I attended a conservative American university, and I have encountered many conservatives on the Internet. I got to know these people up close. Doing this makes it possible for me to understand them enough to advocate for other people to them using their own values.

I will do so with a number of pursuits.

For example, there are people who think that philosophy is useless. What they don’t understand is that most of what we have grew out of philosophy. Science grew out of philosophy. Democracy grew out of philosophy. It took philosophers such as Adam Smith and Ayn Rand to conceptualize and justify capitalism. Which means that we owe a lot to philosophy, and it is far from useless.

Then there are people who think that there’s no value to literature and poetry. The Bible is literature. The Psalms is poetry. Literature contains a vast body of wisdom. Failing to avail oneself of this wisdom impoverishes one’s understanding of the world and does one a great disservice.

And of course there is militating against psychology and social workers. This is wrong as well. Even conservative businesses use psychology in marketing and human relations. As for social workers, they perform a service. It costs much less to hire a social worker to check people’s criminal tendencies than it does to lock them up. Which means that the social workers are good for the taxpayer.

Have wrong things grown out of these pursuits? Of course they have. But wrong things have also come out of military and business. Damning the full pursuit because some influences in it are destructive is absolute foolishness. This is like feminists disowning the entire cultural legacy of the Western civilization because some influences in it have been racist or patriarchal.. Bad things have come out of these pursuits. That does not make them wrong in themselves.

Most arguments made in service of these pursuits fail to connect. It is important to speak to conservatives in their own language. Then it becomes possible to correctly advocate to them for the merit of things that they do not understand.