News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We tapped a few maples this week, and the warm weather is making the sap run quickly. Cold sap straight from the tree is quite the treat.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend pieces on Wendell Berry, urban planning, and gleaning.
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Jason Peters opens the forthcoming issue of Local Culture with a brief for civil dissent. If you want the full issue to land in your mailbox next month, subscribe by March 1.
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Paul Krause reviews Aaron Weinacht’s new book and argues that it is a needed corrective to the public misperception of Ayn Rand as radical capitalist. She was, first and foremost, a radical nihilist. Insofar as Rand embraced capitalism, it was secondary to her axiomatic nihilism.
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Robert C. Thornett turns to three recent books to consider what the geography of the future might look like: “At a time when ideologies and slogans often pull us away from the difficult task of finding realistic solutions and building a world together, the approach of these authors reveals the necessity of digging deep to confront the facts as they are and recognizing the complexity of challenging issues.”
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John Murdock issues a call for political leaders willing to put adherence to principles before the cult of personality: “If there is to be the equivalent of a Reagan following President Biden, he or she will face a more difficult task than the one leaders faced in 1980. Reagan only had to deal with the political ghost of Nixon, but a candidate in 2024 will have to deal with a flesh and blood Trump.”
This week our Wendell Berry class read The Hidden Wound. Berry’s writings on race remain perceptive and remarkably relevant to recent discussions around racism. I’m looking forward to his forthcoming book on this subject. In the meantime, here’s a passage from the end of The Hidden Wound on the nature of freedom of community life:
There is no safety in belonging to the select few, for minority people or anybody else. If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors’ prosperity and goodwill and, beyond that, in the good health of our worldly places, our homelands. If we were sincerely looking for a place of safety, for real security and success, then we would begin to turn to our communities–and not the communities simply of our human neighbors, but also of the water, earth, and air, the plants and animals, all the creatures with whom our local life is shared. We would be looking too for another kind of freedom. Our present idea of freedom is only the freedom to do as we please: to sell ourselves for a high salary, a home in the suburbs, and idle weekends. But that is a freedom dependent upon affluence, which is in turn dependent upon the rapid consumption of exhaustible supplies. The other kind of freedom is the freedom to take care of ourselves and of each other. The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.