Greetings from the Porch,

Joseph Orso is doing a book tour this fall and winter for his forthcoming FPR book, On the Threshold of Worlds: Tending My Father Before and After His Last Breath. If you might like to host him for a reading and conversation on your front porch, or help organize an event at your local bookstore, church, coffee shop or other venue, you can email him at [email protected]. More details about the book are here.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about lettuce, Kansas, and burial.

• William Matthew McCarter describes the fate of the American redneck, whom the political system recognizes under two conditions: "It wants a scapegoat, or it wants a soldier. The rest of the time he is around mainly as a thing to laugh at, the punchline, the embarrassing cousin at the national reunion who shows up in the family photo nobody frames."

• T.M. Moore marvels at the gift of beauty: "We take beauty for granted, yet it keeps coming at us in an endless display of divine grace and power."

• Sarah Silflow recounts the meaning of seeing spring's first green grass while she was living and working in Russia: "After the cold and dark of a long Russian winter, spring had arrived. Its light awakened in me a longing for life. And in a patch of urban grass I found it—something ephemeral, yet real. Defiant in its changeability, welcoming in its vulnerability, arresting in its verdant beauty, it stood out as real in a world of crumbling artifice."

• Brandon McNeice muses on the maturation of taste via his account of how he learned to appreciate Leonard Cohen: "At some point, I stopped wishing the voice were different. What had sounded affected began to sound authentic. The joke was not separate from the sadness but one of the ways Cohen bore it. The song remained strange, but I had begun to understand what its strangeness was doing."

• Michael Sauter remembers David Cayley's remarkable life: "To me, his body of work for CBC Radio’s Ideas is the most remarkable sustained achievement in public intellectual life in the last half-century."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about change this week.

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time by Karl Polanyi is a landmark, and I finally made time to read and digest it. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book in which the stupidity of the concluding chapter contrasts so starkly with the brilliance of the first 250 pages. But the first 250 pages really are brilliant—they are full of insight and make some very generative and helpful connections between economics and politics. Among other things, Polanyi argues that industrialization and the rise of a market society turned land, people, and money into “fictitious commodities.” To operate well, self-regulating markets need these to be for sale, but putting them up for sale threatens to destroy homes and farmland, reduce humans to the value of their labor, and subject societies to disruptive monetary fluctuations. Writing as a refugee from the Nazis, Polanyi warns that if countries fail to protect their people from these market dynamics, they will create fertile ground for the evils of fascism. Net economic growth won't compensate for social chaos. His argument has provocative parallels to the challenges posed by AI technologies: is intelligence a fictitious commodity also? Can Britain’s failed nineteenth-century experiment with wage subsidies dampen the enthusiasm in some circles for a UBI? Here’s his description of why land is not merely a commodity:

What we call land is an element of nature inextricably interwoven with man’s institutions. To isolate it and form a market for it was perhaps the weirdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors.

Traditionally, land and labor are not separated; labor forms part of life, land remains part of nature, life and nature form an articulate whole. Land is thus tied up with the organizations of kinship, neighborhood, craft, and creed—with tribe and temple, village, guild, and church. One Big Market, on the other hand, is an arrangement of economic life which includes markets for the factors of production. . . .

The proposition is as utopian in respect to land as in respect to labor. The economic function is but one of many vital functions of land. It invests man’s life with stability; it is the site of his habitation; it is a condition of his physical safety; it is the landscape and the seasons. We might as well imagine his being born without hands and feet as carrying on his life without land. And yet to separate land from man and to organize society in such a way as to satisfy the requirements of a real-estate market was a vital part of the utopian concept of a market economy.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro