HOW WE READ
Robert Meyers

It has been proved repeatedly that a person is less likely to remember a fact that conflicts with his belief system than to remember one that supports it. Two professors once compared five college students who had Communist sympathies with five equally bright anti-Communists. Each student read a violently anti-Communist selection and wrote down all he could remember of it. The procedure was repeated with a selection that was strongly pro-Communist. (Some students read the pro-Communist selection first, to balance the effects of order of reading).

On three successive weeks, the students reread the passages and were immediately tested. During the next five weeks tests were given to measure their degree of “recall.”

The results? The anti-Communist group learned the anti-Communist ideas more rapidly and remembered them longer. The pro-Communists also remembered best the selections they wanted to believe. So it is that people hold on to the facts that fit their basic idea of what is true and reasonable, and are little perturbed by facts that do not fit.

We actually do not “see” information we do not “want” to see. Our prejudices act as a kind of unconscious filter. As a professor teaching university courses in the Bible I am constantly amazed at the things I find in that library. Even though I read certain passages over many times through the years, I read with a certain mental “set,” a kind of pre-conditioned mind. The material I sought, or needed, leapt out at me as if it were in boldface type. Material that was useless to me, or might have caused me to question my belief system, receded and became invisible.

It is necessary that we remember this if we are going to have proper sympathy for people who do not “see” what seems to us to be right under their noses. (“Plain as the nose on their face,” the preachers of my boyhood liked to say). Their physical eyes see, but their minds do not register. They are benefitting from a built-in protective system which lets ,us admit only the useful and previously approved.

Since there is no time or condition of life to which this rule does not apply, all of us must provide our own safeguards against this hazard. And the best safeguard I know is to talk often with, and listen sympathetically to, people who have quite different approaches from our own. The experience of trying to “see” with their eyes can be illuminating, indeed, and may save us from being held captive forever by the biases we have already formed.

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I have an old friend who is working on a biography of Elder William Brewster, an early Congregationalist. Not long ago my friend sent a quotation he thought would interest anyone who had grown up, like me, in the Church of Christ.

To set the stage I need to tell you that he had just finished a chapter dealing with the advent of Puritanism in the villages around Scrooby, England. The man who brought that reforming zeal in the mid-1590’s was one Richard Clyfton, who had obtained the “living” of a church in Babworth, a little hamlet eight miles south of Scrooby. The following description of Clyfton’s zeal will serve to remind heirs of the Restoration movement that nearly three centuries earlier there were people who linked statues, organs and clerical garments as devices of the Devil:

“Not content with words alone, Clyfton proceeded to exemplify his ‘forward’ beliefs by ridding the church of statues of the saints, carting away the organ, teaching his congregation to ‘catch the tune’ from a ‘singing voice,’ and appearing in the pulpit dressed in an ordinary layman in ruff, jerkin, doublet and breeches, rather than in vestments.”

“I wonder,” my friend wrote, “if good old Alexander knew that?”

I’ll bet he did!

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SOLEMNITY is occasionally beautiful and appropriate but far more often an affectation. We are ill at ease, and so we act solemn. Or we want to convince others that what we are about to do is more serious than anything they have yet met, so we act solemn. Sometimes we want to fill our pocketbooks and we think the best way to do it in a given circumstance is by convincing customers of our absolute and unvarying seriousness, so we act solemn.

When I was in Abilene Christian College, a friend and I used to smile at what we considered the incredible SEE-E-E-E-RIOUSNESS of some of the preacher boys. They never unbent. With solemn faces and black bibles under their arms, and with broom stickily erect postures, they strolled magisterially about the campus. We thought they needed to be twitted, for the sake of their health, and so we gave ourselves joyously to this enterprise. It did not make us popular, but (I am happy to report) it did unbend some of them.

Ever since I have been wary of eternally solemn folk. They frighten me as lean and hungry Cassius frightened Caesar. I would not have such men about me, for I do not understand them and I invariably provoke them by twitting them at the wrong moment.

This being true, you can understand my delight when I was reminded the other day of that French wit who defined solemnity as “a mysterious carriage of the body to cover defects ‘of the mind.” He must have been spiritual kin to Mark Twain, who thought that a hearty laugh could explode more nonsense in this world than all the dynamite in all the warehouses.

So laugh, brother, laugh! And especially when you hear solemn nonsense. —338 Fairway, Wichita, KS 67212