News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
It seems to be a busy time of the semester with lots of talks, student events, and more happening here at Grove City College. And in a couple of weeks, I'll be in Texas to give talks at Baylor University (April 3) and Dallas Baptist University (April 4).
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about thinking, baseball, and eggs.
- Alex Sosler wrestles with the far-flung implications of how we attend: "Wendell’s Berry whole corpus reminds us of this fact: The way we treat the world is the way we treat each other (and vice versa). European colonists stripped Africa of human bodies that we called resources, and soon after, we stripped the land of life in the name of resources. We pillage the land; we pillage bodies. It’s a reciprocal effect that has generational consequences. I don’t mean to suggest that one day I stop noticing scarlet rosemallows, and the next day, I start killing people. But attention is decisive. It determines our lives."
- Nadya Williams commends reading with others: "The debates over whether audiobooks should count as reading or not reveal the default individualistic mentality that we, children of (post) modernity, apply to reading. In other words, whatever medium we use for ingesting books today, the overwhelming assumption is that we’re doing it alone."
- Elizabeth Hansen reflects on what it means to inhabit a home as she cleans hers in preparation for selling it: "I saved the trim with our four kids’ measurements for last. I took pictures. My husband made a spreadsheet of the dates, names, and heights. Still, I kept lingering by that one beam in our front room. Seven years’ worth of growth in this house, I thought. I couldn’t bring myself to wipe it all away."
- Josh Pendergrass takes stock of the televised drama that played out recently between Trump, Vance, and Zelensky: "We are experiencing a ... profound change in contemporary society with the adoption of screen media—television, the internet, and social media. As McLuhan states, 'new technology disturbs … any society so much, so that fear and anxiety ensue and a new quest for identity has to begin.' Our political and cultural convulsions are the result of us attempting to imagine new identities and communities in our globally interconnected screen environment."
- Graham McAleer turns to J.R.R. Tolkien for wisdom about how we might think about war: "Tolkien offers a cautious approval of brutalist buildings and a full-throated one of trees."
- David Bannon considers what words or acts might actually bring solace to mourners: "As a bereavement support group facilitator, I frequently hear of shockingly insensitive consolations, usually from within the mourner’s congregation. We make a list of the best and worst things people say. More often than not, entries under the 'No, they did not' side of the list sound helpful at first, but come off like variations of your grief is inconvenient to me or simply stop bringing everybody down."
Wendell Berry's Life is a Miracle sparked intense discussion in class this week. It's a rich meditation on scientism and imagination, on the proper relationship between knowing and doing. At one point, he addresses the social and political effects caused by professional elites who revolt (to use Christopher Lasch's term) from those to whom they are responsible:
The badness of all this is manifested first in the loss even of the pretense of intellectual or academic community. This is a loss increasingly ominous because intellectual engagement among the disciplines, across the lines of the specializations—that is to say real conversation—would enlarge the context of work; it would press thought toward a just complexity; it would work as a system of checks and balances, introducing criticism that would reach beyond the professional standards. Without such a vigorous conversation originating in the universities and emanating from them, we get what we’ve got: sciences that spread their effects upon the world as if the world were no more than an experimental laboratory; arts and “humanities” as unmindful of their influence as if the world did not exist; institutions of learning whose chief purpose is to acquire funds and be administered by administrators; governments whose chief purpose is to provide offices to members of political parties.
The ultimate manifestation of this incoherence is loss of trust—loss, moreover, of the entire cultural pattern by which we understand what it means to give and receive trust. The general assumption now is that everybody is working in his or her own interest and will continue to do so until checked by somebody whose self-interest is more powerful. That nobody now trusts the politicians or their governments is probably the noisiest of present facts. More quietly, people are withdrawing their trust from the professions, the corporations, the education system, the religious institutions, the medical industry. Perhaps no expert has yet assigned a quantitative value to trust; it is nonetheless certain that when we have finished subtracting trust from all we think we have gained, not much will be left.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro