This Keith Burgess-Jackson guy not only has a good blog going, but he also writes for Tech Central Station.
His story is a bit like my own:
I've been a student of public affairs since about 1969, when I was twelve years old. That's when, as a youngster in rural Michigan, I began reading The Detroit News on a daily basis. It brought the world -- the wonderful, frightening, often puzzling world -- into my comfortable home. My curiosity about how things work led me to political science (which studies government), economics (which studies markets), history (which studies the past), and eventually to philosophy (which studies the conceptual schemes of -- and the relations among -- these and other disciplines, professions, institutions, and practices). My ideological development has been tortuous rather than linear. I began as an inchoate liberal, then discovered and fell in love with libertarianism, then became a socialist and a radical feminist. I now consider myself -- gasp! -- a conservative, albeit a nonreligious one. My mentors (from afar) are Roger Scruton and John Kekes, each of whom happens to be a philosopher. Liberals who seek to "examine their lives," as Socrates put it, would do well to read their work. (I recommend Scruton's The Meaning of Conservatism, rev. 3d ed. [2002] and Kekes's A Case for Conservatism [1998].)Change the date of starting to have an interest in public affairs from 1969 to 1980, and the story is very similar. 1969 is pretty close to my birth year! I'm also not sure I would have called myself a radical feminist at any point, but I did get sucked into some of that during my years on campus. It's such a part of campus culture these days that I'll forgive both myself and Keith on that count. The spooky thing is that I even read and loved the Scruton book he mentions. I have not (yet) read Kekes, but doing has crossed my mind in the past. Oh, and I crossed the religious Tiber a little less than two years ago. Of course I stopped formal study years ago and Keith has a PhD and a law degree, [smirk] the big show off. [/smirk]
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