News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
It's been bitterly cold this week, but our pipes haven't burst, my morning bicycle commutes are particularly invigorating, and I even got out for a bit of ice fishing.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about media, meat, and life.
- Robert J. Joustra takes stock of the state of Canada. Drawing on George Grant's classic Lament for a Nation, Joustra finds something that the great Canadian intellectual, Justin Trudeau, and Donald Trump can all agree on—Canada has become "post-national": "Grant, too, argued Canada was a 'post-national' place, though it was less a cumulative success of sunny ways for Grant and more a graveside eulogy."
- Michael Jimenez reviews Jeremy Beer's new book on the unjustly neglected Francisco Garcés: "The foreboding sense of doom climaxes at the last chapter―things go from bad to worse quickly in the so-called tragedy of July 1781. [Yet] Beer reflects that some descendants of the Indigenous people that Gárces ministered to maintain a commitment to Christianity into the present. He closes the book with this legacy. Beer declares: 'If Christianity exerted no attraction for the O’odham, it should have died. But it didn’t. The O’odham themselves kept the friars’ faith alive.'”
- Grace Phan Bellafiore mourns the closing of D.C.'s Hotel Harrington and talks with OK Congressman Daniel Pae about what made it a special place. As Bellafiore asks, "When the everyday American visits Washington he ought to feel he belongs, so why let local businesses that infuse our capital with an Americana-aura of accessibility fall through the cracks?"
- Elizabeth Stice warns about the likely consequences of the growing legal and cultural acceptance of sports gambling: "With the current state of sports betting, companies have managed to secure a largely unregulated, highly profitable, vice-driven field of operations."
- L.W. Blakely considers what it might take to live today as a lover of wisdom: "As long as we do live philosophical lives and share in that life with others, we can sprout a philosophical culture from the ruins of the one dominated by the philistines."
I'm excited to be teaching a Wendell Berry course this semester and working through some of his writings with a group of thoughtful and engaged students. We're reading The Unsettling of America this week, and I was struck by Berry's prescient critique of what is now known as longtermism and effective altruism. These are simply new species of the old temptation to justify present neglect or evil in the name of future benefits:
What has drawn the Modern World into being is a strange, almost occult yearning for the future. The modern mind longs for the future as the medieval mind longed for Heaven. . . . The future has been envisioned, dreamed, projected, painted for us by prophets of every kind: scientists, comic-book writers, novelists, philosophers, politicians, industrialists, professors. And, of course, by ourselves; the cult of the future has turned us all into prophets. The future is the time when science will have solved all our problems, gratified all our desires; when we will all live in perfect ease in an air-conditioned, fully automated womb; when all the work will be done by machines so sophisticated that they will not only clothe, house, and feed us, but think for us, play our games, paint our pictures, write our poems. It is the Earthly Paradise, the Other Shore, where all will be will. And if we are living for the future, then history is on our side—or so we are at liberty to think, for the needed proof are never at hand. That there has for some time been growing a cult of dread of the future testifies not only to the innate silliness and frivolity of this vision, but to its power. The adoration of the future may be beginning to falter, but it is still dominant, still available and useful to the exploitive mind.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro