‘Minds Wide Shut’ Review: Dogma, Division and Distrust

Can an academic world aiming for moral purity be redirected to the spirit of inquiry and toleration? 

Image from article: A student march at the University of California, Berkeley, 2011. PHOTO: MAX WHITTAKER/GETTY IMAGES 

By Michael S. Roth, The Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2021 5:43 pm; see also 

"Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us" is a plea for moderate, open-minded liberalism in an age of self-righteous certainty. Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro are professors of literature and economics, respectively, at Northwestern University, where Mr. Schapiro is also the president. The two have taught and written together, and this book is a sequel to their “Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn From the Humanities.” That, too, was a plea to take the blinders off, especially aimed at economists who often tend not to pay much attention to fields other than their own. 

Messrs. Morson and Schapiro are academics who have spent a good deal of their lives on university campuses, and they know that things ain’t like they used to be. Their works return us to well-trodden paths of moderation and conversation, bidding us stay back from the slippery slopes that lead to dangerous dogmatisms. In this volume, literature professors are frequently taken to task, either for not realizing the greatness of the books they are privileged to teach or because they aim for moral purity and theoretical certainty. 

Messrs. Morson and Schapiro are worried not only about the fate of parochial academic disciplines; they are concerned about the development of a culture that undermines the possibility of democratic disagreement. “We need to cultivate the skills of self-questioning, recognizing our own limitations, and attentive listening to those who differ,” they write, “all of which are necessary for respectful, productive dialogue.” The authors claim that too many faculty, students and citizens today believe in theories or take moral stances that claim to provide complete certainty about a vast domain of human experience. This commitment creates new fundamentalisms, making open-minded learning all but impossible. The fundamentalist spirit eliminates the consideration of important questions because it doesn’t tolerate the possibility that in some matters ambiguity or partial answers are the best we can do. Certainty shuts one’s mind.

“Minds Wide Shut” repeats some of the same themes as “Cents and Sensibility.” The authors rightly remind social scientists that not everything important can be measured, and offer strong arguments to show impassioned humanists that most decisions involve trade-offs. As in their earlier volume, they fill their pages with lessons learned from Great Literature. Realist novels, especially the 19th-century English and Russian classics, are mined for homilies about tolerance and respect, about our complex moral natures and the dangers of using any theory to come to sweeping conclusions about all people at all times.

Messrs. Morson and Schapiro are good liberals, and they prize tolerance and curiosity as moral and intellectual virtues. This is, perhaps, most evident in their comparison of Luther (bad) and Erasmus (good). “Erasmus remains deeply skeptical of the powers of the human mind to discern truth,” they write, “and he is keenly aware of the tendency of people to leap to conclusions, rule out discrepant evidence, and seek only what confirms prior beliefs.” For Luther, by contrast, real belief calls for intolerance of error; there are no trade-offs to consider when the issue is salvation. For Messrs. Morson and Schapiro, salvation isn’t the issue, even when they discuss biblical interpretation.

Like almost everyone who preaches reasonableness and open-mindedness, the authors have their limits—there are some things that arouse their ire and not just their curiosity. They are annoyed with humanists who fail to understand basic economic facts and with literary theorists who don’t acknowledge the Greatness of those Great works. These arguments seem of another time, to put it gently, especially since no literary theory of the last 20 years is mentioned. The authors do have real affection for Mikhail Bakhtin (whom Mr. Morson has frequently written about), perhaps because his philosophy of literature led to conclusions about the importance of dialogue that agree with their own.

A Cold War aroma wafts from some of the book’s passages about contemporary leftism. Soviet totalitarianism was their generation’s great example of ruthless intolerance, and the authors can’t help but raise the specter of the Red Menace in regard to Bernie Sanders’s calls for higher taxes on the wealthy and for universal healthcare. Since Bernie went to the Soviet Union in 1988, they have their suspicions. They don’t mention his time on a kibbutz, I suppose, because they are less threatened by that kind of socialism. 

“Minds Wide Shut” is as critical of market fundamentalists as it is of those seeking moral purity through political progressivism. We need some skepticism both about central planning and about the fairness of markets, the authors argue, but not too much skepticism. Messrs. Morson and Schapiro astutely criticize the “missionary nihilism” of those who believe that, since we have no certainty, we have no ability to make better or worse judgments. For their part, they reach back to the philosopher Stephen Toulmin’s practice of reasoning through cases, building judgment through the consideration of how we learn from particular examples. Such reasoning promotes intellectual humility, since no theory will account for all the contingencies one might encounter.

Liberal education has been under fire in the United States since the founding of the republic. Some have objected to it as providing a luxury experience rather than a means of instilling the skills really needed by the young. Others have complained that the independent thinking it encourages undermines tradition, belief and loyalty. Defenses of liberal education have evolved over the years, but the ones offered here are fairly traditional, with frequent citation of Tolstoy, George Eliot and Adam Smith, but these touchstones matter less than the common-sense reminders to “keep the conversation going.”

Although these authors might reject the company of a postmodernist like Richard Rorty, their positions evoke his model of knowledge and inquiry. Rorty knew there was no theory or foundation for establishing academic disciplines or modes of discussion, and his pragmatist practice of philosophy-as-conversation warned against trying to tie moral, aesthetic and scientific views together in a neat package. To echo Rorty’s terms: Respect for contingency and irony makes for better students and teachers, and appreciation for solidarity makes for a better community. Messrs. Morson and Schapiro are surely right to point out that in recent years we have instead seen new fundamentalisms generate solidarity through distrust, disinformation and angry resentment. Their book reminds us that we need to aspire to create communities open to learning, to conversation and to recognizing one’s own errors. That’s what we want, after all, from our campuses and from our democracy.

—Mr. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University. His latest book is “Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses”