You don't really expect to learn anything useful your first day of a lecture hall at a large university. You expect to find teenagers nursing hangovers from the back to school parties, struggling to stay awake. You expect to find a professor going through the motions of teaching material you should have learned in high school, and sometimes going off on tangents that leave your notes a jumbled mess of question marks and doodles. You expect to hear a run down of the syllabus, with dire warnings attached to all of the expectations.
But nineteen years ago, I was sitting in the back rows, straining to see the chalkboard, on which the professor had scrawled in all caps:
ALL HISTORIANS ARE LIARS
He then proceeded to explain the careful process of selection that even the most academic treatment of a topic must go through. You can try to tell the whole story, but you must select the facts you find most relevant. The details you leave out (or possibly ignore for any number of reasons) may very well be used by someone else to tell a completely different story.
It left an impression. Our brains are giant propaganda machines that filter the things we read and the words we hear so they line up with our core beliefs. Sometimes we embrace things that we shouldn't, because they don't hold up to careful scrutiny. Sometimes we fail to recognize the importance of things that we should be considering, because doing so would force us to face the ridicule of people we admire and respect.
I think it's fairly common for people to experience the cognitive dissonance of loving someone whose religious or political beliefs are in polar opposition to our own. Marriages fail, mothers and fathers disown their adolescent and adult children, and sometimes entire communities go on modern day witch hunts. It's tragic that friends and family can and do stop loving each other over these differences, and start seeing each other through a lens of distrust or outright disgust.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not talking about the solution to world peace here. I'm not suggesting that members of the NAACP should get together with Klan leaders around a campfire and join hands. Some things are worth taking an uncompromising stand on, and I'll probably be talking a lot about those sorts of topics, because they matter to me.
If you disagree with me, though, I'm open to your criticism. It's happened before, and I can think of several times in my life when someone shattered my illusions about some core convictions I held. They pointed out where I was simply wrong, and I'm a better person today because of it. I'm grateful to them, and if I have a chance to be one of those people simply because I have words tumbling inside of my head that need to be released, I'm grateful for that, too.
We hold our truths to be self evident, but sometimes they aren't. Obviously, or everyone would agree with us. So this is a blog about that. Hope you enjoy.
