News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
It's been a busy week on the porch. Without further ado, here are the highlights:
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In my weekly Water Dipper, I recommend essays about the infrastructure bill, Paul Kingsnorth, and which books you shouldn't read in public.
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S. Adam Seagrave, writing as a self-described "card-carrying Lockean liberal," makes what is perhaps a counterintuitive argument: "Front porch republicanism should be the logical conclusion of our times for communitarians, liberals, progressives, libertarians, and conservatives."
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Joshua Pauling argues that "for the sake of human formation and flourishing, it is essential to carve out sanctified spaces of peace and refuge away from the mesmerizing pull of screens." He shares how he accomplishes this in his classroom.
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Michael Sauter reviews David Cayley's new intellectual biography of Ivan Illich. He also recorded a fascinating conversation with Cayley about Illich and his enduring insights.
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Henry Chappell, a Texan novelist himself, takes stock of Larry McMurtry's contributions to Texan literature: "As much as he despised literary provincialism and argued for a turn from rural to urban literature, his focus remained on Texas."
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Alan Cornett chats with Pedro Mendes about classic menswear in an age of Zoom.
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A group of Porchers is hosting a virtual discussion of Nathan Schneider’s 2018 Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That is Shaping the Next Economy.
What's on the docket for next week? A review of the new PBS documentary on Hemingway, a meditation on rural pastoral care and cultural competence, a consideration of the paradoxical relationship to place that has defined American communities, and an account of how a reader fell out of love with Whitman's poetry.
Last week I quoted a couple of paragraphs from Ursula Franklin's "Every Tool Shapes the Task: Communities and the Information Highway." Later in the essay, she makes another point about the Internet and the loss of the commons that I continue to mull over:
What I most fear about the current developments is not the infiltration of the Internet. My first and profound fear is the restructuring of work that electronic media technology brings. We should not forget that more and more people have no meaningful work, and that this is particularly difficult for young people. My second fear is that when the community and individuals begin to really get hooked on the Internet, using it and enjoying the virtual communities they create, we are shifted away from what is probably our most treasured possession: the notion of the common good.
If you want to grow a cactus from seed or have sightings of the Virgin Mary, you will find people who have grown cacti or had visions of the Virgin on the Internet. This is nice, but the optimizing of the private creates a fragmentation that runs parallel to the fiscal privatization that takes away from public space. We might think that cyberspace is a public space. But let’s think about oceans. The oceans used to be a world resource that didn’t belong to anyone. So everybody dumped their garbage in the sea. The potential of cyberspace as a global dump is quite substantial.