Picture yourself in a generic social science course held in a typical college classroom...way too much beige, sticky laminated chair-desks haphazardly angled towards the plywood lectern, an obsolete overhead projector hulking in the corner, and a friendly old teacher at the helm...perhaps also growing more obsolescent by the semester.  It looks and feels like another routine day in Whatever 101.  But the instructor asks the students to close their iPads, put away any vestigial books that may remain in their possession, and shut down the incessant texting for fifty minutes, assuming western civilization can tolerate such an absence of real-time communication, and pay some serious attention to his lesson plan.

Picture yourself in a generic social science course held in a typical college classroom...way too much beige, sticky laminated chair-desks haphazardly angled towards the plywood lectern, an obsolete overhead projector hulking in the corner, and a friendly old teacher at the helm...perhaps also growing more obsolescent by the semester.  It looks and feels like another routine day in Whatever 101.  But the instructor asks the students to close their iPads, put away any vestigial books that may remain in their possession, and shut down the incessant texting for fifty minutes, assuming western civilization can tolerate such an absence of real-time communication, and pay some serious attention to his lesson plan.  For the subject this day is stereotyping.  The professor, distressed by the widening divisions cleaving the nation into bitter camps unable to speak rationally to each other, sets up the underlying premise for the discussion:  the danger of jumping to conclusions.

Here is how it develops:

The prof asks each student to conjure up a mental image of two real personalities...both of whom have names familiar to everyone in the classroom.  The teacher has studied the two biographies and taken some notes on each  on a yellow legal pad.  He asks which of these people about to be thumbnailed could potentially be a good neighbor or good friend, and to ponder the likely political views each would have cultivated.

The first one, code-named Mr. Ride for the sake of the discussion, sounds like a rebel without a cause.  The teacher reads from his scrawled list of factual attributes of this man.  “Likes black leather, rode a motorcycle in many parts of North America, thinks God is a contrived hallucination of mankind, has never had any smidgeon of religion, loner in high school, plays basketball, watches TV most of the time, always cuts his own hair, pledged the animal house fraternity, never bought a house on his own, avoided military service like the plague, protested against Vietnam and Iraq wars, never bought a stock or bond, digs raunchy rock and roll, lived in a slum apartment with the first band that tested out Woodstock before the festival; inlaws included longshoremen, cops and bookies; now lives in the woods in an obscure town that has no stores or traffic lights; was unemployed for years, now earning a thousand a month in an entry-level job; mired deeply in debt, sleeps with his dogs, drives an old American SUV, lifetime reader of Mad magazine..and that was just a partial litany of his bio.

The prof pauses for a moment and eagerly the class rips into their imagined version of Mr. Ride with passion, reviling him as a deadbeat, a heathen, a Godless loser, a slovenly hippie, a leech on society, a stoner, a felon, a creep, a misanthrope, and a hood.  They assert he could never become a friend of theirs and they wouldn’t want him anywhere near their neighborhood.  They bet such a guy would never bother to vote, but would probably be a Democrat or a clueless greeny Naderite if he did.

The second biography, the so-called Jay Kool, sounds like another extreme personification of the American Dream:  Born into a fine family, father helped desegregate Nashville schools peaceably in the fifties, athletic, played on two state championship teams, class valedictorian, attended an elite college, earned advanced university degree, pursued professional careers in academia and business, married in the Alps to a vivacious head cheerleader, lives on a landscaped rural estate, works in a financial services firm located in a major metropolis, drives a world class luxury European SUV, skied Alta and Sugarbush and Stowe, believes Jesus was a phenomenal teacher, toured Europe in a Porsche and the US in a classic Stingray, plays aggressive tennis singles, reads books about the WW II in the Pacific and Europe, scans Forbes and Financial Advisor, teetotaler and vehemently anti-drug, traveled to Europe, retired from his primary profession in his mid-fifties, listens to the great operatic arias, dabbles in nature photography, raised children who are becoming successful professionals in the creative arts and business world, etc.

Once again, there is a pause for the class to play along with this mind game and lay into this hopelessly constricted stereotype, as they excoriate him for being such an oppressive goody-goody-two-shoes caricature of a real man, a painfully proper boor, an over-achiever, a collector of status symbols, and probably a tedious, cookie-cutter, pompous, bogusly religious, self-absorbed, rich Republican snob.   Some wag says that although he could never be a friend of such a self-conscious wannabe perfectionist, it would be fun to live nearby because it would be a nicer neighborhood than the slums where Mr. Ride supposedly liked to hang out.

Now thoroughly but pleasantly exhausted by all this venting, the class turns curious about the real identity of these two people.  They start throwing out names, hoping to strike it rich, for the prof has brought in some tempting CD’s as rewards for the winner of this exercise.  One brave student raises her hand and suggests, “Charles Manson is Mr. Ride!”  Another asserts decisively,  “Jay Kool must surely be Mitt Romney.”  From a guy in the back row,  “Henry Winkler!”  From a girl in the front row,  “Karl Rove!”  Soon there are cries of “Bernie Madoff!”  “Al Gore!”  “Donald Trump!”  “Bill Gates!”  “Rush Limbaugh!”  “Tim McVeigh!”  “Al Sharpton!”  “Steve Jobs!”  The names begin to fly fast and furious from the worlds of politics, pop culture, sports, psychotic criminality, and the sciences.  There is no limit to the savagery of the lambasting of these two possibly disfunctional people.    One thing is for sure, the students could not imagine the two men getting along with one another.  It would be a bloodbath, they say, and “Mr. Ride would pummel that prissy pantywaist senseless with a tire iron!”  ...”No way!”, someone else retorts, “Jay would have that pathetic misanthrope arrested by his hired goons and thrown off his estate in a heartbeat.”

But the professor tells them they are way off in their blind and illogical stabs at the truth.  He pokes gentle fun at the prejudice and turmoil displayed before him.

Then a pensive young woman who had been quietly contemplative but tuned in during the raucous vilification of these disparate personalities raises her hand, rises slowly, and with her assured voice, takes full command of the classroom:

“I think I’ve got it!  We have just been scammed!  We have seen two half truths before us and we added them together into one massive two-headed lie, skewed by our biases and our crazy spins and narrowminded stereotyping...entrapped by the wiles of our prof.  We are no better than the polarizing false pundits on the disreputable news networks who are ripping our society down the middle with their distortions, made-up facts, and selective exploitation of our fears and hatreds!  I don’t know who it is, but the two people must actually be just one!”

Her classmates are in awe of at this breakthrough that only a few had surely suspected b ut summarily dismissed, taking in the power of her common sense.  They realize in a flash of neurons that anyone can take the totality of a life, with fragments of reality broken out of context, and sort it into two or more parallel but apparently antithetical personalities.

Finally the epiphany spreads, prompted by an English major who says, “Oh yeah!  You are right, we have been listening to the biography of Dr. Jay Kool and Mr. Ride! Get it?”  He repeats the names emphatically and way too obviously to get the point through to his few classmates who are unfamiliar with the classic Robert Louis Stephenson thiller of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the quintessential tale of a personality split into good and evil.  “We should have seen it from the start...we were being fed morsels of truth today, but no coherent story!  So our brains, always seeking to force some higher order onto the chaos, individually and collectively, took the scant evidence and sculpted what we thought to be distinct characters out of the kaleidoscopic sparkles of disconnected truths.  Jay Kool ‘n’ Mr. Ride are indeed the same person!  But who it is, I have no clue!”

The professor, proud of the insight of his young and idealistic class, smiled while  thumbing through the CD’s for a reward to the two students who had solved most of the riddle.   A few students still called out names that might hit the jackpot, but no one really could figure out the ultimate enigma.

The seasoned instructor dragged it out dramatically, leading the befuddled students to explore the depths of their bafflement.  Contradictions and inconsistencies between the two biographies were discussed and explained away by the class full of budding young sleuths.  They scolded themselves for being so willing to classify and condemn; they cringed at how breathless they were in leaping to unfounded conclusions on partial knowledge;  they were disappointed in themselves for being victimized by the same repulsive spin machine and black and white dichotomies they decry in America’s public discourse.  They should have known that the world and its actors are a thousand shades of gray, with seven billion hues stirred in.  The students had found themselves to be unknowing captives of the obsessive cult of personality, the power of superficial imagery, the easy lure of shorthand depictions of achievement and illusions of apparent success, the reduction of the complexities of multi-dimensional personalities and myriad experiences into a caricature of the core of a man’s essential existence.

The hour was drawing to a close, the class was energized by the power of the emotional coaster they had just ridden, but the riddle was still before them.  One particularly animated student raised the ultimate question that was still on everyone’s mind:  “Who is it, professor?  Stop torturing us!  How could anyone find out such obscure details about the life of this one person whom we all must know?  You must tell us who this guy is before we have to split for lunch!  ...Wait!  I think I know who it is!”  Beckoned to come forwrd, he whispered a name to the leader of this class on stereotyping.

The instructor, just a typical associate professor at a routine third-level state college in a small state, nodded in agreement and handed out the final CD to this eagerly insistent young scholar and then turned slowly to the blackboard to write the recognizable name for all to see of this mysteriously cloven personality:

In anticipation of the moment of revelation, total silence fell over the class for the first time. And then the professor slowly wrote his own name:

Roy Van Til