The role of a political columnist for a student paper is a curious one. The folks on The Sun opinion page have no news sources that you, the reader, do not. We are unlikely to be more insightful than all the political correspondents and public-minded citizens whose work is available via the internet. What advantage, then, does a student columnist have over any of a large number of capable bloggers and professional opinion journalists?

This left me somewhat at a loss in choosing a topic for my maiden column. Well, the obvious thing for a conservative to do was to look to the past for guidance. The Cornell Library has digitized a large number of back issues of The Sun, and has made them available online. Seeking inspiration, I looked through many of these back issues to see what student writers did in the past. In my browsing, I concentrated on the World War II period, since it has the best coverage in digital copies and holds significant personal interest for me. In addition, 60 years on, there is substantial consensus on the “right answers”: Hitler bad, Tojo bad, Churchill and Roosevelt good, America good, isolationism bad. Given this benefit of hindsight, we can assess how accurately Sun writers of the past understood their circumstances.

They didn’t do so well. On September 28, 1939, The Sun editorialized that students ought not ignore the war in Europe, even though “we all know that war is silly, a useless destruction of men and property.” They urged students to read British statements with a critical eye, to “bend over backwards” to be impartial towards Germany and to remember that “nothing is ever entirely in the wrong, and Germany is no exception.” The parallels to current rhetoric about Iran and terrorism are as obvious as they are disquieting.

War, however, is a great educator: the press of events made my predecessors in the press revise their opinions. A week before Pearl Harbor, on December 1, 1941, they editorialized that the war was “a struggle on the part of Britain and America to preserve such elements of decency as our civilization has built up,” and later in the week, again argued for American intervention. Even before Pearl Harbor, The Sun was ready to support the war.

What a contrast from the earlier view that war was “silly” and “useless destruction!” The rather naive views early in the war, were, of course, not peculiar to Sun editorialists; indeed, they seem to have been prevalent among Cornellians. In October 1939, The Sun conducted a poll of the student body, seeking their views on a number of questions related to the war in Europe, which had recently begun. Only a minority of students supported selling arms to Britain. Large minorities were opposed to war in all forms, with 37 percent saying they would not be willing to fight to defend American territories from invasion! Subsequent events seem to have changed student minds; when Hawaii, then a territory, was bombed, few Cornell students shirked the war.

These embarrassing views were not the result of bad character or ignorance or anything like that. The sentiments of Cornell students in 1939 were similar to those of students elsewhere and representative of the country as a whole. The conclusion I draw from the lackluster record of The Sun and the Cornell community is that it’s often hard to perceive political things correctly, and still harder to react correctly. As Humphrey Bogart says in The Maltese Falcon, “It’s not always easy to know what to do.” Sun columnists, then as now, are going to make mistakes and misunderstand. Don’t take us too seriously.

Given these formidable obstacles in the commentator’s path, what is the benefit of writing a column, when without a doubt I will provoke the smirks and condescension of readers in the future? More broadly, what is the purpose of student political action and discussion, given that it will usually have only limited effect on the world around us?

Most Cornell students assume implicitly that voting is a civic duty, even though one vote has essentially no chance of altering the result of an election. The act is worthwhile, even apart from its consequences. Similarly, trying to understand the world, including the political world, is worthwhile in itself and need not be justified by any direct effect on politics or by actually discovering the right answer. The fatalistic view that one student, one opinion, can’t make a difference is unwise. As any history professor would acknowledge, it’s hard enough to understand cause and effect after the fact; predicting all the future consequences of even as humble an act as participating in student politics is nigh impossible. One might say that I don’t know what I’ll achieve writing this column, but I’m sure I should try to achieve something.

Many academic departments would be out of business if success required them to find ultimate truth. Such disciplines as Philosophy, English and History all are predicated on the understanding that the search for truth has non-instrumental value. The academy has not given up on those subjects even though it is generally acknowledged that we will never have final answers to questions in the humanities. While it may be true that our political views today are wrong, we won’t ever have right answers unless we try to find them. Thinking and discussing are probably the best ways to sort out right and wrong conclusions, and this is where The Sun can make a contribution, shining, as it were, a light onto otherwise murky topics.

Ari Rabkin is a graduate student in Computer Science. He can be contacted at asr32@cornell.edu. Between the Lines appears Thursdays.