News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
The last copies of the spring issue of Local Culture hit the mail this week. They should be arriving soon in subscriber mailboxes.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend essays on college, conservation, and computers.
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Laurie Johnson describes the efforts that The Maurin Academy makes to foster the vision that Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day had: “We take to heart Maurin’s call to foster the three C’s of ‘cult, culture and cultivation.’ We want to do this in a way accessible for 21st-century people who get much of their information and even social engagement online. Part of the puzzle we want to solve is how to join that tendency to genuine local action and face-to-face friendship. We are not nostalgic in our approach, and we do not reject technology per se, though we are deeply critical of modernity and the harm of the prevailing dominance of machines and technocracy over man.”
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Dixie Dillon Lane probes the real reasons why students are tempted to cheat: “we will not improve our students’ honesty just by figuring out a way to identify AI-written essays. They will just continue to find better and better ways to cheat. Improvements in honesty will only come when we can give our students tools to overcome their crippling fear of being average.”
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Max Longley reviews Kermit Roosevelt’s The Nation that Never Was and tackles debates about how we should view the founding era: “After excluding less plausible interpretations like Roosevelt’s, I think the Old Testamentish version of the Founding is the most defensible: the Founders left us some good principles which later were often disregarded, but which brave men and women in later eras fought for, often with success.”
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McKenna Snow considers what makes a farm beautiful: “In order to heal this relationship between man and the land he cultivates, man must allow beauty to return to the farm. Farms can be beautiful, because they can facilitate both the orderliness of farming and the creative liberties inherent in nature. Farms do not have to drive the birds, bugs, and weeds away. Instead, they can strive to learn why they come, why they are there.”
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In the latest episode of Cultural Debris, Alan Cornett talks with Ferenc Hörcher about Roger Scruton, and in particular Scruton’s ties to Central Europe.
Ed Yong’s An Immense World explores the variegated and impressive array of senses by which different animals experience the world. It’s a fabulous book, in both senses of that word: some of these abilities really do seem mythical. And in a culture that is increasingly, as Wendell Berry writes, calling the mind “out of the world, out of the neighborhood, out of the body” to locate it in digital hardware, Yong’s account reminds us that intelligence is an embodied reality: “An animal’s sensory world is the result of solid tissues that detect real stimuli and produce cascades of electrical signals. It is not separate from the body, but of it. You can’t simply imagine how a human mind would work in a bat’s body or an octopus’s, because it wouldn’t work.” As merely one example of a different perceptual reality, take dolphins:
[Researchers] realized that dolphin sonar was even more impressive than anyone had guessed. Dolphins could discriminate between different objects based on shape, size, and material. They could distinguish between cylinders filled with water, alcohol, and glycerine. They could identify distant targets from the information in a single sonar pulse. They could reliably find items buried under several feet of sediment, and they could tell if those objects were made of brass or steel—feats that no technological sonar can yet match. To date, “the only sonar that the Navy has that can detect buried mines in harbors is a dolphin,” Au says. . . .
Dolphins can also echolocate on a concealed object and then recognize the same object visually—even on a television screen. This might seem like an obvious feat, but stop to consider what it involves. The animal isn’t just working out the object’s position but constructing a mental representation of that object, which can be translated to its other senses. And it’s doing that with sound—a stimulus that doesn’t naturally carry rich, three-dimensional information. If you heard a saxophone, you might recognize the instrument and work out where its music is coming from, but good luck predicting is shape from sound alone. You could, however, touch a saxophone and get a solid impression of what it should look like. So it is with echolocation. This sense is often described as “seeing with sound,” but you could just as easily think of it as “touching with sound.” It’s as if a dolphin is reaching out and squeezing its surroundings with phantasmal hands.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro