News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We’re in the throes of finals week in my neck of the woods, but I gave a talk this week on ChatGPT hosted by the college’s computer science club, and a good number of students came from a wide variety of departments. It’s encouraging to see students want to wrestle with the implications of AI and think together about the conditions that promote human community and wisdom.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend essays about David Foster Wallace, Brian Doyle, and Francis Fukuyama.
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Matt Miller draws on a Wendell Berry short story to imagine composing an essay as analogous to the art of loading brush: “The story presents a provocative philosophy of education that can help us navigate contemporary challenges in teaching writing, especially the problems posed by new forms of computer-generated text.”
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Anthony Esolen describes the costs of building and inhabiting larger houses on larger lots: “American liberals talk a great deal about assistance to the poor, but even if I concede their good will in this regard, I fear that neither they nor most self-styled conservatives want to reexamine the habits, both economic and sexual, that have impoverished the working class, set the middle class on the wheels of a machine that literally sends their extra income up the chimney, and eviscerated neighborhood life.”
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Jesse Russell reviews a new biography of Antonin Scalia that offers a “nuanced portrait of Scalia as an industrious and fair-minded Italian Catholic father and husband who worked his way from the streets of Queens to the ‘ivory temple’ of the United States Supreme Court.”
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Ben Christenson follows the advice of Nick Gray’s book The 2-Hour Cocktail Party and reminds us that fostering community doesn’t have to be complicated: “As someone who squirms every time I see a couple or family all quietly tapping their cell phones, a room of twenty people talking is a beautiful sight. It is easy to despair at our polarized and atomized society, but I appreciate Gray’s book for giving a clear, achievable step for building community and making friends.”
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In the latest episode of Cultural Debris, Alan Cornett talks with John Herreid. They discuss “the dying world of good used bookstores, what makes authentic art, and how to DIY your way to beautiful art on your own walls.”
In reading Wendell Berry’s Remembering this week for a class, I was struck by the parallels between Andy’s description of the value in practicing and defending good farming despite the unstoppable juggernaut of industrial agriculture and the value in practicing and defending human communities of thinking and writing despite the unstoppable juggernaut of artificial intelligence. Andy’s posture here in his argument with his editor at Scientific Farming inherits J.R.R. Tolkien’s attitude toward fighting the long defeat:
Andy wanted to hit him. They were not even in the same argument that Andy had thought they were in. It was not an argument about right and wrong ways of farming. It was an argument about the way things were going to be for the foreseeable future. And he was losing that argument. He was now on the side that was losing it, and he was furious. He felt his fury singling him out. And he was exultant. He stood, to discover that he was shaking.
For the foreseeable future, then, no argument would be effective against the blocks of economic power. Farmers were going to fail, taking the advice of Netherbough and his kind. And Netherbough and his kind were going to thrive, giving bad advice. And that was merely what was going to happen until the logical consequences of that course of success became intolerable. And then something else would happen. And who knew what?
But that an argument was losing did not mean that it should not be made. It had already been made and it would be made again, not because he would make it, but because it existed, it always had, and he belonged to it. He would stand up on it here, in Tommy Netherbough’s office, in Tommy Netherbough’s face. That it was losing did not mean it was beaten.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro