News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Even though we had some snow here this week, I know it’s spring because baseball has returned.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend essays about barbarians, liberalism, and disinformation.
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John Fechtel argues that when we professionalize stressful tasks such as military service, policing, and others, we put undue psychological stress on humans: “We need to try to imagine a world that doesn’t destroy the humans who inhabit it. What does it look like to not make repetitive micro-damages to the minds and souls of our armed forces, our cops, our bankers and social workers and McKinsey consultants and nurses?”
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Dixie Dillon Lane speaks on behalf of risky parenting: “All of parenting is risky because nothing is more important to us than our children. And the decisions we make do matter, sometimes greatly. But if we allow risk to dominate our thinking and practices, we will become unmoored from reality and pass down this paralyzing anxiety to our children.”
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Elizabeth Stice weighs the benefits and limitations of brands such as Tracksmith that promote the value of community: “If Tracksmith testifies to our longing for community, it also testifies to the inadequacies of community built on consumer identity.”
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Henry George reviews a new collection of essays, including a contribution from the late Roger Scruton, on mourning and draws on his own experience living with a painful disability to consider how we should understand suffering: “The need to reconcile with one’s finitude and live as good a life in light of this was made clear by many of the more successful essays and tallied with my own experience of coming to terms with the limits on my life from my condition, both in an everyday and an ultimate sense.”
One of the joys of teaching is having the occasion to return to books again and again. I’m leading a group of students through Paradise Lost right now, and I’m newly struck by Milton’s warnings against an intemperate desire for knowledge. In our age of information abundance, the consequences that the angel Raphael describes here are very much in evidence:
what thou canst attain, which best may serve
To glorifie the Maker, and inferr
Thee also happier, shall not be withheld
Thy hearing, such Commission from above
I have receav’d, to answer thy desire
Of knowledge within bounds; beyond abstain
To ask, nor let thine own inventions hope
Things not reveal’d, which th’ invisible King,
Onely Omniscient hath supprest in Night,
To none communicable in Earth or Heaven:
Anough is left besides to search and know.
But Knowledge is as food, and needs no less
Her Temperance over Appetite, to know
In measure what the mind may well contain,
Oppresses else with Surfet, and soon turns
Wisdom to Folly, as Nourishment to Winde.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro