Sticking with Your Raising

A facebook friend suggested that he is intellectually radical, while having a conservative temperament, and he thought I might be the same. (His actual statement was more complex, but this will serve.) I wrote this in response about myself:

This is a complicated topic. I believe this society is badly effed up and needs a radical change, as in it needs to be torn out by the roots and remade. As the old union song says, "We can bring to birth a new world from the the ashes of the old." This is not a belief that I came to through reason. This is the way I was raised. I was also raised to challenge ideas about art, since my father hung out with avant garde artists, who were very interesting people. I grew up in a house of the future, and this is not a metaphor. So what does this make me? Radical or conservative? As far as temperment goes, I'd say I am timid, which is not the same as conservative. (Remember that I grew up in the Midwest in the McCarthy era, which was also the height of the Cold War. That does not lead to a lot of confidence, though it does lead to believing ordinary middle class American life is poised above an abyss, and you cannot trust the neighbors. No wonder I loved SF.)

If you are true to your raising, are you conservative, even if your rising is in many ways radical?