For reasons of transparency and bias disclosure, here is who I am: a Christian, seventh-generation Texan, husband, father, grandfather, mathematician, software engineer and composer. To get this out of the way, I am a white (for certain values of white), straight, cis male, so that everything I say may thus be disregarded as the words of an oppressor by an intersectionally-inclined reader (though I’m not aware of having oppressed anyone). By nature and heritage, I am solidly rooted in flyover country. By training and career, I am in the elite, holding several degrees from prestigious universities, having taught at others, and having retired from a tenured full professorship in mathematics.
I am philosophically conservative – by which I mean seeking to solve the present problems of humanity using solutions which have been shown to work in the past. The assumption here is that while the appearance of the current problems may be new, the fundamental issues are not (thus I subscribe to what Thomas Sowell calls the “Tragic Vision” rather than the “Utopian Vision”). This is not to say that we should never try anything new, but rather that we should experiment carefully on a limited basis – if the new idea is shown to work, then expanding it is now a conservative notion.
I am theologically conservative – by which I mean an Occam’s Razor approach to hermeneutics, combined with an extreme reluctance to adopt any doctrine which was wholly unknown to any orthodox theologians of, say, 200 years ago, there having been no events in roughly the last two millennia that would have impacted theological truth (and thus certainly none in the last two centuries, or the last two decades).
I am economically and fiscally conservative – suffice it to say that I am a fan of Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell.
Politically, I am what I call a Christian libertarian (small-l) – by which I mean a libertarian who has read, understood and believed the message of the Book of Judges. This position is a trade-off between the notion that generally the best policy approach is that which promotes the most individual liberty, and the reality that serious problems can arise when “every man does what is right in his own eyes.”* In binary Republican/Democrat choices in recent years, this pretty much means I pull the lever for the Republican, as the Democratic party has become more and more opposed to both individual liberty and Christianity. Though neither party really represents me, I am finding the choice between the two easier and easier as time goes on.
Culturally, well, I don’t really know – I enjoy rodeo but not NASCAR; I am a gun owner but not an NRA member; I’m a Dallas Cowboys fan in self-imposed exile (meaning that I won’t return to actual fandom until Jerry Jones no longer owns the team – I have a very long memory regarding the firing of Tom Landry in 1989); I’ve been programming computers since the 1960’s (really!) but the only lifetime membership I hold is in the American Quarter Horse Association; I like bluegrass but not country music; the genres of music that I most enjoy are 20th century art music (Bartok, Stravinsky, Ives, etc.), R&B (Motown and Stax specifically), J.S. Bach (yes, he’s a genre all his own) and 1970s jazz/rock fusion (Chase, Ides of March, Chicago, BS&T, RTF, etc.); specific artists I enjoy and appreciate are Chanticleer, Aretha Franklin, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, B.B. King, John Eliot Gardiner, Louis Armstrong and Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. Oh, and Weird Al and Itzhak Perlman and Derek Trucks and EW&F and Maynard Ferguson and Ella Fitzgerald and Glenn Gould and Chick Corea and…eh, that’s enough. Feel free to infer any pattern from that list as you may. If you knew where to look, I believe that you could find recordings on the web of a number of my compositions, as well as of me performing as a tenor, a bass, a tubist, a bass guitarist, a pianist, and a percussionist, though few of my friends would believe that the last three (and especially the last two) could possibly be true. Also (again if you knew where to look), you could find on the web a handful of software patents, a dozen or so mathematical papers, and LOTS of math review articles of mine.
A partial list of those I read regularly (alphabetical order) and am in broad-strokes agreement with: Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Malcolm Daniels), Veronique de Rugy, Rod Dreher, Victor Davis Hanson, Steven Hayward, Gail Heriot, Sarah Hoyt, Peter Kirsanow, Glenn Loury, Heather Mac Donald, John McWhorter, Dan Mitchell, Wilfred Reilly, Glenn Reynolds, Christina Hoff Sommers, Thomas Sowell (obvious if you’ve been paying attention), Jason Whitlock, and Bill Whittle. It should be pointed out, though, that having spent a career in academia, I have also read many, many writers with whom I largely disagree, and have had many, many friends and colleagues with whom I disagree (hopefully not disagreeably, though). I should also mention that the presence of names on the list above does not imply endorsement of all of their views, nor does it in any way make them (or my family, for that matter, should my anonymity fail) responsible for anything I say. After all, if two people agree on everything, one of them is unnecessary**
* As Thomas Sowell has rightly observed, “there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs.”
** certainly not original with me, and variously attributed to Winston Churchill, Benjamin Franklin, Ben Bernanke and Ruth Bell Graham – none of whom apparently had the foresight to leave a permalink for the corresponding blog post.