It took crossing both oceans, a comprehensive study of the history of religion and government, and four years of college to change my perspective. As someone who moved from one extreme to the other, I can tell you the one thing that saved me was the conservative impulse to be self critical, to avoid hubris and arrogance. The other was my parents teaching me to love science.
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This is precisely why some parents fear college or claim colleges are leftwing propaganda factories for their children: minds get changed. All institutions have areas of political bias but the university more often than not lives up to the goal of academia to teach an accurate history of the life of the mind in all its explorations and journeys to understand the world around us. Science has done a better job than other departments because in science and math, there are accepted tests for what is shown to be so and not shown to be so. This is more problematical in the humanities. Indeed, one of the reasons I love teaching screenwriting, and much prefer it to teaching playwriting or fiction, is that there is an area in which it's clear what "wrong" means. It's like teaching sonnet writing. If you turn in 15 lines, it's not a sonnet.
This country retains its long love affair with anti-intellectualism, and that's just too bad. Maybe it comes from our roots and the importance of frontiersmen, those who could do labor being more important than those who could think clearly. But we used also to have a tradition of the marriage of both, the blue collar intellectual, the longshoreman as philosopher, and this seems to have been lost as we became more specialized. And once you define the news media as entertainment, you commit yourself to playing to the lowest common denominator.
I really do want Palin to run for president. I want to learn how many votes she'll actually get. As depressing as this may prove to be, I want to know.
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