News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
As our Christmas travels wind to a close, I've had several reminders this week of the far-flung community that Porchers constitute. While I was visiting a church last week, one reader introduced himself. Later in the week I had lunch with another reader and long-time contributor. And at the end of the week, I gave a talk at a Great Hearts school in Phoenix where, it turns out, the current assistant headmaster found out about the school and applied for a position there after reading an essay published at FPR.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about Alaska, smartphones, and political realignment.
- Joseph Orso ponders how we might actually push against the gifts of technocracy: "Unaware, we can stand in a museum, in a temple of modernity that extracts life from all other temples. We can gaze into the vengeful gift of a god while that god stands right behind us, unseen, not believed in, multiplying his box of miseries into every pocket in the museum and beyond."
- Grayson Walker defends the benefits of federalism, where states can try out different policies: "Although it may seem counterintuitive, freedom is actually enhanced, not curtailed, when states have the right to experiment, subject to important federal constitutional limitations, with social and economic polices till they do right by their citizens."
- Faith Elizabeth Hough reviews Mitali Perkins's Hope in the Valley and wrestles with the place of activism: "Activism needs to begin by fearlessly staring down our own prejudices, by rooting out the injustices we allow. Once that is accomplished, we can turn to the outer world."
- In an honest and probing essay, Casey Spinks narrates the role that oil has played in his life and strives for the kind of net accounting that Wendell Berry advocates: "I wish environmentalists would better understand that there are no mustache-twirling billionaires drilling and digging and burning oil just for the hell and the money of it. Like money, petroleum is a very effective way to get the things we all want at the best convenience. And those in the oil industry are simply happy to oblige us and profit by their labors."
- John Murdock introduces another panel from our fall conference. This one features Jeff Bilbro, Cassandra Nelson, and Tessa Carman talking about human responses to technology.
It's been a delight to read aloud some classics from my childhood with our daughter. We recently read A Wrinkle in Time. In her portrayal of IT, Madeleine L'Engle captures quite well many of the recurring temptations that powerful technologies pose. IT frames his offer through what L.M. Sacasas terms the "Borg complex," i.e. resistance is futile because the dominance of this form of technology is inevitable. IT goes on to promise both justice for all, and a life free from pain and struggle and work. It sounds quite a lot like some of the rhetoric around AI and LLMs in recent months:
Now, my dears, . . . I shall of course have no need of recourse to violence, but I thought perhaps it would save you pain if I showed you at once that it would do you no good to try to oppose me. You see, what you will soon realize is that there is no need to fight me. Not only is there no need, but you will not have the slightest desire to do so. For why should you wish to fight someone who is here only to save you pain and trouble? For you, as well as for the rest of all the happy, useful people on this planet, I, in my own strength, am willing to assume all the pain, all the responsibility, all the burdens of thought and decision.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro