News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I drove through a torrential rainstorm this week to attend a conference. Sitting around a table with thoughtful people and talking about important ideas in person is a real blessing. Sorry Zoom and Metaverse, but embodied conversation is an irreplaceable good.
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend pieces on boys, protests, and the Metaverse.
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Mark Clavier asks whether progressivism is sustainable given that "progressivism in its present form appears to depend on a degree of urban affluence that’s ecologically unsustainable. The reason for this is progressivism’s dependence on consumerism."
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Amanda Patchin reviews Rita Felski's Hooked and wonders what's gone wrong with academia to require such a defense of "attunement, attachment, engagement, and identification [as] necessary for properly considering artworks of all kinds."
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Mark Mitchell sorts through the controversy surrounding Joe Rogan and considers what the requirements are for healthy public discourse: "A decent society must be characterized by individuals who reject designations of class guilt and innocence, who are capable of seeing the image of God in the face of the other, and who are willing to forgive. The alternative is the will-to-power that, in practical terms, becomes the rage-to-destroy."
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Casey Spinks examines a genre of film he terms "forest rebel cinema": "In a world of frictionless unreality, endless abstractions, and tepid and timid loves, these films impress upon us resistance, difficulty, attachment, and the dire risk that attachment brings."
I'll conclude with one more tidbit from Berry's essay "Discipline and Hope." It remains an incisive, provocative essay that, with the exception of Unsettling of America, might be the most comprehensive of his essays. Berry relies in this essay on a fundamental distinction between a linear mode of a thought and a cyclical one:
According to the scheme of our present [linear] thinking, every human activity produces waste. This implies a profound contempt for correct discipline; it proposes, in the giddy faith or prodigals, that there can be production without fertility, abundance without thrift. We take and do not give back, and this causes waste. It is a hideous concept, and it is making the world hideous. It is consumption, a wasting disease. And this disease of our material economy becomes also the disease of our spiritual economy, and we have made a shoddy merchandise of our souls. We want the truth to be easy and spectacular, and so we waste our verities; we are always hastening from the essential to the novel; we will have no prophet who is not an acrobat. We want to have love without a return of devotion or loyalty; to us, Aphrodite is a peeping statistician, the seismographer of orgasms. We want a faith that demands no return of good work.