News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
In the week since we canceled the fall conference, we’ve begun to list some hosts for smaller, local gatherings. Several groups of Porchers gathered last fall to discuss the latest issue of Local Culture and meet some nearby fellow readers. You can see who has offered to host a local porch here (and let me know if you’d like to be added to the list).
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In this week’s Water Dipper, I recommend essays about regenerative dairies, hydroponic gardens, and John Muir.
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Aaron Belz reflects on the life and work of Norm Macdonald, with some help from the great humorist Mark Twain. He concludes, “What all these profound culture-makers have in common is death-mindedness, which gives them the ability to fully pursue their art, because they don’t pay as much mind to the fleeting: the money, the fame, the critical disapproval.”
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As a new school year begins, Jon Schaff takes stock of the effects of COVID on education. Learning is relationship, and, if the point of college, as the very term “college” implies, is to come together for the enterprise of learning, that coming together has to be more than a name or face on a screen.
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Jason Peters introduces the fall issue of Local Culture by contrasting the traditional telos of education, what John Newman called “a great but ordinary end,” with the current emphasis on utility and constant social change.
I’m working on a book chapter that deals with Mark Twain. I really want to fit this insight from Walter Ong into my argument, but I’m afraid it’s not going to make it. I will at least note it here. Ong argues that when information is scarce, we rely on agonistic heroes to help us make decisions. When print technologies make information more abundant, decision-making can become more rational and objective:
Massive supplies of information or ‘fact’ inaccessible to primitive man have taken much of the edge off disputation, which throve on uncertainties or half-certainties. To a significant degree, if not always in perfectly satisfactory fashion, decisions, which earlier societies had to arrive at through acrimonious disputes, all the more agonizing because both sides were arguing from minimal stocks of information, can be prepared for by data processing on computers.
It’s hard to imagine Ong making this argument today! Social media has reintroduced many of the elements of oral culture, often with a twist. One consequence, at least, of an overabundance of information seems to be that we once again rely on pugilistic (celebrity) heroes to help us navigate a confusing and chaotic landscape and to know what we should think about a given issue. This doesn’t seem like a particularly great way of dealing with information overload, but we are limited creatures, and we can respond to this reality either well or poorly.