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.