Reading to Learn Vs. Reading to Confirm What We Think We Already "Know"

The quote cited below not only applies to our approach to reading, but also to our listening and interacting with other people, and prompts us to ponder honestly whether we: 

Tend to think the worst of someone first, "confirming" our biased conclusions? 

Only surround ourselves with like-minded individuals, and expose ourselves only to like-minded journalism and social media so as to never feel challenged or perhaps threatened in the way we've always assumed things? 

Take the time to seek out original sources and scholarship based on the study of original sources, or curtly begin and end with what is easy, sounds good, or allows us to continue on feeling justified in how we have always lived and thought, or want to continue to live and think?

And finally, whether we, when all of the above is said and done, only read-into our material or person we are listening to our own stubborn "yeah butts," self-protective biases or excuse that "it just doesn't make sense" when in reality we are just lazy to do the muscular work of exploring an idea further so as to understand it.

To me, the question then becomes, "why interact with life at all if we've already made up our minds about it?"



E.D. Hirsch, Jr. writes, 


"It is pointed out that the main reason for studying texts, particularly, old ones, is to expand the mind by introducing it to the immense possibilities in human actions and thoughts--to see and feel what other men have seen and felt, to know what they have known. Furthermore, none of these expansive benefits comes to the man who simply discovers his own meanings in someone else's text and who, instead of encountering another person, merely encounters himself. When a reader does that, he finds only his own preconceptions, and these he did not need to go out and seek."
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation, pp. 25-26.




copyright Barb Harwood