Back to the Blog

I am not new to blogging, but I don't think I was ever particularly good at it.

I've written at a handful of web sites in my life. I had a Livejournal for part of my high school career that was largely a chronicle of the day-to-day. In college, I periodically blogged on the Livejournal site. I wrote a baseball blog, then for several different baseball sites (one of which really took off after I left, actually). I set up a politics blog late in college to spare my friends annoying Livejournal posts. I periodically wrote a column on international affairs that felt somewhat bloggish for the Gettysburgian, the school newspaper of my alma mater. With hindsight, a lot of that writing was uneven. Some things I just find misguided. Some naive. Some just poorly written. Many poorly argued.

So I've been writing for years, though perhaps not well. Now, a half decade older and hopefully wiser, I aim to write again (sometimes), using this mainly as a place to expand on some things that I hammer on my Twitter feed. I might write some politics, but I am less interested in the proverbial horse race than I was back in 2008, and I think getting stuck in the weeds is too easy if you follow it too closely. These days, my intellectual interests are in argumentation, persuasion, and uncertainty. How, in other words, should we live, talk, and argue in a world that we really don't understand?

I've titled this blog The Skeptical Servant. As a skeptic, I find myself disagreeing with most of the elite consensus. You probably could have called me something of a technocrat in my earlier years; that was based on a fundamental faith in intelligence, which I think comes naturally to good students who find themselves frustrated by the outside world. That went away in college, and the events of 2007 and 2008 solidified my disdain for social elites. Much of what I will be writing here will be, in some ways, standing athwart what I believe is a misguided elite consensus on a particular issue.

But I also see myself as a servant. In my non-writing career, I work as a public servant, and I take the notion of responsibility to the taxpayer very seriously. I should also state that I found religion a few months back. Many things that never made sense to me about my Catholic faith all of a sudden clicked, in what I can only describe today as a sudden, unexpected moment of spiritual clarity that has lingered for these past several months. Many things that made me uneasy about my childhood faith began to make sense in ways that are hard to describe, and those things have pushed me towards a deeper notion of service: to God, to country, to people in general. As a servant, then, I try to be humble, which means I will try my best to avoid taking potshots. If I ask a question, it will be because I genuinely want to know how someone reconciles something that I don't understand. I will avoid accusing people of malice or stupidity; and I would like to be called out on it if I slip. Most importantly, I will write here in an effort to improve my own understanding and level of engagement with the world. We are always learning, and there is always much to learn. And, as my early blogging demonstrates to me, even bad writing is useful; it reminds us of who we were, and how far we've come.

Lastly, I don't expect to change any minds writing here, and I'm frankly not after converts to my way of thinking. (Though if you're interested in Catholicism, I'm happy to help out on that front.) Still, I'd like to think that by periodically writing here, I can provide examples of a specific worldview in a way that is respectful and decent, rather than inflammatory and frustrating. If I do that, I'll be satisfied.