News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
It's been a busy week around here. You'll notice our brand new website (more on that in my essay linked below). Many thanks to Dan Beltechi of Pilcrow for gifting us this well-designed virtual home. We also published Jason Peters's introduction to the new issue of Local Culture. Make sure you're subscribed to receive this issue in your mailbox.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about MacIntyre, classical music, and diapers.
- Russell Arben Fox reflects on the legacy left by the great philosophy Alasdair MacIntyre: "I don’t see how any English-speaking student of politics or philosophy from the past half-century could have avoided being shaped by After Virtue, his short and explosive argument against the then-prevailing assumptions of Enlightenment liberalism, which was published in 1981." Stay tuned for more essays on MacIntyre in the days to come.
- Raleigh Adams ponders how we ought to discipline ambition, and turns to Abraham Lincoln for a model: "Politics, at its best, requires those willing to risk greatness."
- Mark Botts describes the hands--and hearts--of some of his fellow parishioners: "His hands remind me of a topographical map. Even now with their nail scars, do Jesus’ hands bear also the marks that come with age and years as a craftsman?"
- Ben Henson explains why rural people tend to leave the keys in their trucks: "Trust in rural places isn’t built on virtue; it’s built on visibility. It’s knowing you’ll see the person again."
- Jason Peters introduces the new issue of Local Culture: "There is no law preventing us from being worthy pupils of the spring rains, the dead, and the plants. We can mind first principles; we can keep our hands off the principal."
- I give some updates on the state of FPR and reflect on the challenges and benefits of being an amateur "organization": "I don’t know what the future holds. Amateur operations are fragile and tenuous. But we’re grateful for a much-improved virtual home from which we will continue the paradoxical project of encouraging one another on toward love and good deeds in the myriad local places where we make our earthly homes. May the Front Porch Republic continue to be a movement that is a movement because it is advanced by all its members in their daily lives."
- Emily Harrison recommends that we start being honest about the dangers of unfettered screens: "How much longer will we prioritize a Wild West notion of freedom over protecting children and teens? The truth is, like cigarettes and alcohol, these devices are incompatible with healthy childhood development."
Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, originally published in 1952, saw the mechanized trajectory that the US was on in the wake of WWII. The novel is a quite perceptive examination of how people come to see themselves as machines when they give over all work and thought to machines. Vonnegut doesn’t propose any easy answers; he shows how all too often those who oppose technologies mirror the violence and blinkered-vision of the techno-boosters they ostensibly hate. (For another incisive dramatization of this dynamic, see Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake.) One of the Luddite revolutionaries, Lasher, articulates the effects of eliminating all useful human work and offering what is, in effect, a UBI instead:
“Things, gentlemen, are ripe for a phony Messiah, and when he comes, it’s sure to be a bloody business.”
“Messiah?”
“Sooner or later someone’s going to catch the imagination of these people with some new magic. At the bottom of it will be a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being needed on earth—hell, dignity. The police are bright enough to look for people like that, and lock them up under the antisabotage laws. But sooner or later someone’s going to keep out of their sight long enough to organize a following.”
Yet later one of the leaders of the technocratic government warns about the dangers of such rhetoric:
“Keep to your own side of the river, Paul! Your job is management and engineering. I don’t know what the answers are to Lasher’s questions. I do know that it’s far easier to ask questions than to answer them. I know that there have always been questions, and men like Lasher ready to make trouble by asking them.”
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro