learning. I have a well-developed "crap
detector" that generates emotional response to nonsense, illogic, "junk"
science, etc. When my crap detector goes off, loud bells ring and bright
lights flash in my mind and, as you describe, "hot feelings" result. This
is a signal to stop, reflect on (not just accept) what I just read/heard,
and test it (with logic and against my own knowledge and understanding.)
I often do this by arguing against it. What is absolutely necessary, in
this process, is that for learning to occur my arguments must be made
forcefully (so the test will be a good test) but with an open mind.
It is not unusual for me to argue strongly for one point of view, then to
adopt the other at the end of the day -- and even more common for me to
find some new understanding that benefits from both (all) viewpoints.
However, I believe none of this learning and growth is possible (at least
for me) without my first having a well-developed crap detector to trigger
it. I fear that many people today do not have one (judging by the
unending stream of ridiculous, disproved, unproved, illogical,
unscientific, dangerous, indefensible, poorly reasoned but persuasively
presented ideas I hear espoused every day all around me.)
Thus, I am much more concerned with helping people develop their crap
detectors than I am with opening them up to possibilities. The people I
meet are much too open to new possibilities -- and don't have any way of
judging which are worth pursuing (or believing) and which are not. They
are merely swayed by the persuasive force, the rhetoric, of the
presentation and cannot independently judge the worth of the ideas
themselves. This frightens me much more than if they were merely closed
to new ideas, although I have done my share of struggling to help people
overcome this problem, too.
As someone once wrote, "It's not what he doesn't know that bothers me;
it's what he 'knows' that just isn't so."
--"John Gunkler" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>