News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I've been enjoying the stocked trout stream that runs through campus. Catching hatchery-raised trout isn't quite the same as catching wild trout, but on the other hand, it's pretty nice to be able to dip a line in the water on my way home from work.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about conservation, inflation, and Boeing.
- Megan Brand treats pruning as a craft with implications for all of life: "Pruning is difficult because we are forced to make a conscious decision to remove something that has been part of a growing plant. But these cuts are necessary and even life-giving."
- Austin Jepsky wasn't impressed with the new Civil War movie: "I must say that I did not want to write this review. I walked into the theatre with high hopes for Mr. Garland’s Civil War. I was hoping it would sober people to the actual horrors that a modern a civil war would entail."
- J. Cameron Moore reviews Elizabeth Stice's book on trench newspapers in World War I: "These papers provide the means for understanding how imperial concerns shaped the way Entente soldiers perceived themselves and the war. But even more importantly to my mind, the papers provide a window into the human soul and how humor springs eternal in the human breast, even in the most inhuman conditions imaginable."
- Nadya Williams ponders the significance of our garages and the kind of detritus that tends to accumulate there: "No home but the Garden was there originally for man, once upon a very long time ago. No garage either was part of life before expulsion from Eden."
We finished up Wendell Berry's classic The Unsettling of America this week in class, and every time I read through that book, Berry's arguments seem more necessary and illuminating. Given my recent ponderings on AI, I particularly appreciated his discussion of the cultural conditions that make human intelligence possible:
A culture is not a collection of relics or ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its corruption invokes calamity. A healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, value, work, conviviality, reverence, aspiration. It reveals the human necessities and the human limits. It clarifies our inescapable bonds to the earth and to each other. It assures that the necessary restraints are observed, that the necessary work is done, and that it is done well. A healthy farm culture can be based only upon familiarity and can grow only among a people soundly established upon the land; it nourishes and safe-guards a human intelligence of the earth that no amount of technology can satisfactorily replace. The growth of such a culture was once a strong possibility in the farm communities of this country. We now have only the sad remnants of those communities. If we allow another generation to pass without doing what is necessary to enhance and embolden the possibility now perishing with them, we will lose it altogether. And then we will not only invoke calamity—we will deserve it.
A few pages later, he delivers this prescient zinger: “The future is the time when science will have solved all our problems, gratified all our desires; when we will all live in perfect ease in an air-conditioned, fully automated womb; when all the work will be done by machines so sophisticated that they will not only clothe, house, and feed us, but think for us, play our games, paint our pictures, write our poems.”
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro