News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
This week has been a whirl. I’ve been grading final essays and spending every spare minute getting my garden ready to be planted. It’s also been a busy week on the Porch.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend essays on the end of the world, pawpaws, and local journalism.
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David Heddendorf articulates the precise nature of P.G. Wodehouse’s genius: “Forget the bulging forehead, the soaring ideas, the revered place in the history of civilization. Wodehouse’s is a modest, chastened genius, the genius of a flawed, child-like man of middlebrow tastes.”
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I draw on Jayber Crow to respond to some tough questions raised both by my students and by my friend Brad East: how should we respond to Berry’s vision of rooted membership when we find themselves in an industrial, technocratic world?
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John Murdock interviewed Chuck Marohn from Strong Towns in the latest episode of the Brass Spittoon podcast and discuss how engineers could better approach the task of designing traffic infrastructure.
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Andrew Figueiredo responds to Nick (see below) and warns that NFTs are simply not compatible with a healthy economy: “Chris Hytha is a laudable example of somebody civilizing our approach to digital assets, and I fully support him. I’m glad to see fellow Philly Porchers Anthony Hennen and Nick Russo elevate Hytha’s work, but I don’t see any way to align the Wild West NFT economy with Wendell Berry’s ‘Great Economy.’“
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Nick Russo offers a limited defense of NFTs and claims they can serve local communities: “The status of NFTs in the world of 2027 depends, in large part, on how well we’re able to incorporate them into our positive vision of the good. We can, and should, step back and question them. But to stay removed from the craze is to abdicate our duty to shape the future in accordance with our values. The NFT trend marches on: will we help to choose its destination, or will we resign ourselves to futile finger-wagging?”
I wrapped up a great semester of reading and discussing Berry’s writings with an engaged group of students. I didn’t incorporate this quote into my essay reflecting on the class, but it’s one I had in mind. In “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” Wendell Berry’s response to his outraged readers of “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” he addresses a version of the questions my students raised several times: If the systems are so big, and so powerful, and so corrupt, what’s the point of any individual act of defiance?
Some of my critics were happy to say that my refusal to use a computer would not do any good. I have argued, and am convinced, that it will at least do me some good, and that it may involve me in the preservation of some cultural goods. But what they meant was real, practical, public good. They meant that the materials and energy I save by not buying a computer will not be “significant.” They meant that no individual’s restraint in the use of technology or energy will be “significant.” That is true.
But each one of us, by “insignificant” individual abuse of the world, contributes to a general abuse that is devastating. And if I were one of thousands or millions of people who could afford a piece of equipment, even one for which they had a conceivable “need,” and yet did not buy it, that would be “significant.” Why, then, should I hesitate for even a moment to be one, even the first one, of that “significant” number? Thoreau gave the definitive reply to the folly of “significant numbers” a long time ago: Why should anybody wait to do what is right until everybody does it? It is not “significant” to love your own children or to eat your own dinner, either. But normal humans will not wait to love or eat until it is mandated by an act of Congress.