“Closed thoughts and an open face” - Sir Henry Wootton.
“What You Can’t Say” is an essay that talks about Heresy. Not the religious type, but the more general society heresy.

When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don’t know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite. Remember, it’s the nature of fashion to be invisible. It wouldn’t work otherwise. Fashion doesn’t seem like fashion to someone in the grip of it. It just seems like the right thing to do. It’s only by looking from a distance that we see oscillations in people’s idea of the right thing to do, and can identify them as fashions.

As soon as I hear anyone say they are open-minded, I know that they aren’t. If you truly are open-minded, you just don’t care. It would never occur to you to advertise the fact. More wisdom on human nature:

Changes between the past and the present sometimes do represent progress. In a field like physics, if we disagree with past generations it’s because we’re right and they’re wrong. But this becomes rapidly less true as you move away from the certainty of the hard sciences. By the time you get to social questions, many changes are just fashion. The age of consent fluctuates like hemlines.
We may imagine that we are a great deal smarter and more virtuous than past generations, but the more history you read, the less likely this seems. People in past times were much like us. Not heroes, not barbarians. Whatever their ideas were, they were ideas reasonable people could believe.

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