Greetings from the Porch,

We're still working to get issues of Local Culture printed on a more consistent schedule, but the "fall" issue is a beautiful one, and it will be going to the printer shortly. If Jason's introduction below makes you want to read the rest of the issue, subscribe in the next few days to get it in your mailbox.

• In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about attention, housing, and subscriptions.

• Jason Peters introduces the new issue of Local Culture: "Wading in a river and lumberjacking in the woods are at once work and play, play and work, and in this they resemble anything we might do for instrumental ends and yet, at the same time, take a great deal of pleasure in."

• Stephen McGinley praises the humble yet remarkable trust that underpins the USPS: "This stranger, rain or shine, snow or hail, more religiously than I prayed as a child, lifted the flap and dropped letters into my family’s home."

• Emily Harrison hopes for the possibility of a bipartisan coalition around protecting children from the toxins of screens: "The negative effects of digital poison can, as documented by Haidt, cause a sort of phantom anxiety and depression for an entire generation."

• Elizabeth Stice reviews Ken Burns's The American Revolution and articulates the value of good public history: "No filmmaker is as concerned with engaging Americans in our own stories and in our own democracy."

• Emily Ruddy relates how she came to listen and enjoy "secular" music again after a season of religious scrupulosity: "While I’m past the point of burning my records and musical books, and I’m no longer having to evacuate coffee shops because 'Sympathy for the Devil' is playing, I still struggle with that feeling that music is contraband."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about Los Angeles this week.

Charles Taylor's Ethics of Authenticity remains my favorite book of his. I've relied on his account there of authenticity as a relational, dialogical reality in trying to understand how Wendell Berry thinks about identity as arising from membership, and I've been thinking in recent weeks about his nuanced response to the dangers of instrumental reason. He acknowledges its many shortcomings but insists that its origins are in a commendable benevolence, a desire to make our care for others more effective. Elsewhere he works through Ivan Illich's corruptio optima pessima, so Taylor is cognizant of the way that institutionalizing benevolence can distort it entirely, but he also insists that we should want to help others effectively. In some respects, he may be making a point that parallels Iain McGilchrist: left-brain, instrumental reason makes a good emissary but a poor master. Here are two key paragraphs from Taylor:

Instrumental reason has also grown along with a disengaged model of the human subject, which has a great hold on our imagination. It offers an ideal picture of a human thinking that has disengaged from its messy embedding in our bodily constitution, our dialogical situation, our emotions, and our traditional life forms in order to be pure, self-verifying rationality. This is one of the most prestigious forms of reason in our culture, exemplified by mathematical thinking, or other types of formal calculation. Arguments, considerations, counsels that can claim to be based on this kind of calculation have great persuasive power in our society, even when this kind of reasoning is not really suited to the subject matter, as the immense (and I think underserved [undeserved?]) saliency of this type of thinking in social sciences and policy studies attests. Economists dazzle legislators and bureaucrats with their sophisticated mathematics, even when this is serving to package crude policy thinking with potentially disastrous results. . . .

What we are looking for here is an alternative enframing of technology. Instead of seeing it purely in the context of an enterprise of ever-increasing control, of an ever-receding frontier of resistant nature, perhaps animated by a sense of power and freedom, we have to come to understand it as well in the moral frame of the ethic of practical benevolence, which is also one of the sources in our culture from which instrumental reason has acquired its salient importance for us. But we have to place this benevolence in turn in the framework of a proper understanding of human agency, not in relation to the disembodied ghost of disengaged reason, inhabiting an objectified machine. We have to relate technology as well to this very ideal of disengaged reason, but now as an ideal, rather than as a distorted picture of the human essence. Technology in the service of an ethic of benevolence towards real flesh and blood people; technological, calculative thinking as a rare and admirable achievement of a being who lives in the medium of a quite different kind of thinking: to live instrumental reason from out of these frameworks would be to live our technology very differently.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro