From: ibshambat@gmail.com

When I was a student at the University of Virginia, American conservative columnist George Will came to give a speech. One of his statements was that the past is a usable past. That is most certainly the case. I have intensely studied history, and I've
learned a lot from it. I cannot guarantee that I will not make my own mistakes, but I am most certainly determined not to repeat the mistakes of the people who came before me.

There are people who want to disregard cliches; but there is a reason why cliches become cliches, and it is not that they are untrue. There are people who want to see conservatives or fundamentalists or Americans as such as stupid, but you don't rise to
the leadership of the world by being stupid. Similarly there are people who claim that Americans are wealthy imperialists, but Americans were not born wealthy or rulers of the world. They had to work hard at it, and not only work hard but also work smart.
And they did it in a much more humane manner than say Spain or England, which got their wealth to a large extend by conquering and enslaving other populations.

We also hear the claim that beaten paths are for beaten people. Why are the paths beaten? Because they work. Whether or not you are yourself a beaten person, I have found out, after attempting to the contrary, that beaten paths cannot be dismissed. I am
most certainly happy to be a pioneer, and I have come up with a number of useful ideas that, to the best of my knowledge, are original. However I found out that there is a merit also to the work of the people who came before me.

Vladimir Vysotsky, the Soviet Union's most popular songwriter, wrote a song about how he got into a path and kept riding along in that path until the path ended, at which point he had to make his own addition to the path. He said at the end of the song
that the path was only his. Well no, it was not only his. There were other people who came before him, and he extended the path. This is how the situation is supposed to work.

Many people are bored with their upbringing or see wrong things in it, so they then want to do other ways of doing things. Sometimes there is a legitimate reason for this. Many Americans are bored with or find objectionable the stress on money and are
interested in Russian culture, and many Russians are bored with Russian culture and want to go to America and make money. In many cases going to other places for what the home lacks improves the home. America is improved by bringing into itself Japanese
cars, Mexican food and Russian ballet. Russia is improved by bringing into itself American ideas on how to do business and politics. It is completely rightful to explore other ways than one's own and see how they can be useful in improving one's ways.
However it is not valid to deny matters on which the way in which one has been raised is right. And – especially in case of America – there are many things that are right with it.

In relationships, novelty can be a source of excitement and of introduction of worthwhile things to which one has not been exposed. However it will also expose the person to whatever is wrong with the other culture as well as to value conflicts with her
upbringing. I know a woman from Kansas who married a Native American man and wound up with 40 stitches in her skull. I know a woman from a royalty-descended government family who married a self-made Reagan conservative, and he would come at her with
fists if he found a speck of dust on the floor. I know an American man who married a young Russian woman and got used and abused. One frequent scenario is that the person goes for someone from another world and is horrified at the differences in values
and attitudes. We will see a battle between the desire for novelty and ingrained values. That will likely result in conflict. To deal with such conflicts it will be necessary to understand the other's perspective. However doing so may also lead to
negative attitudes toward the other person, as their perspective would clash with one's own. Resolving such differences requires lots of intelligence and effort, and many people are not going to put in that effort. And many of those who do will end up
recognizing, as they examine both their own attitudes and those of the other person, that there are things of merit in their own background that the other person's background lacks. At which point their attitude toward their own background will improve.
The person will become more appreciative of what she has been given. That does not mean that she will go back to mindlessly agreeing with everything. She will however be more likely to have respect for what she has been raised with and see matters on
which her upbringing was right.

A claim made by many liberals about conservatives is that they have a closed mind. Open mind is something that you want to have in order to learn new things. For getting things done, such a thing may be experienced as disruptive. Open mindedness is good
at a university. In a family, it may not be such a good thing, as it may expose the child to influences that confuse or harm the child or interfere with the child's development. It may prevent the development of a stable identity or undermine the
structures that the child needs in order to grow. Some influences can be appealing to the child but be very wrong. If a child is exposed to, say, Communism or chaos magic, that could be appealing to the child but take the child down a wrongful path. So
it becomes understandable why many people would favor open-mindedness when they are students but choose closed-mindedness when they are parents. The two tasks require completely different approaches. And the same person may very well go both ways at
different times in their life.


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