I've been trying to express that for years... how refreshing!
>From: Daniel Reeves <dreeves Æ umich.edu>
>To: improvetheworld Æ umich.edu
>CC: Nicole Poellet <poelnico Æ umich.edu>
>Subject: article on red-blue alliance
>Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 21:08:14 -0500 (EST)
>
>Cam writes,
>
> > My goal here is to urge everyone to create a better world by trying
to
> > understand each other. In this case, it means researching the
other
> > side to the same extent we research our own vs. blindly pushing for
the
> > extreme right or left, while in reality hoping to end up with a
slightly
> > different definition of the middle.
>
>Here's an article in that spirit that I found interesting:
>
>http://www.techcentralstation.com/112904A.html
> [text of article follows]
>
>Faculty Clubs and Church Pews
> By William J. Stuntz
> Published 11/29/2004
>
>The past few months have seen a lot of talk about red and blue America,
>mostly by people on one side of the partisan divide who find the other
>side a mystery.
>
>It isn't a mystery to me, because I live on both sides. For the past
>twenty years, I've belonged to evangelical Protestant churches, the kind
>where George W. Bush rolled up huge majorities. And for the past eighteen
>years, I've worked in secular universities where one can hardly believe
>that Bush voters exist. Evangelical churches are red America at its
>reddest. And universities, especially the ones in New England (where I
>work now), are as blue as the bluest sky.
>
>Not surprisingly, each of these institutions is enemy territory to the
>other. But the enmity is needless. It may be a sign that I'm terminally
>weird, but I love them both, passionately. And I think that if my church
>friends and my university friends got to know each other, they'd find a
>lot to like and admire. More to the point, the representatives of each
>side would learn something important and useful from the other side.
These
>institutions may be red and blue now. But their natural color is purple.
>
>You wouldn't know it from talking to the people who populate universities
>or fill church pews.
>
>A lot of my church friends think universities represent the forces of
>darkness. Law schools -- my corner of the academic world -- are
>particularly suspect. A fellow singer in a church choir once asked me
what
>I did for a living. When I told her, she said, "A Christian lawyer? Isn't
>that sort of like being a Christian prostitute? I mean, you can't really
>do that, right?" She wasn't kidding. And if I had said no, you don't
>understand; I'm a law professor, not a lawyer, I'm pretty sure that would
>not have helped matters. ("Oh, so you train people to be prostitutes?")
>
>You hear the same kinds of comments running in the other direction. Some
>years ago a faculty colleague and I were talking about religion and
>politics, and this colleague said "You know, I think you're the first
>Christian I've ever met who isn't stupid." My professor friend wasn't
>kidding either. I've had other conversations like these -- albeit usually
>a little more tactful -- on both sides, a dozen times over the years.
>Maybe two dozen. People in each of these two worlds find the other
>frightening, and appalling.
>
>All of us are appalling, I suppose, but these reactions are mostly due to
>ignorance. Most of my Christian friends have no clue what goes on in
>faculty clubs. And my colleagues in faculty offices cannot imagine what
>happens in those evangelical churches on Sunday morning.
>
>In both cases, the truth is surprisingly attractive. And surprisingly
>similar: Churches and universities are the two twenty-first century
>American enterprises that care most about ideas, about language, and
about
>understanding the world we live in, with all its beauty and ugliness.
>Nearly all older universities were founded as schools of theology: a
>telling fact. Another one is this: A large part of what goes on in those
>church buildings that dot the countryside is education -- people reading
>hard texts, and trying to sort out what they mean.
>
>Another similarity is less obvious but no less important. Ours is an
>individualist culture; people rarely put their community's welfare ahead
>of their own. It isn't so rare in churches and universities. Churches are
>mostly run by volunteer labor (not to mention volunteered money): those
>who tend nurseries and teach Sunday School classes get nothing but a pat
>on the back for their labor. Not unlike the professors who staff
important
>faculty committees. An economist friend once told me that economics
>departments are ungovernable, because economists understand the reward
>structure that drives universities: professors who do thankless
>institutional tasks competently must do more such tasks. Yet the trains
>run more or less on time -- maybe historians are running the economics
>departments -- because enough faculty attach enough importance to the
>welfare of their colleagues and students. Selfishness and exploitation
are
>of course common too, in universities and churches as everywhere else.
But
>one sees a good deal of day-to-day altruism, which is not common
>everywhere else.
>
>And each side of this divide has something to teach the other.
>Evangelicals would benefit greatly from the love of argument that
pervades
>universities. The "scandal of the evangelical mind" -- the title of a
>wonderful book by evangelical author and professor Mark Noll -- isn't
that
>evangelicals aren't smart or don't love ideas. They are, and they do. No,
>the real scandal is the lack of tough, hard questioning to test those
>ideas. Christians believe in a God-Man who called himself (among other
>things) "the Truth." Truth-seeking, testing beliefs with tough-minded
>questions and arguments, is a deeply Christian enterprise. Evangelical
>churches should be swimming in it. Too few are.
>
>For their part, universities would be better, richer places if they had
an
>infusion of the humility that one finds in those churches. Too often, the
>world of top universities is defined by its arrogance: the style of
>argument is more "it's plainly true that" than "I wonder whether." We
like
>to test our ideas, but once they've passed the relevant academic hurdles
>(the bar is lower than we like to think), we talk and act as though those
>ideas are not just right but obviously right -- only a fool or a bigot
>could think otherwise.
>
>The atmosphere I've found in the churches to which my family and I have
>belonged is very different. Evangelicals like "testimonies"; it's common
>for talks to Christian groups to begin with a little autobiography, as
the
>speaker describes the path he has traveled on his road to faith.
Somewhere
>in the course of that testimony, the speaker always talks about what a
>mess he is: how many things he has gotten wrong, why the people sitting
in
>the chairs should really be teaching him, not the other way around. This
>isn't a pose; the evangelicals I know really do believe that they -- we
>(I'm in this camp too) -- are half-blind fools, stumbling our way toward
>truth, regularly falling off the right path and, by God's grace, picking
>ourselves up and trying to get back on. But while humility is more a
>virtue than a tactic, it turns out to be a pretty good tactic. Ideas and
>arguments go down a lot easier when accompanied by the admission that the
>speaker might, after all, be wrong.
>
>That gets to an aspect of evangelical culture that the mainstream press
>has never understood: the combination of strong faith commitments with
>uncertainty, the awareness that I don't know everything, that I have a
lot
>more to learn than to teach. Belief that a good God has a plan does not
>imply knowledge of the plan's details. Judging from the lives and
>conversations of my Christian friends, faith in that God does not tend to
>produce a belief in one's infallibility. More the opposite: Christians
>believe we see "through a glass, darkly" when we see at all -- and that
>we're constantly tempted to imagine ourselves as better and smarter than
>we really are. If that sensibility were a little more common in
>universities, faculty meetings would be a lot more pleasant. And it
should
>be more common: Academics know better than anyone just how vast is the
>pool of human knowledge, and how little of it any of us can grasp.
Talking
>humbly should be second nature.
>
>There is even a measure of political common ground. True, university
>faculties are heavily Democratic, and evangelical churches are thick with
>Republicans. But that red-blue polarization is mostly a consequence of
>which issues are on the table -- and which ones aren't. Change the issue
>menu, and those electoral maps may look very different. Imagine a
>presidential campaign in which the two candidates seriously debated how a
>loving society should treat its poorest members. Helping the poor is
>supposed to be the left's central commitment, going back to the days of
>FDR and the New Deal. In practice, the commitment has all but disappeared
>from national politics. Judging by the speeches of liberal Democratic
>politicians, what poor people need most is free abortions. Anti-poverty
>programs tend to help middle-class government employees; the poor end up
>with a few scraps from the table. Teachers' unions have a stranglehold on
>failed urban school systems, even though fixing those schools would be
the
>best anti-poverty program imaginable.
>
>I don't think my liberal Democratic professor friends like this state of
>affairs. And -- here's a news flash -- neither do most evangelicals, who
>regard helping the poor as both a passion and a spiritual obligation, not
>just a political preference. (This may be even more true of theologically
>conservative Catholics.) These men and women vote Republican not because
>they like the party's policy toward poverty -- cut taxes and hope for the
>best -- but because poverty isn't on the table anymore. In evangelical
>churches, elections are mostly about abortion. Neither party seems much
>concerned with giving a hand to those who most need it.
>
>That could change. I can't prove it, but I think there is a large, latent
>pro-redistribution evangelical vote, ready to get behind the first
>politician to tap into it. (Barack Obama, are you listening?) If liberal
>Democratic academics believe the things they say they believe -- and I
>think they do -- there is an alliance here just waiting to happen.
>
>Humility, love of serious ideas, commitment to helping the poor -- these
>are things my faculty friends and my church friends ought to be able to
>get together on. If they ever do, look out: American politics, and maybe
>American life, will be turned upside down. And all those politicians who
>can only speak in one color will be out of a job.
>
>I can hardly wait.
>
>William J. Stuntz is a Professor at Harvard Law School.
>
>
>--
>http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves - - google://"Daniel Reeves"
>
>Q. How do you tell an extrovert computer scientist?
>A. When they talk to you they look at your shoes rather than their own.
>
>
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