About

Nurse. Lawyer. Anglican. Quaker. Small-town boy. Tea Partier. Runner. These are all things I have been or done, am or was, some of where I’m coming from. To one degree or another, in one way or another, all of them are also identities or ways that I have left behind or turned my back on, or thought about turning my back on, over the years. Yet even the ones I have most radically broken with remain part of who I am or have been, the contexts that have shaped and formed me,* at a minimum the starting point that any new ways or transformations have to work with or start from. I am who I am. We all are, I suppose.

And what could be more boring than that? The world certainly doesn’t need more navel gazing and talking about oneself, especially in our time. Certainly if at any point I’m just adding to the noise for you, put this down, stop reading.

But since you ask:

About

I don’t intend to spend our limited time here talking about myself; I’ll be doing my best to engage thoughtfully with ideas, culture, religion, politics, current events—that I find interesting, and that maybe you will, too. But my background as a nurse, for example, will be part of what gives me any perspective to have anything to say about such ideas in the first place. Jonah Goldberg and Mark Steyn, strikingly, give opposite advice for those thinking about writing:

• Steyn says (I paraphrase from memory), First go out and do something—become a lumberjack, anything! Anything would be better than to sit there and think the world needs to hear your thoughts on the world, when you haven’t spent any time doing anything out in the world and consequently have nothing to say.

• Goldberg says, Don’t think about writing; write! Like anything that takes practice or exercise, you can’t get any good at it if you don’t do it, and keep doing it. You could spend your whole life telling yourself or others that you might like to write someday; if you never actually start writing, you never do. What’s stopping you?

At this point in my life, having had a couple of careers, I may actually be in a position to try following both pieces of advice.

I’m unable to find it at the moment, but as I recall, I also once read a third writer’s advice for those thinking about writing: Do you feel such a need to write that you would write even if you knew that no one would ever read your writings? If so, write.

I’ve felt this need to write for decades; two careers on, I still can’t shake it. It looks as though I’ll be writing anyway; I may as well do it here.

More About

I also have been (for more or less my entire adult life) and remain Christian, conservative or traditionalist, and American. As Christian, I believe that Christianity is the one true religion, that we’ve all radically screwed up but God gives us an amazing and incredible second chance. If you’d like to learn more about this option, reading more about it can be great (the Bible is of course a very popular choice, and C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity has played an important role in my conversion journey, as well as millions of others’), but I think there’s no substitute for learning by doing, in community, in conversation with those who have been walking this way for some time; my admittedly unfashionable recommendation would be that you go to church, and talk to people there, and ask your most trusted Christian friend to tell you more, if you have one.

(Which church? It’s a very good question, but also a very long conversation, beyond the scope of this piece; I’ll have more thoughts to share another day. In the meantime, I agree with C. S. Lewis that it’s important not to get hung up on that question and let it keep you from trying any of them; the more important choice is that you be in the church at all, more than the choice of which kind. “For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable.” In the absence of any other starting point, try Kevin Williamson’s approach: Start by going to whatever kind of church your grandparents went to; if they didn’t have one, try Catholic.)

In the personal and moral context, to me, conservative or traditional means that my views (and, ideally, my practice, though I’m sure I fail at least as much as anyone else—“sinners, of whom I am chief,” etc.) are pro-life, pro-marriage, and otherwise, well, admittedly unfashionable.

It seems to me that politically speaking, in the American context, “conservative” has always meant that I believe “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” (including property rights); “that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . . .” How strange that in our time these should be considered specially conservative political commitments or partisan opinions, rather than the foundational consensus that all political conversations in America start from, but here we are.

So. My past/identity is, among other things, QuANTPASTR:

• Quaker

• Anglican

• Nurse

• Tea Partier

• Attorney

• Small-town (I would also accept Star Trek fan)

• Runner

Imagine that Quantepast might be the name of a holiday—it sounds something like Passover or Candlemas (you might know it as Groundhog Day)—perhaps a holiday on which there is traditionally a great meal or “repast”. It’s a holiday on which you eat a certain amount. (Quant.? How much? So much. Quantepast.) You might further imagine that the word for a person celebrating Quantepast is a Quantepaster.

But in your travels you would have learned that man is human, and accordingly a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires a human-sounding pen name. (Funny coincidence, a few years from now a machine will be writing the same words about itself.) From the two roots I happen to have placed first above, I take George, for George Fox, the (full disclosure: total weirdo) founder/inventor of Quakerism, and Nightingale, for Florence Nightingale, the patron saint (more or less) and founder/inventor of modern nursing.

(NB Florence Nightingale, for whom I am thus named, was herself in turn named for the city she was born in; though her family was English, she was born in Florence, Italy.)

The “D” is for “Dalrymple”, in tribute to another great pen name.

So, thinking about the interaction of different elements of one’s background, take Quakerism, for example. When I converted to Christianity, this necessarily included turning away from competing religious claims or identities, at least to the extent they were incompatible with Christianity.** That certainly includes Quakerism, an alternate religion that both bears some resemblance (if you squint) and has some historical connections to Christianity, but is really its own thing. That said, to the extent it is not inconsistent with my allegiance to Christ, Quakerism can and has continued to give me gifts of a greater appreciation for silence, patience, listening before speaking, and a lack of concern for social norms—at its best, a willingness to “obey God rather than men”—to be countercultural and nonconformist, to be entirely unfashionable and totally out of step with the surrounding society if necessary—among other gifts.

So stick around, or come back from time to time, if you find the writing or the ideas interesting. I’ll be here writing regardless.

George D. Nightingale

* Many communities and ways will also tend to be chosen by people who already agree with or resemble them to one degree or another; thus, if the question is whether affiliation with the group is cause or effect (of the formation or characteristics of the person), the shortest accurate answer is probably “Both.” Beyond that, we need not further pursue the disentangling of cause and effect here.

** “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me,” and “He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who does not gather with Me scatters.” From the point of view of Christianity, the ubiquitous secular admonition to “Be yourself” (“This above all: to thine own self be true”), at least as the world understands it, is terrible advice. (I’m pretty screwed up; I should be trying to be more like Jesus, not more like myself.)

On the other hand, you are “fearfully and wonderfully made”, incredibly sculpted in His own image (supernaturally speaking, of course, in your mind and heart—of course God the Father has no physical body at all). After God created you, He saw that “it was very good”. C. S. Lewis has some fascinating and nuanced thoughts on the ways in which Christianity calls us both to be ourselves and not.*** God also says, in this mixed-up world in which we’re still working out what (or Whom) we’re willing to commit to, “. . . he who is not against us is on our side.”

*** In The Screwtape Letters, for example, in letter # 13 Lewis imagines the demon Screwtape advising the other demon, “As a preliminary to detaching him from the Enemy, you wanted to detach him from himself, and had made some progress in doing so. Now, all that is undone.

“Of course I know that the Enemy also wants to detach men from themselves, but in a different way. Remember always, that He really likes the little vermin, and sets an absurd value on the distinctiveness of every one of them. When He talks of their losing their selves, He only means abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever. Hence, while He is delighted to see them sacrificing even their innocent wills to His, He hates to see them drifting away from their own nature for any other reason. And we should always encourage them to do so. The deepest likings and impulses of any man are the raw material, the starting-point, with which the Enemy has furnished him. To get him away from those is therefore always a point gained; even in things indifferent it is always desirable to substitute the standards of the World, or convention, or fashion, for a human’s own real likings and dislikings. [¶]

“I myself would carry this very far. I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the ‘best’ people, the ‘right’ food, the ‘important’ books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions.”

Which brings us full circle on Quakerism.

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