"I'm the Most Open Minded Person You'll Ever Meet"

That's an assertion that just makes me shudder.  It almost certainly will precede a statement that will be delivered with doctrine-like authority.  The corollary is equally unpleasant.  And that is that any opinion or argument offered on point of fact that is in opposition will be derided as close minded.  I love irony.  This however is the construct that defines the limits of my love in this area. 

I first started noticing this phenomenon in college.  Professors that defined themselves as open minded, I found to be universally of the opposite temper.  What they meant by open minded was that people shouldn't be close minded by holding firm opinions that were contrary to their enlightened ones.  They should instead shed those and have opinions like theirs.  They held this as the true definition of open minded.

The truly open minded people I've met have never, and I use that word with intention, defined themselves as open minded.  Back to college again, I did have one open minded professor that I can identify as such.  In class I challenged him on a point of fact.  I even remember the fact:  the authorship of dialectic materialism.  He asserted Hegel.  I asserted Plekhanov.  He informed me that he'd look it up that evening.  I had no expectation whatsoever that he'd actually do what he said.  (I was an upperclassman at this point and my cynicism of all things professorial was in full swing.)  He asked me for my source.  I gave it to him (The Oxford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).  

Turns out he did look it up and he was wrong and I was right.  Not only did he look it up however, he also apologized to me in front of the class for insisting he was right...up to the point of offering me a formal apology...did I mention in front of everybody?  I accepted, once I could restart my heart and resume breathing. 

It's interesting to me that I remember so much detail of this event.  I've read a couple multi-volume histories and encyclopedias of Western Thought.  Most of it now is a bit of blur, only coming into focus when a specific issue presents itself and then usually only enough to send me off to the internet to flesh out to some small degree what I used to command in great detail. 

That story contains the unspoken, indivisible and essential ingredient of what I, in a close minded way, hold to be the key to true open mindedness.  That key is this: humility.  Specifically, the kind of humility that allows you to entertain the possibility that you might be wrong. 

Note that it does not follow that  someone striving after humility might very much believe that they are right.  That's OK, as long as it does not remove them from allowing for the possibility of their own error. 
 
There are a lot of things that masquerade as open mindedness.  Here's a few picked at random in no particular order of irritation:

1. Changing your mind.  Changing from one opinion to a different one, even an opposite one, does not make you open minded.  It merely changes the polarity of your close mindedness.
2. Steadfastly holding different opinions than your parents.  This is very similar to 1.  The main difference is that in this case the initial position was formed by someone else.  Other that that, no difference.
3. Embracing social norms.  The keyword here is "embrace."  It's fine and proper to include things from the canon of social norm in your belief and value set.  However, I think that the individual tenet in question should stand on its own merit without appeal to the approval of Everyman.  Going with the crowd only promises that you'll get where the crowd is going and that's not necessarily where you want to be. 
4. Contrary is not the same thing as open minded.  It's reflexively argumentative and ego driven but it's not open minded...and it's so easy to identify as a caricature of what it aspires to be that it's painful to watch.

One last thing.  I Corinthians 13, the love chapter, lists humility as one of the attributes of love.  My agreement with this idea is something else I'm close minded about.  Anything that disguises itself as open mindedness or humility but shouts down the other side with an avalanche of  "everybody knows," eye rolling or "I know more than thou," is I think the very definition of clashing cymbals and clanging bells.