News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
This past week I signed a contract with Baylor Press to publish a book considering how imaginative responses to the challenges of industrial print might help us wisely navigate the challenges of today’s digital media ecosystem. I’ve got a busy year of writing ahead of me, but I’m excited to see this project–which I’ve been working on for about a decade now–near the finish line.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend essays on Luddite teens, George MacDonald, and “The Waste Land.”
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Tom Jones mourns the past decades of development in Manchester that have turned this once distinctive city into a bland outpost of consumerism. It is now in grave danger of becoming a “non-place”: “Taking advantage of a wave of regeneration and rebranding that took place in post-industrial cities during the late 2000s they have slowly sterilised our spaces, replacing individual, localised businesses and spaces en masse. Nowhere is this most true—or more apparent—than in Britain’s first successful post-industrial city, Manchester.”
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Nadya Williams reflects the often adversarial relationship between humans and other animals, and she looks forward to the coming peaceable kingdom: “But the promise of the coming of the Messiah is that all these animals will be changed from enemies of the human race into its friends, or at least comfortable and tolerant neighbors. This promise sheds, furthermore, a different light on the present discomfort that some of us may feel over the invading much-maligned bugs and wildlife.”
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Gillis Harp reviews Rodney Clapp Naming Neoliberalism and finds it mostly helpful: “Clapp’s ambitious study attempts a great deal within a comparatively brief compass. Unfortunately, some topics suffer as a result…How can one best understand the tension between individual moral responsibility (rooted in Protestantism) and an individual liberty which rejects external constraints?”
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Bill Lueders writes a letter to Wendell Berry in which he wrestles with Berry’s unflinching refusal to use a computer: “We can agree that many technological ‘advances’ have objectively done more harm than good, in terms of the human condition as well as the Earth, and that we face a bleak scenario of looming catastrophe. But this doesn’t mean that there is no way out.”
I recently revisited Gracy Olmstead’s delightful interview with Wendell Berry. Berry’s reference to his affinity for John Lukacs’s definition of a reactionary sent me to Lukacs’s Confessions of an Original Sinner. This paragraph describing his political posture is quite refreshing:
A reactionary considers character but distrusts publicity; he is a patriot but not a nationalist; he favors conservation rather than conservatism; he defends the ancient blessings of the land and is dubious about the results of technology; he believes in history, not in Evolution. To be a reactionary in the second half of the twentieth century has every possible professional and social disadvantage. … [He briefly defines Progress and explains what a reactionary is reacting against]: a reaction against such inanities as Human Rights Amendments and ‘Star Wars’; Sex Education and the Intelligence Community (whatever that is); World Government and Making the World Safe for Democracy; Abstract Art and the Gross National Product; Nuclear Power and Genetic Engineering; Quarks and Black Holes; Ecumenicism and The Science of Economics; Cybernetics and National Security; Computer Intelligence and Opinion Research; Psychohistory and Quantification, and so on and so on. Note that the reactionary distrust of such things transcends the now increasingly outdated and even senseless categories of ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal.’ It marks, rather, a commonsense way of thinking against the abstract projections of progressive nonthinking.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro