More from email with a professor.

To choose a discipline, to me, is like choosing a faith. It means you
have to see the world according to a particular set of rules. If you
see through those rules you are not seeing the whole picture. I'm not
naive enough to believe there is never a social lens. I know there is
always one. What I want, though, is to encourage in myself (and in
others, although it isn't really my place) the belief that taking the
impurities from all the lenses you can find and mixing them up makes
the best lens.

Not from some over-developed sense of multicultural political
correctness (did that one many years ago) nor from a belief that
everything is relative (did that one too) but from a belief that our
goal (the goal of humans) is to know more (so as to be more) and the
way to know more is through the generation, transmission and
evaluation of as much stuff as possible.