News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
If you haven't checked FPR's local porches page recently, you might want to do so. We've added a couple of locations in recent weeks, including one in Alberta, Canada. I'm spending this weekend at a gathering with lots of Wendell Berry readers, and quite a few Porchers, so I'm newly reminded of the goods of in-person conversations.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about being stuck, mud, and gentleness.
- Christina Bieber Lake responds to Words for Conviviality: "twenty-first century media technologies, with their relentlessly exploitative algorithms, are the same song, second verse. The difference is that the tempo has sped way up. We’re living the part of Lou Reed’s song 'Heroin' when the drug hits the speaker’s nervous system, except that our addiction is the dopamine that is always at our fingertips, a quick click away. Amped up this way, our discourse cannot but degenerate into soundbites and trolling. Anxiety and despair are inevitable. What can we do to converse together more convivially?"
- Russell Arben Fox reviews Laurie Johnson's The Gap in God’s Country: A Longer View of Our Culture Wars and finds much to commend: "American individualism, she argues, has been led to its current alienating and disempowering state by the way market-oriented and technology-obsessed thinking has come to permeate even the most basic institutions and practices of ordinary life—in our schools, churches, families, and communities."
- Judd Baroff interviews Ashley Fitzgerald about the possibilities for local action and the dangers of "spreadsheet brain": "Spreadsheet Brain is fundamentally a result of alienation. It is directly related to not knowing context, not knowing how land works, not knowing anything about ecologies, not having life experience outside of total machine, pavement, technological, high-tech mediated existence."
- Ben Christenson reviews Ross Douthat's new book, Believe, and dares to compare the New York Times columnist with a certain twentieth-century Oxford don: "They are public intellectuals in positions of influence who are irenic rather than polemical. Both write across many genres—essay, memoir, fantasy—and though Douthat is less didactic than Lewis, he is no less versatile."
- Evelyn Bence relates a parable of sorts about her fig tree, grown from one of George Washington's trees, and illustrating the complex vision named in Washington's favorite Bible verse: "George Washington frequently cited the biblical prophet Micah, who poetically described a future day when every farmer would sit peacefully under one’s own fig tree. Sometimes Washington was referring to his beloved homestead, sometimes to a land free from tyranny. In his letter to a Jewish congregation in New England, the sentiment bespoke acceptance and refuge, a place where 'none shall make them afraid.'"
“People, Land, and Community," collected in Standing by Words, remains one of my favorite Wendell Berry essays. It probes the interplay between love, imagination, and work in ways that Berry applies specifically to farming and marriage but that have much broader resonance. And near the end of the essay, he offers some wise words for those of us living in an age of artificial intelligence:
The modern stereotype of an intelligent person is probably wrong. The prototypical modern intelligence seems to be that of the Quiz Kid—a human shape barely discernible in fluff of facts. It is understood that everything must be justified by facts, and facts are offered in justification of everything. . . . This, of course, is machine thought. To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person’s intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings. We must suspect that any statistical justification of ugliness and violence is a revelation of stupidity.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro