News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I have two FPR notes to lead off with this week. First, Sarah Soltis, who has served behind the scenes formatting essays for the website, selecting cover images, managing our social media profiles, and writing the occasional piece, graduated from Grove City College this past month. She’s stepping down from FPR to give her attention to other duties, but we’re very grateful for her able help the past eighteen months or so.
Second, registration is now open for our fall conference. It will be held in Madison, WI, and Paul Kingsnorth is flying across the pond to give the keynote address. Judging from early interest, we expect tickets will sell out, so if you want to join us, register sooner rather than later.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend essays about money, the wild, and the Metaverse.
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Ben Christenson mourns how Spider-Man has lost his local perspective: “Each reboot of Spider-Man since Tobey Maguire’s trilogy wrapped in 2007 has steadily replaced Spider-Man’s local concerns and moral depth with generic global or universal problems. While Maguire in the early aughts was content keeping New York City safe, Tom Holland’s recent iteration and the current animated Spider-Verse hero, voiced by Shameik Moore, are now saving the planet and the multiverse.”
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Will Hoyt turns to Tocqueville for help making sense of America’s disorienting political map: “Faith and reason aren’t opposed any more than freedom (the rallying cry of Patriots) and distributive justice (the rallying cry of social justice warriors) are opposed!”
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Will Caverly considers the benefits of living in the exurbs: “What I’ve just attempted to describe are the joys of the edge. Freedom, I believe, has a limited half-life when it’s in the heart of civilization. Anarcho-pastoralism means that there’s the most freedom near the edges, but freedom-lovers are ever in a struggle to move outward.”
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Scot Martin encourages us to bless our neighbors: “What’s stopping you from blessing your yard, neighbors, and neighborhood, your watershed, the land you drive over everyday? Bless the world, literally, and with your being. Offer it up to the one who has created it and cares for us all.”
Jean Bethke Elshtain’s Meditations on Modern Political Thought: Masculine/Feminine Themes from Luther to Arendt is a slim and incisive introduction to the core debates within political theory. In her concluding chapter, she offers some still-pertinent advice regarding how we might sustain healthy political communities:
This brings us directly up against Tocqueville’s conundrum: our very freedom may convulse us, may corrode the possibility of many coming together as ‘one’ by fragmenting the many into irrevocably disassociated isolates. What glue can hold us together and help us to forge civic identities? How are we to restore any meaning to citizenship?
First, although we cannot re-create traditional forms of community, we can nurture community’s living remnants—whether families, churches, neighborhoods, informal support groups, and associations. To do this we must get out of the house and into the world; we must resist powerful tugs toward privatization. Although women historically were defined as the preeminently private beings, the problem today goes much beyond (although it includes) the roles and identities of men and women. For modern consumerist societies push all of us toward the private pole, constituting us as takers and buyers rather than as givers and actors.
Second, and using powerful ideals from these meditations on political thought, we can challenge the modern technocratic worldview with its reigning utilitarian ethic which dictates that nothing is of intrinsic value; hence, there are no intractable barriers to social engineering and experimentation. Given our only too human cravings for order in a world that seems out of control, and in light of the capacities of a technocratic world (at least, apparently) to satisfy these cravings, will our compulsion to control eventually take over the entire public sphere? Democracy is an unpredictable enterprise. Our patience with its ups and downs, its debates and compromises, indeed its very antiauthoritarianism, may wane as we become inured to more and more control—all in the name of freedom. Freedom from the vagaries of our bodies. Freedom from chance. Freedom from fear of the ‘other’. But our engagement with political thought cautions that much can pass under the name freedom and it must be assayed critically rather than endorsed unthinkingly.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro