{"id":7472,"date":"2012-07-03T05:55:44","date_gmt":"2012-07-03T05:55:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=7472"},"modified":"2012-07-03T05:55:44","modified_gmt":"2012-07-03T05:55:44","slug":"putting-away-childish-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/putting-away-childish-things\/","title":{"rendered":"Putting away childish things"},"content":{"rendered":"

CPAC’s boy wonder swings left<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it was naive,\u201d Krohn now says of the speech. \u201cIt\u2019s a 13-year-old kid saying stuff that he had heard for a long time.\u2026 I live in Georgia. We\u2019re inundated with conservative talk in Georgia.\u2026 The speech was something that a 13-year-old does. You haven\u2019t formed all your opinions. You\u2019re really defeating yourself if you think you have all of your ideas in your head when you were 12 or 13. It\u2019s impossible. You haven\u2019t done enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

\u201cI started reflecting on a lot of what I wrote, just thinking about what I had said and what I had done and started reading a lot of other stuff, and not just political stuff,\u201d Krohn said. \u201cI started getting into philosophy \u2014 Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Kant and lots of other German philosophers. And then into present philosophers \u2014 Saul Kripke, David Chalmers. It was really reading philosophy that didn\u2019t have anything to do with politics that gave me a breather and made me realize that a lot of what I said was ideological blather that really wasn\u2019t meaningful. It wasn\u2019t me thinking. It was just me saying things I had heard so long from people I thought were interesting and just came to believe for some reason, without really understanding it. I understood it enough to talk about it but not really enough to have a conversation about it.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jonathan Krohn’s original manifesto was embarrassing in a way that a 13 year old’s musings tend to be<\/a>. More blame should go to those who took advantage of the freak factor here. It’s not very surprising that Krohn’s reading of philosophy pushed him to the cultural Left. The modern American social Right doesn’t do very well at elucidating a high-toned and intellectually appealing vision.<\/strong> Most people are not reading James Kalb<\/a>, they’re reading James Dobson. This is fine when it comes to raw numbers, Dobson is more appealing and accessible to the average person than James Kalb. But for someone with raw intelligence, as Jonathan Krohn obviously possessed, Dobson will become weak tea. Truly intellectual conservatives tend to be libertarians, or often of a more sectarian bent (e.g., traditionalist Catholics appealing to traditionalist Catholics, or conservative Reformed Christians appealing to like-minded Protestants). I don’t believe that modern social liberalism offers a genuine vision for human flourishing. But to convince people like Jonathan Krohn as that move to more sophisticated lines of reasoning conservatives need to argue at the same level as liberal intellectuals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CPAC’s boy wonder swings left: \u201cI think it was naive,\u201d Krohn now says of the speech. \u201cIt\u2019s a 13-year-old kid saying stuff that he had heard for a long time.\u2026 I live in Georgia. We\u2019re inundated with conservative talk in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[935],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7472"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7472"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7477,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7472\/revisions\/7477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}