News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Our washing machine broke this week (not a good thing when there's an infant in the house), and in trying to determine whether or not it was fixable, I had my first "conversation" with an AI bot on the phone. It wasn't a pleasant experience. Fortunately, we eventually found a local establishment with real people to work with.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about the essay, Jane Greer, and blue states.
- Michial Farmer considers the bizarre yet revelatory world of insects: "I can’t help admiring the people who, when faced with the squashing, squelching insect world that surrounds us, choose not to look away but to look closer. And maybe no one has ever looked closer than Jean-Henri Fabre, a nineteenth-century Provençal entomologist whose best-known work, Souvenirs entomologiques (translated into English as the rather less mellifluous Fabre’s Book of Insects) invites us to look closer, too."
- Christian McNamara remembers his father and imagines how his life might help us address today's crisis of masculinity: "How do men like my father get made? This is a question I find myself asking with each additional piece of evidence confirming the existence of a crisis that is afflicting American men. Metric after metric shows the perilous state we are in. . . . One need not believe in the Catholic (or any other) God to see in these trends a crying out for the purpose that a life oriented towards something beyond one’s self can provide. The manhood crisis is in no small way a crisis of our inability to make men for others."
- Gene Callahan turns to Socrates for guidance on how to engage bad-faith rhetoric online: "Although engaging in online discussions today is often vexing, it might be a relief to know that the problems we face are not unique to our age, and that Plato offered us a guide for how to cope with them 2400 years ago. Taking his prescription may not be any easier today than it was for his listeners then, but it might at least keep us sane and set us on the path toward truth."
- Elizabeth Stice challenges us to have honest conversations with our acquaintances who are turning to AI for companionship, information, and amusement. These choices are not harmless or neutral: "Many people say that AI is 'just like a calculator.' The people saying that are dramatically overestimating the calculator and dramatically underestimating market forces. Graphing calculators are remarkable; Texas Instruments knows what it is doing. But no one is pressing for their integration into everything. I don’t have to 'opt out' of using them on almost every computer program or platform. Companies are not constantly adding 'now with graphing calculator' to everything or allowing graphing calculators to perform decision-making functions, whether or not they are suited to it."
- Mark Botts does the seemingly impossible: find glimmers of hope in Cormac McCarthy. "Blood and violence and death are on every page; however, trace that which has fallen back to its original height, especially the moment in the barn where all the rough characters are aglow. Perhaps then the pale lights glimmering, for a moment, from these endarkened fictional characters will draw readers toward some good—not to the characters or to lesser gods or to human exceptionalism, but, rather, to that light which ruin seems to have overshadowed yet cannot dispel, the light that shines first and last and forevermore."
Paul Kingsnorth’s forthcoming Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity is a landmark that will provoke much needed debate and encourage, I hope, meaningful renewal. His talk at the 2023 FPR conference previewed some of the book’s argument, and I’m very much looking forward to hosting him at Grove City College this fall on his book tour (he’ll be here Oct. 7th—let me know if you’d like to join us and want details). I’ll have a review essay on his book in this fall’s issue of Mere Orthodoxy, and FPR will be running several responses to the book too. Suffice it to say that this is a book well-worth pondering. Here’s a taste of his approach:
Resisting the Machine requires a loud and clear refutation of the worldview that created it. It requires us to stand against Progress. It also requires an alternative worldview: something to stand for, and stand upon. Not an ideology, mind you, and certainly not a blueprint for utopia. That’s what got us into this mess in the first place. No, what is needed is something more old-fashioned: a stance. A place to stand, based on a particular reality. What is needed, in short, is an anti-Machine position. What should it look like?
Kingsnorth sketches out a “reactionary radical” tradition and concludes this section:
I have written already about the Four Ps—people, place, prayers, the past—which could be said to underpin traditional culture, and the Four Ss—sex, science, the self and the screen—with which Machine modernity has replaced them. A reactionary radicalism could be usefully defined as an active attempt at creating, defending or restoring a moral economy built around the four Ps.
This, then, is my idea of an anti-Machine politics. A reactionary radicalism, its face set against Progress Theology, which aims to defend or build a moral economy at the human scale, which rejects the atomised individualism of the liberal era and understands that materialism as a worldview has failed us. A politics which embraces family and home and place, loving the particular without excluding the outsider, and which looks on all great agglomerations of power with suspicion. The rejection of abstract ideologies in favour of real-world responses, and an understanding that material progress always comes with a hidden price tag. A politics which aims to limit rather than multiply our needs, which strategically opposes any technology which threatens the moral economy and which, finally, seeks a moral order to society which is based on love of neighbour rather than competition with everyone.
Amen.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro