News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
It's that wonderful time of the year when we can have fresh salads with spring greens and radishes each night for dinner. Amazing.
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays on Payne Hollow, ice cream, and National Parks.
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Adam Smith reviews Hartmut Rosa's The Uncontrollability of the World: "For Rosa, as for many others, the modern project at its core is the transgression of limits in pursuit of control. Most modernity critics argue that what is lost in this pursuit is the wide range of essential goods that can only be enjoyed when limits are respected. Rosa does too, and his own catalog of loss stands out for its concreteness."
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In an essay that complements Smith's argument, Jon Schaff responds to a recent survey indicating Americans feel worse off than they did fifty years ago: "If this is true of individuals, that money doesn’t buy happiness, why can’t it be true of a whole society? Perhaps we can sum it up thusly: What does it profit a man to gain the world yet lose his soul?"
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Brian Kaller reports from rural Ireland about what happens when farmers put up silage rather than hay: "I’ve been talking to elderly friends here in the Irish countryside about what they used to do when the sun shone. The answer, of course, was that they made hay."
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Nadya Williams assesses the progress her students have made in the past year: "One learning outcome I had in mind for this academic year was to teach all students to close the bathroom door when using the facilities. Alas, we seem to have failed at this. But our Greek curriculum has gone swimmingly."
Hartmut Rosa's The Uncontrollability of the World really is a wonderful little book. He distills decades of thinking into a brief volume that's filled not with intellectual history and fine-grained sociological analysis, but with sharply observed comments on some of the paradoxes at the heart of modern existence:
This confusion of reachability and controllability finds perhaps its most consequential expression in the translation of our fundamental human desire for relationships into a desire for objects. Unlike relationships, objects can be thoroughly and reliably controlled. The logic of consumerism and commodity capitalism is thus based on responding to our unquenchable longing for resonance in the form of a promise of controllability, which channels the desires that guide our actions toward objects themselves. In effect, this corresponds to a process of fetishization. The qualities we desire—the ability to be ‘called’ and transformed in a way that allows us to experience self-efficacy—are ascribed to objects and commodities (cruises, desert safaris, Ayurveda cures, etc.); we seek fulfillment not through the uncertain, uncontrollable process of adaptive transformation, but through the reliable, controllable appropriation of commodified objects. But having access to and control over purchased products cannot fulfill the tacit promise of resonance. The magic trick that capitalism manages to pull off is thus to leave us as consumers constantly disappointed by the objects we have acquired, not so much that we stop desiring and purchasing them, but in such a way that we insatiably desire ever newer and ever different ones, in an infinitely escalating spiral of hope and disappointment (in which we never actually find what it is we are seeking).
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro