News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Last week I had a chance to participate in a Hannah Coulter reading group with some local pastors, community members, and students. Wendell Berry always provokes good conversations, and it was a treat to read one of my favorite novels again in the company of some earnest and thoughtful readers.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about hacking, splendor, and the Dakotas.
- Matt Miller imagines how to live and write in exile from his native place: "I have long felt a sense of calling to love and care for my overlooked home state. But I’m bound to admit that providence and my own choices have ordered my steps toward another calling, not of the homecomer but of the exile."
- Matthew Smith draws parallels between vampires, Moloch, and AI: "AI is peak Moloch, the thin ice on which we crunch. Just as Cold War proliferation of nuclear weaponry created the zero-sum game of MAD (Mutually-Assured Destruction), AI raises a game of existential chicken between big tech corporations and nation states. The usual laws of supply-and-demand do not apply. Opinion polls show massive public mistrust of artificial intelligence. AI developers sound the alarm against the very technology they unleashed. Nobody wants this; everyone sprints toward it."
- Judd Baroff interviews Ashley Fitzgerald about raising un-anxious children in a Chicago neighborhood: "I went to Uruguay and I found the same kind of community that I left, which was a community of people who were working class enough that they needed each other. People are interdependent by necessity, and it’s crazy because I went all the way across the world to find what I came from, and I was slowly realizing this during my seven years there. I realized — wait, actually everything I was looking for I have already at home."
- Peter Biles wrestles with the insidious vice of envy that haunts those who aspire to excel in a given art: "Only recently have I forced myself to realize that the green-eyed monster is not a far-off specter in my own life. It is an uncomfortably close and grubby roommate, clamoring in the next room, never leaving me alone."
- Jon Schaff reviews Andrew Willard Jones’s The Church Against the State: On Subsidiarity and Solidarity: "Those concerned with the aggressive liberalism of our day while pondering what a Christian politics might look like will benefit from Jones’s expansive knowledge. This book serves as a warning to those Christians who wish to 'heighten the contradictions,' to use the tactics of the hostile Left against the Left, who see politics as an 'us against them' fight to the death."
Charles C. Mann’s 1491 is quite fascinating. I particularly enjoyed his close attention to the shifting interactions between Indians and their places and ecological communities. He describes the importance of the development of maize at great length, and he also argues that the abundance of animals such as the passenger pigeon and the bison encountered by early settlers were not natural but the result of the previous collapse of Indian populations due to the introduction of European diseases:
The pigeon should indeed stand as a rebuke and a warning. But if archaeologists are right it should not be thought of as a symbol of wilderness abundance. . . . When disease swept Indians from the land, [their] entire ecological ancien régime collapsed. Hernando De Soto’s expedition staggered through the Southeast for four years in the early sixteenth century and saw hordes of people but apparently didn’t see a single bison. (No account describes them, and it seems unlikely that chroniclers would have failed to mention sighting such an extraordinary beast.) More than a century later the French explorer La Salle canoed down the Mississippi. Where De Soto had found prosperous cities La Salle encountered “a solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of man,” wrote the nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman. Everywhere the French encountered bison, “grazing in herds on the great prairies which then boarded the river.” When Indians died, the shaggy creatures vastly extended both their range and numbers, according to Valerius Geist, a bison researcher at the University of Calgary. “The post-Columbian abundance of bison,” in his view, was largely due to “Eurasian diseases that decreased [Indian] hunting.” The massive, thundering herds were pathological, something that the land had not seen before and was unlikely to see again.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro