News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We spent the past week hiking in and exploring the New River Gorge National Park in West Virginia. It's a beautiful stretch of river with a rich history and culture.
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about the Rust Belt, ducks, and lanternflies.
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Rachel Griffis reviews Jessica Hooten Wilson's new book and commends its "case for reading both the Bible and other serious works of literature in ways that are nuanced, spiritually formative, and rooted in Christian tradition."
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Davin Heckman draws on Michel de Certeau to imagine family life as a place where we can practice a tactical way of making do: "If we think of the home as an organic alternative to the structures of the workaday world, we might first take steps to cherish it more fully and guard it more carefully against the incessant effort to transform it into a sad parody of public space. And in doing so, we might see more keenly those aspects of modern society which connive against our virtue. Secondly, we might celebrate the poetics of family life as a thing of beauty."
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Mark Botts considers the wisdom regarding friends and advisors found in Shakespeare's Macbeth: "Our best ally should not be a man or woman who lacks the aptitude to discern right from wrong... One should not draw unto himself or herself a companion like Lady Macbeth, for Lady Macbeth does not exercise virtue."
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Pepijn Leonard Demortier suggests we will find no solution to homelessness unless we first live in communities where we know and are known: "Economists and politicians will accuse me of using a sentimental argument rather than a scientific one. And to some extent my argument should be read in that capacity. However, what makes the point legitimate is that it shows that moral intuitions fade in modern, gigantic 'communities.'"
Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet isn't as detailed or insightful as I'd hoped, but it's still a good tour through six institutions that have organized and defined knowledge in different eras: the library, the monastery, the university, the republic of letters, the disciplines, and the laboratory. The story that Ian F. McNeely and Lisa Wolverton tell is a reminder that what counts as knowledge depends on socially shaped community standards. Take, for instance, this account of the distinction between Humboldtian and Pasteurian scientific approaches:
It is useful to contrast Pasteurian with Humboldtian science, for both made the world their laboratory and won public acclaim for their achievements. Humboldt emphasized the universal scope of science, by gathering data all over the world. Pasteur's method emphasized controllable replicability, by carefully establishing laboratory conditions and only then extending them to outside spaces. Why did Pasteur prevail? As [Bruno] Latour writes, his approach meshed with networks of social, economic, and political power--the farm interests, the government statisticians, the overseas colonists. To these powerful interests he added that of the laboratory scientist, who through microtechniques developed in a small room engineers macro-level changes that extend throughout the physical world. What Pasteur accomplished was in many ways a well-crafted illusion--his private notebooks reveal many cut corners and some outright public deceptions--but Pasteur's public relations know-how meant that he could mobilize economic, political, and social resources on his behalf, to get people to buy expensive sterilization equipment, to get governments to pass laws requiring certain treatments, to get people to change their most intimate habits of food consumption and cleanliness. Science gains its public authority by making amazing predictions, but only by turning the world into a laboratory can scientists establish conditions that enable them to say reliable, "This will happen."
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro