News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We're in the midst of a lovely winter wonderland here in western PA. Last winter, we never had much snow on the ground, but we were able to go sledding this week, and the snow has been steadily accumulating. Warmer temperatures are in the offing, though.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about AI, bureaucratization, and NIMBYs.
- Doug Stowe reflects on the importance of educating students to work with their hands: "With the rise of Artificial Intelligence, it is more important than ever that we develop a common framework of understanding rooted in the senses—sight, sound, and touch—offline, in the real world."
- Elizabeth Stice wonders why boarding schools make good settings for stories: "If boarding school stories are exceptionally good at communicating certain universal themes despite the privileged setting, the lasting appeal of the setting offers some lessons, as well. The older we get, the more it is tempting to act as though the challenges faced by young people are somehow not serious. They are. They are serious even if those challenges are not new."
- Ben Darr reviews Toby Green and Thomas Fazi’s The Covid Consensus and evaluates their leftist critique of Covid responses: "Not only did the worst consequences of lockdowns occur in the Global South, but lockdowns were pushed on the South from the North, through well-known strongarm tactics of neocolonialism that have consistently pushed neoliberalism, austerity, and impoverishment on the South for the last several decades."
- Robert Jensen proposes a highfalutin teaching philosophy: "After years of research, I have developed a three-stage teaching method that breaks new ground in pedagogical theory: Stage 1: Pay attention. Stage 2: Be astonished. Stage 3: Tell about it."
- John Murdock introduces the humane politics panel from our fall conference. This one features Adam Smith, Mark Mitchell, and our fearless podcaster himself, John Murdock.
Micheal O'Siadhail's The Five Quintets has been on my list to read for awhile, but I finally got to it this Christmas break. Wow. It's a tour de force. In five long poems, he traces key people in the arts, economics, politics, science, and philosophy/theology. The sheer ambition of the poem is hard to convey; it's Dantean in its effort to encompass the cosmos. Consistently, O'Siadhail seeks human-scale, third-way options in the debates and arguments that crop up among his many characters. Take, for example, his conclusion about Jean Monnet, an architect of the EU:
Europe's greatest strategist of peace,
Gifted and constrained by his background,
Conjures up a common marketplace To create a cogent superpower
Where finance and labour freely flow,
Mirroring it's smaller nationhoods.
Must our peace now merge all difference?
Reader of newspapers but no books,
Jean Monnet the ideologist
Misses out on deeper bonds and ties,
Ligatures of tongues, a sense of place
Coloured by a common narrative History houses near our human core.
Union somehow yet remains unreal;
Orders issued, Brussels' one-fits-all,
Starred blue flag so dutifully raised,
Still not fluttering in our chambered hearts.
Heaven is no timeless superstate.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro