An education in the liberal arts is ridiculously simplified.

I came to Bates College from the third-poorest county in the United States. While I had some ideas and values, I was voluntarily open to new ones. Several years removed from graduating from Bates, I realize I was never as intelligent as I was the day before I left home at 17 years old.

I abhorred racism in any form. I still do. I thought women and their basic rights had been historically abused. Coming from a racially diverse region, I had seen a large amount of racism of both the gutter and the sophisticated variety. That said, I believed we all had the right to breathe the same air, were entitled to live a life free from ridicule, and that race and gender should never be a barrier to happiness and productivity. I believed that environmental conditions were subservient to the power and motivation of the individual. I had the right idea.

I came to Bates and took the gamut of liberal arts courses from history to political science to sociology to rhetoric. I absorbed ideas I had not known existed. I felt enlightenedand angry. I learned that there are dichotomies in society. I learned that there are haves and have-nots, majorities and minorities, men and women, rich and poor and that these social conditions were basically caused by singular entities. I learned that whites’ diseases and malevolence killed Native Americans, Europeans kidnapped Africans through a trade network that led to slavery for American blacks and that the US had “taken” over 50 percent of Mexico.

Moreover, I was confronted with being a man in a world politically and domestically dominated by men. I tried hard to undo any behavior of my own that could be attributed to “traditional” male behavior. I did this because I did not know then what I do believe now: opinions are not objective truth. I lost any notion that an individual can control their own destiny. I fully believed that the individual is a slave to the collective.

All the while I was developing subtle class arrogance. I knew what was right and unjust and if you did not agree then you must simply have internalized dominant ideas. What a terrible word academia has created; internalized.

If a black man wants to date a white woman, he must have internalized dominant opinions about beauty. If a young girl aspires to be a housewife, she has internalized ideas about what a woman should be. For all the left’s rhetoric about being open-minded, I found it had its own fascist peer pressure. I believed it was permissible to hold people up to verbal scorn as long as it landed within politically correct guidelines.

Then a funny thing happened. I graduated Bates and went home to the ghetto. I began to look more critically at the neighborhoods around me and, for the first time, began to notice that life breathes outside of history and texts. Removed from the privilege of Bates, I was reintroduced to the difficulty of making ends meet. I noticed people of all races were at undeclared war with one another. I noticed that many women enjoy the idea of traditional gender roles. What soapbox entitled me to claim anyone’s beliefs were shallow or unfounded?

Do I believe everything I learned in college was wrong? No.

Do I think it was ridiculously simplified and even counterproductive to social change? Yes, I do.

This society needs conflicting opinions. It is what makes democracy live and America grand.

I am not a moral relativist. I think there is a right and a wrong. Yet, I propose that all of us are entitled to travel our respective paths and develop our own politics. I no longer believe in sweeping generalizations or justifiable disdain toward a group because of history, circumstance or what happened an hour ago.

Although it is difficult to be the person I was when I was 17, that is exactly what I try to do. I have relearned that the truth is stratified and learned for the first time that resentment is a double-edged sword.

The best solution I have ever heard to social problems is Roger Ebert’s assertion, “That we must pity each other, and be gentle.”

Robert Edward Chavira, who graduated from Bates in 1999, is a finish carpenter living in Waterford.