News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
The spring issue of Local Culture is coming together nicely. If you want to gather with some other FPR readers in your area to discuss it, check our local Porches and consider organizing one yourself. Let me know if you'd like us to add your name and location to the list.
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about happiness, blues, and the Farm Bill.
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Nadya Williams compares Eugene Vodolazkin's view of history to Augustine's: "Vodolazkin’s critical vision of the Medieval Russian past is no different in essence from Augustine’s similarly sharp and un-glamorous vision of Roman history. Augustine’s contemporaries were longing for the glory days of Rome’s past. Yet in response, all he could do was debunk their idealistic narrative of Roman history, show the imperfections of that past in all its ugliness, and point his readers to the perfection of a future with God."
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Ben Christenson finds fatherhood quite rewarding, despite the warnings many people gave him: "Marital expectations are set sky high, parental expectations are set at rock bottom. With that setup, your spouse can’t help but disappoint, and your child can’t help but delight. But the reason those transitions are framed differently hints at the limits of the “life is about happiness” mindset."
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Michael J. Sauter speaks on behalf of an earthy, humorous, humble spirituality: "What lies behind all of these hierarchies and priesthoods, after all, and as seen in the seminal analysis of geniuses such as Thorstein Veblen, Tolstoy, Illich, Preparata and others, is simply that seductive feeling of being on top of another, to have it over others; this goes by the name of prepotence and is close to our ancient nemesis pride."
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Andy Stanton-Henry suggests some ways we might learn from the Amish: "The Old World values of solidarity, community, and mutual aid are central to this microeconomy’s success, as is the spirit of entrepreneurship. The combination of strong social ethics and entrepreneurial energy seem to be the secret to their surprising success. In the end, it was a robust practice of imagination that enabled the Amish to survive and thrive."
I had occasion this week to revisit Patrick Deneen's excellent essay on Wendell Berry's political thought in The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, edited by Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter. The book has several very fine essays, and Deneen's argument about liberalism, democracy, and Wendell Berry is spot on. Here's his conclusion:
The paramount virtue of democracy is and remains self-governance, whether called moderation, temperance, or prudence. Self-governance means, above all, the learned and habituated capacity to deny oneself those wants that prove to be limitless and to which we thereby can too easily become enslaved. For democratic citizens of modern times--taught by liberalism that human happiness is commensurate with the satisfaction of wants--we must begin the hard lesson of learning to distinguish between wants and needs. Being able to draw distinctions between desires that are rightfully sated and those that demand inevitable diminutions of liberty is only the result of a difficult apprenticeship in the disciplines of citizenship. This aspiration of liberty, and the democracy that is its result, receives no better expression than by Wendell Berry, today's leading articulator of democracy rightly considered:
Free men are not set free by their government; they have to set their government free of themselves. . . . It is a matter of discipline. A person can free himself of a bondage that has been imposed upon him only be accepting another bondage that he has chosen. A man who would not be the slave of other men must be master of himself--that is the real meaning of self-government. . . .
A person dependent upon someboyd else for everything from potatoes to opinions may declare that he is a free man, and his government may issue him a certificate granting him his freedom, but he will not be free. . . . Men are free precisely to the extent to which they are equal to their own needs.
Freedom is not in the conquest of the world but rather in the conquest of our insatiability. Only in waging that never-ending battle can a true path to democracy be struck.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro