So there definitely is a culture war. It doesn’t take much reading through academic literature and the press to see that discussions of reason and revelation, faith and science, social freedoms, public morality, and sexual identity all attract attention and all cut to the deepest convictions and principles of American society. And it doesn’t take long to see that America is unsettled on those convictions and principles. The problem is that this culture war is often pretty mixed up, with participants shooting themselves in the foot as often as anything else.
They say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. This is true. People learn a couple of talking points and a few intellectual formulas, and suddenly they think they have profound weaponry for social regeneration. One example is a billboard on Interstate 55 here in Jackson. It’s advertising a school which, I’m told, actually does do a good job at placing students into colleges and preparing them for high-paying jobs. Still, the sign’s faux intellectualism is unnerving. It advertises that the school will “Teach you how to think, not what to think.” Now that certainly sounds pious. This school, unique among all others, will avoid brainwashing its students with socio-political bias and will instead impart to them a view-from-nowhere objectivity that will allow these students to discover the best world and life for each of them, as they freely realize it on their own, with no intrusion from the principalities and powers.
Obviously that’s ridiculous. Continue reading
Wedgewords 