Today I would like to examine what for most people (maybe everyone) is an unfamiliar part of my own training and preparation as a writer.  In fact, today I would like to talk about how I learned to become a blogger before such a thing existed, as a high school student in the late 1990’s who nonetheless wished to reflect upon insights.  It’s time to take a step back and examine the training and preparation of a future blogger.

It was as a high school student when I first thought that it would be a worthwhile habit to reflect on the issues of the day, and write some sort of commentary on them.  Since at the time I had only a Suncoast Freenet (no longer in service) text-only internet connection on a 14.4 modem (very slow, as could be imagined), I did not have access to a web page that would have allowed me to share my thoughts with the world and receive some kind of public comments in return.  I would have appreciated such a thing, but I did not have it.

So, I did the next best thing, starting a project I called “Essays on Modern Life,” intentionally modeling them on Blaise Pascal’s Pensèes, just thoughtful reflections on faith and contemporary goings on in international affairs as well as my own (admittedly ambivalent) thoughts about authority, which even then were strong interests of mine.  Lacking an audience or someone to communicate these thoughts to, these essays were only infrequently written, but they did help me develop a certain discipline of expression, a conscious expectation that my writings would be placed in the public eye (at least eventually), and so I worked on honing my ability to articulate my thoughts, insights, and opinions to make them clear and in a logical flow.

I find it intriguing that even more than a decade later, I still muse over the same sorts of subjects.  I certainly know a lot more than I did as a nerdy teenager, I have a lot more discernment and maturity, more nuance in my perspective, but fundamentally the same issues are my deepest concerns.  I suppose, despite the variety of my interests, that I am more a hedgehog than a fox, more focused on a depth of understanding in a closely interrelated set of interests than I am in a broad and scattered variety of interests pursued superficially, though I have pursued broad studies in order to deepen my fundamental concerns about legitimacy, honor, faith, authority, personal responsibility, intimacy, and community as they related to individuals, families, groups, organizations, political entities, cultures, and periods of history.

Elsewhere I have recorded some of my reflections on this particular writing project from my high school years in my “Second Thoughts on the IB Exception,” which examined how as a high school I was upset that my high school sought to make the rules harsher on students without fulfilling their responsibility to provide the proper infrastructure or learning experience for their best and brightest students.  It took me some time to understand that the school, and the public school system as a whole, was not greatly interested in providing for learning but more interested in control and in fostering a sort of groupthink identity for its students.  As a young person who always stuck out and refused to be like everyone else, public schooling was very hard on me.  I didn’t realize it was designed to be that way–to be hostile to the sort of person I am.

So, as a result, my idea of the “IB Exception” was in a sense deeply flawed by a failure to understand the purpose of the greater control.  Such a control was in fact less of an issue for me because I had already rejected it in my mind, but all the more severe for those who had not consciously rejected the authority of the government (through the public schools) to provide the worldview on such matters as history, personal morality, political theory, and religion.  Nonetheless, I was aware that my own rejection of that illegitimate authority made me in some sense a rebel to that authority.  I had a vague understanding even then that the fundamental questions of life were not so much about the objective facts as much as about the foundations of legitimacy and authority they rested on.  Who do you trust?  Who do you believe?  Who do you follow?  These are the essential questions–everything else flows from those commitments.

Another essay that foreshadowed my future concerns about international relations was a short essay I wrote about the problem of the secession of Quebec from Canada, which is a periodic issue for our neighbors to the north.  My main comment was that the separatists of Quebec might be setting a bad precedent with their secession, because while they might assume that their province would contain all of the land and people now there, that secession would further a precedent for the English-speaking First Peoples in the far north of Quebec, whose land contains the hydroelectric plants that power the province, to in turn secede from Quebec and remain with the rest of English-speaking Canada.  I was unaware at the time that this precise argument was used by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War to point out the inconsistencies of secessionist thought, refusing to realize that if a nation can be carved up, a state can be carved up by its minority groups seeking their own freedom and self-rule.  There is no end to division once one views schism as the solution to difficult political problems, because if the will to cooperate and coexist does not exist, then it will split up any polity or organization such schismatic and divisive people find themselves in.  The problem is in the spirit and attitude, not in the structure.

I did not realize at the time, and it is somewhat of a shock to think about it even now, but even then I realized in some vague sense the sorts of intellectual problems that would form my adult mind–the concern with worldviews, the musings on the formation of separate group and national identities (more true even for Somaliland, for example, than for Quebec), and the serious attempt to grapple with unity and division.  Perhaps I was prepared far more than I ever thought for the sort of work I am now engaged in intellectually.  It is a refreshing thought to think that I have been preparing for this sort of study and examination for so much of my life, without realizing it.  But then again, bloggers and intellectuals are not born, they are made, by much effort and diligent practice.