For new readers just tuning in: after outlining my goals for this blog in an introductory post and follow-up, and picking up again with another follow-up and an acknowledgment, I’m finally launching into the first post in what I hope will become a (brief) series, in which I intend to explore how I came to see the world the way I do, and address the question of whether and how my views have changed in recent years.
Rather than digress into a full autobiography that would unnecessarily bore my readers to sleep, I’m going to try to keep this focused on the details and experiences that seem to have been most influential in shaping my ideas and attitudes. There’s plenty of interesting stuff in the present and recent past that I want to get around to blogging about without much further delay, so I have motivation to keep this brief and stay on-topic. The way I envision the series now, I expect to get through it in about 5 or 6 posts. We’ll see how that goes.
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I grew up in Los Angeles (yes, people do do that in “L.A.”, to greater or lesser extent), spending the first 20 years of my life there during the 70s and 80s. For those interested in the math, that puts me in my mid-30s now — wondering, as I think we all do now and again, where the time could have gone.
The older of two children, I grew up in a family with both parents (a fortunate situation that an early awareness of elementary-school classmates with divorced parents led me to appreciate), together with a lively and dear extended family centered around a nearby aunt and uncle and their two daughters. Thanksgivings, Easters, and Christmases were invariably spent around the semi-improvised dining room table of one sister or the other, enjoying good company, good conversation, laughter and meals that had been a much appreciated, hours-long-in-the-making labor of love. Now that my aunt is no longer with us, I miss the gatherings we used to have in those days all the more.
One might argue that as children we maybe aren’t as attuned to such things as adults are, but in my recollection my parents were almost never vocally political, and it was an extreme rarity for politics to ever come up in conversation, whether at home or at such extended-family gatherings. Implicitly it seemed there were many more important and interesting things in life, such as cherishing our time together and taking an interest in one another’s lives and happiness, and politics were a relatively less important matter and/or a personal one. This approach seemed perfectly natural to me then — so much so that I don’t think I ever took particular notice of it — and surely had an influence on my own attitudes. Having grown up in that kind of environment, it’s no wonder that I get uneasy today when people not only freely bring up their politics in conversation, but seem to assume that others must naturally share their (implicitly correct) views and opinions. In hindsight, it’s perhaps an aspect of the bubble of my childhood that did not prepare me well for conflict. But on the other hand, I will say that I think there’s something to the perhaps old-fashioned notion that such topics might not be considered polite conversation in presumably “mixed company”. There’s a sort of humility to that seemingly forgotten convention that I would think might appeal to people who today advocate for tolerance of diverse viewpoints, though it evidently does not. As a result, in my adult life I have often found myself uncomfortably in the middle of an unexpectedly political conversation, looking for an exit.
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Since early childhood, I have always been interested in figuring out what enabled people to be successful, in the sense of being happy and fulfilled. A reasonable level of material success was something I came to see as part of that, but as a helpful potential facilitator rather than the end goal. For certainly there were people who were rich and unhappy, and without question a deeply meaningful and worthwhile life could be had without the requirement of material success or reward — yet, by the same token, it seemed that a person with goals and interests would do well to acquire sufficient means to support himself in their pursuit. The key seemed to be to find what you loved doing, and then figure out a way to make that your livelihood, so that you could devote your time and attention to doing it. It wasn’t going to be easy getting started, and some began with greater obstacles ahead of them than others, but enough had made it to show that it was possible to get from anywhere to anywhere. The essential and indispensable ingredients, it seemed to me, were passion, determination, perseverance, integrity, hope, resourcefulness, a basic faith in life and humanity, and a can-do attitude. I sought out examples of that attitude and the success it produced, among both the famous and the people around me, and thought about the things I felt passionate about doing and how to make the recipe work for my life.
The flip side of this was noticing the self-defeating things that people so often did (all too frequently, it seemed to me, out of disproportionate or unfounded fear), which in many cases caused them far more grief than anything that others, or their accidental situation in life, had done to them. Avoiding the trap of fear and self-sabotaging attitudes seemed to be another essential part of the recipe. An awareness of fear’s potential influence on us, and of the need to continually combat its debilitating effects in order to live a full life, continues to play an important role in the way I approach things. (I’m of course never quite as fearless as I aspire to be, but successful avoidance of fear’s deadly traps is a goal toward which I continually strive.)
Throughout high school, I worked the occasional catering job as a bus boy, dishwasher, and sometimes prep cook or waiter, as my way of earning spending money. (I had long hair back then, for reasons that I now find more difficult to fathom when looking at old pictures, and that usually, though not always, limited me to the back-room jobs.) Catering work in L.A. included everything from weddings and bar mitzvahs to Academy Awards dinners and private parties at the homes of the rich and occasionally even famous. I remember the vast majority of our clients as having been kind and generous, and now that I’ve begun to enjoy a modest measure of success in my own life I’ve sought to pass that generosity on each time the opportunity arises to tip someone for a job well done. I mention this because it’s one of the life experiences that comes to mind when I try to understand why I didn’t develop the same ingrained resentment of or vindictiveness toward people with money that I occasionally see in other people and in contemporary politics. The rich whom I had met were people living productive and creative lives whose blessings they seemed to genuinely appreciate, and who were doing one of the best things they could possibly do for me and my fellow-catering-temp classmates by hosting events that provided us with good student jobs. Within a few years, I would leave that springboard to begin pursuit of a more technical/scientific career, but I am grateful for those experiences, for the character and responsibility that they helped me to develop, and for the many fine people I worked with and for.
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It’s been a bit of a strange feeling so far, going back to revisit my past, from the perspective of knowing what happened next, in an attempt to see and understand connections in my train of thought. In hindsight, though I wouldn’t begin to realize it until my college years, my tendency to avoid political engagement and conflict, and acquired convictions regarding the primacy of one’s own attitude and actions in determining the course of one’s life, were to put me on a collision course with the culture of contemporary liberalism as it had developed in the U.S. In the meantime, before my awareness of the points of divergence in my own perspective began to take shape, I would myself live as an least peripheral part of that culture for the next several years.
(More to come…)
I had hoped by this date to have reached the point of September 11, 2001 in the telling of my own story, but I haven’t yet managed to set aside enough time for that project to make it happen. I’ll save the untangling of that painful knot for a future date. For now I just want to join others in solemnly marking the day and the passage of another year.
In past years, I’ve looked without much success for 9/11 memorial services to attend in the Bay Area. Maybe we’re just too far removed from the sites of the attacks out here. (Maybe, I often think, we’re also too far removed from the reality of that day.) Last year I ended up spending the day alone in quiet remembrance, watching and reading as memorial posts unfolded across the “blogosphere” with which I had only recently become acquainted. In hindsight, I did attend a memorial service of sorts that year, with a far-flung extended family that shared my grief. I expect I’ll be checking in again with many of the same folks as today wears on.
Yesterday I finished watching the remarkable two-part National Geographic documentary “Inside 9/11” that Bill Whittle mentioned in his recent essay and that has been waiting for me on the TiVo all week. It was difficult stuff to get through, to be sure, but a journey I had to take. We must remember and clearly understand what happened on that day and in the decade-plus of malicious planning that led up to it, and I think the creators of the National Geographic documentary have helped facilitate that by producing an exemplary piece of journalism — one that presents us with the known facts, and leaves us to weigh them.
My watching of “Inside 9/11” prompted many thoughts, but I will leave it at one for now. In our grief, we must not forget this was not merely a “tragedy” or misfortune (though it was certainly the former), but an act of war by violent extremists who mean to destroy us by dividing us against one another. I often fear they may be succeeding. If we care anything for our culture and way of life, we must not allow them to prevail.
UPDATE:
One of the most moving and memorable reflections I read this year was this 2003 article about the search for the identity of the famously photographed “Falling Man”. (Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the pointer!)
Also recommended: a 9/11 photo-essay at Pajamas Media.
Web-essayist extraordinaire Bill Whittle is back and in top form, with a new piece entitled “Tribes”!** Bill’s is some of the best work I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of reading this past year (and quite possibly ever). If you haven’t experienced a Bill Whittle tour de force before, I highly recommend you pay a visit to his site.
Bill’s latest piece has left me reflecting on how fortunate I am to have lived most of my life within the artificial sanctuary of the flock. The attacks of 9/11 awakened the sleeping sheep dog in me, and I humbly hope to make myself useful in that capacity.
* UPDATE 2009-09-08: Sadly, “Tribes” appears to have been a casualty of Bill’s move to pajamasmedia.com. I’ve updated the above link to point to where the essay should be — and, I hold out hope, will be someday — but for now the text of it is missing in action, and can only be found in the Second (print) Edition of Bill’s excellent “Silent America” essay collection (which I can’t possibly recommend highly enough).
** UPDATE 2009-10-13: “Tribes” is back online!
One more news item before I launch into my series:
Courtesy of Instapundit: Czech Republic President Václav Klaus delivered a remarkable address at a meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society in Reykjavik last week. As a U.S. citizen of partly Czech ancestry who holds liberty dear, I can’t help but feel a special affinity for the spirit of his stirring words.
Beginning with an exploration of the appeal that socialist thinking holds for intellectuals, and tracing his theme through to the development of socialism’s contemporary derivative ideologies in Western Europe, Klaus ends up painting a clearer picture of the broad differences in thinking between Western European nations and their post-communist Eastern brethren than I think I have yet seen expressed.
There’s an audio (.mp3) recording in the “Attachments” section following the Brussels Journal article, and a full transcript of Klaus’ speech (which he abbreviated significantly in some places as he went). This is, without a doubt, one of those “read the whole thing” gems — so much so that choosing a brief passage to quote is difficult.
Fifteen years after the collapse of communism I am afraid, more than at the beginning of its softer (or weaker) version, of social-democratism, which has become — under different names, e.g. the welfare state or the soziale Marktwirtschaft — the dominant model of the economic and social system of current Western civilization. It is based on big and patronizing government, on extensive regulating of human behavior, and on large-scale income redistribution.
…
Illiberal ideas are becoming to be formulated, spread and preached under the name of ideologies or “isms”, which have — at least formally and nominally — nothing in common with the old-styled, explicit socialism. These ideas are, however, in many respects similar to it. There is always a limiting (or constraining) of human freedom, there is always ambitious social engineering, there is always an immodest “enforcement of a good” by those who are anointed on others against their will, there is always the crowding out of standard democratic methods by alternative political procedures, and there is always the feeling of superiority of intellectuals and of their ambitions.
I have in mind environmentalism (with its Earth First, not Freedom First principle), radical humanrightism (based — as de Jasay precisely argues — on not distinguishing rights and rightism), ideology of “civic society” (or communitarism), which is nothing less than one version of post-Marxist collectivism which wants privileges for organized groups, and in consequence, a refeudalization of society. I also have in mind multiculturalism, feminism, apolitical technocratism (based on the resentment against politics and politicians), internationalism (and especially its European variant called Europeanism) and a rapidly growing phenomenon I call NGOism.
All of them represent substitute ideologies for socialism. All of them give intellectuals new possibilities, new space for their activities, new niches in the market of ideas.
(Klaus’ inclusion of “feminism” in this last passage is a bit surprising to me. — Is the dominant form of feminism in Europe an illiberal one?)
Interestingly, Virginia Postrel asserts that Klaus has finally come around to seeing it her way, years after repudiating her assertion that socialism in its traditional form is no longer cause for significant concern.
OK. Today, I begin.
But first, a tip of the hat is in order. (I’m not actually given to wearing hats very often, but let’s just set that minor detail aside for the moment and go with the metaphor, shall we?)
One of the blogs I’ve been frequently reading and enjoying since first encountering it last Spring is written by a trained therapist living in New England. Blogging anonymously under the pseudonym “neo-neocon“, her goal has in part been to explore the process of her own political change in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, in an ongoing series titled “A Mind is a Difficult Thing to Change“. Reading her insights and perspective, and occasionally participating in the discussions in the comments sections following her posts, has been a very helpful kind of therapy for me, as someone going through a very similar experience earlier in life and on the other side of the continent.
Neo’s thoughtful work has helped motivate me to begin recounting my own story and exploring my own process of change and of coming to better understand myself. I’ve been grateful for the thought and effort she puts into her writing, which consistently comes across as being motivated by a sincere desire to better understand things, and I hope to follow her admirably level-headed example in that regard. (Hers is certainly a blog to which I’d refer any Democrat with a sincere interest in understanding what the heck happened to his or her wayward former compatriots.)
As a practical means of keeping momentum on the writing end (with the added benefit of hopefully not boring my readers too terribly) I expect to try to stick to the essentials and get through this bit of storytelling fairly quickly. There is plenty of stuff in the recent past and present that I want to blog about, and I hope to start making more time for that soon. So if I can manage it, I’m going to do my level best to suppress any perfectionistic tendencies that might become an undue hindrance, and try to treat this more like writing a series of e-mail messages — which, for whatever reason, don’t seem to take as long to compose. Better to post something rather than to wait indefinitely for the right turn of phrase to come to mind, or to be sure that every last detail is in place.
The above said, I do feel the need to start this blog by establishing some basic context: Who am I, and what’s motivated me to begin this project? In my most recent post, I wrote:
Discovering that I am more different from those around me than I had realized, in my way of seeing and thinking, has prompted me to try to understand the essential reasons for and origins of those differences. Is there just a different set of axioms wired into my way of perceiving, analyzing, and responding to the world? How did I acquire them? What makes me “me”?
As I get underway, these are the some of the questions I’ll be setting out to explore.
I’ve been told that I have changed over the past several years. Have I in fact changed in my views? Have the Democratic party and “liberalism” with which I once decidedly identified changed? Have I grown to become more aware of and to more clearly understand the foundational differences between my own beliefs and the philosophy of contemporary liberalism in the U.S.? To some extent, each of these things has happened. And while the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and their aftermath have certainly been a catalyst for my own change and reexamination of my thinking, the story goes back farther than that and there’s much more to it.
My first piece in the series is coming together. If I don’t quite manage to finish it today, I hope to get it posted sometime in the coming week for sure. Stay tuned and thanks for visiting!
Having amply, if unintentionally, demonstrated what I meant by “weeks at a time,” I suppose I can consider it OK to get this project rolling now. I’m working on it, folks. The trouble is, I’ve been accumulating so many ideas I want to write about that figuring out just where and how to begin is turning out to be a big challenge. Combined with the need to make time to sit and write at reasonably regular intervals, the experience is giving me a whole new degree of respect for those who manage to make this look so easy.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to say and the points I want to cover, jotting down thoughts here and there and composing fragments of future posts as they come to me in seemingly random order. I think throughout my life this has just been the way that the process of writing has worked for me. Occasionally, I’ve had the experience of writing something straight through from begining to end without looking back, and being reasonably satisfied with the end result. More often, though, I’ll start at some random point in the middle (wherever my mind seems inclined to focus first) and build the thing up, adding fragments as they come to mind, and finally arranging them in sequence and linking them together until I have a coherent end result with a natural flow of thought to it.
At this stage the pieces are starting to come together, but not necessarily in sequential order, so it’s going to take a bit more time before I can start to roll the first finished pieces off the assembly line. I assure you though, my mind is still on this, and I’m working on it when I can.
It’s been an interesting exercise thinking back to earlier parts of my life and revisiting the path by which I became the person I am today, while attempting to distill from that the set of experiences that seem to have been most important in shaping the way I see and think. Discovering that I am more different from those around me than I had realized, in my way of seeing and thinking, has prompted me to try to understand the essential reasons for and origins of those differences. Is there just a different set of axioms wired into my way of perceiving, analyzing, and responding to the world? How did I acquire them? What makes me “me”?
As I get underway, these are the some of the questions I’ll be setting out to explore. Stay tuned. I hope to have more in the coming weeks.
