Greetings from the Porch,

It's graduation weekend, which means a flurry of activities and saying goodbyes to students who have become friends over the past four years.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about regenerative farming, Jonathan Swift, and Palantir.

• Mel Livatino meditates on what he calls "the saddest pair of words in the English language": never again.

• Elena Streett argues we shouldn't see machines as adequate relational substitutes for humans: "'Relationships' between human beings and machines are not real relationships because machines cannot relate to the experience of living a human life."

• Nadya Williams wonders what a locksmith's craft might teach us about attentive love: "To truly listen to locks requires the love of a locksmith."

• Ray Craig praises those who operate the scoreboard at Little League games and those who take up other communal responsibilities: "When the scoreboard lit up at my son’s game yesterday, it felt like a small miracle."

• Cameron McAllister recommends serving in the church nursery as one way to find your identity: "To gaze into the eyes of a helpless baby was to see my actual condition as a creature laid bare."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about salvation this week.

This semester I read through William Cavanaugh’s The Uses of Idolatry with several of my colleagues. Cavanaugh’s claim that modernity is defined not by disenchantment but by misenchantment provoked good conversations as we tried to apply his framing of idolatry not only to nationalism and consumerism—the two idols he discusses in detail—but to other sacred loci that structure our economy and culture. I was hoping he’d develop his core claims with a bit more cultural analysis; at times, the book gets bogged down in extended engagements with particular scholarly disputes. But it’s still a book worth reading and thinking with. Here’s a taste from his chapter on nationalism where he summarizes how nationalism can subvert localism in the same way that globalism can subvert proper universalism:

There are reasons to think . . . that devotion to the modern nation-state promotes neither a healthy localism nor a true universalism. To consider the former, there are problems with the straight line that [Dorian] Llywelyn and [Michael and Kenneth Himes] draw from love of neighbor to devotion to the nation-state. They associate the nation-state with particularity and localism, but as [Carlton] Hayes points out, the opposite is in fact the case: devotion to the nation-state is in tension with local forms of loyalty. The nation-state arises by usurping local forms of authority, self-governance, and loyalty. In Robert Nisbet’s words, “the rise and aggrandizement of political States took place in circumstances of powerful opposition to kinship and other traditional authorities.” The fundamental conflict of modernity, says Nisbet, is not between state and individual but between state and social group. Rather than incarnation, national belonging is a type of what Charles Taylor calls “excarnation,” the replacement of communion and embodied belonging with abstract “nomolatry” and bureaucracy. Llywelyn’s work is especially concerned with defending local forms of cultural particularity against the homogenizing onslaught of globalization, but the nation-state is in many respects an agent of homogenization and the destruction of local forms of belonging. As David Albertson and Jason Blakely put it, “Nationalist consciousness is not a local or natural affection but a monoculture engineered by modern states.” At the end of his book, Llywelyn laments the disappearance of thousands of threatened languages in the face of the global hegemony of English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian. But the process of nation-building is the enemy of linguistic and cultural diversity; the consolidation of French identity and the dominance of the French language in France required the ruthless suppression and death of Breton, Occitan, Provençal, and other regional languages. The pays is increasingly assimilated to the patrie through the cult of the French nation-state, the kind of civil religion of which Durkheim was a vocal booster. Nationalism, as Hayes points out, becomes the supreme loyalty over more local forms of belonging only through a long educative process and a kind of catechism in the nationalist religion.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro