News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
The snow here has given way to rain, and the warm temperatures have me pulling my taps and buckets out of the attic and preparing to harvest some maple sap.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about hospitality, AI, and rivers.
- Brad East offers some guidance for those who want to raise children who read well: "Is it possible, then, to raise readers in a digital age? I think so. ... Within varying limits, there are certain things parents can do to make it more likely that their children will learn good reading habits—even become lifelong readers themselves. Here are the ones that have worked well for our family."
- Nadya Williams bemoans the increasing prevalence of AI "helpers": " No question about it: For writers like me, who would like nothing more than to do our own writing and thinking with dignity and intellectual honesty, it’s becoming harder to write—at least on a computer."
- Campbell Frank Scribner draws prudently on the romantic tradition for educational wisdom: "Whenever sentimental and softheaded adults trap children in their own immaturity, it seems, Romanticism is to blame. These are all valid concerns, but they overlook an important, countervailing aspect of the Romantic tradition: namely, its attention to moral sincerity."
- Adam Smith commends the virtue of courage in our age of passive consumption: "All the virtues, even the intellectual ones, are in some way about action. Being virtuous is not about assenting to the proposition that it would be good to do good. It is about doing good."
- Evan Patrohay distills the biblical case for conservation: "The Bible tells us there is life within the Kingdom—life for us and life for what is around us. It is up to Christians and their families today to respond to this in humility and care not just for the people in our communities but also for the land we all live on and from."
This week, our Wendell Berry class discussed, among other works, his classic essay "Think Little." More than fifty years after it was written, it remains quite relevant in our age of digital slacktivism:
The Confucian Great Digest says that the “chief way for the production of wealth” (and he is talking about real goods, not money) is “that the producers be many and that the mere consumers be few….” But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers, and the chief motive is still the consumer’s anxiety that he is missing out on what is “in.” In this state of total consumerism – which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves – all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand. Most of us are not directly responsible for strip mining and extractive agriculture and other forms of environmental abuse. But we are guilty nevertheless, for we connive in them by our ignorance. We are ignorantly dependent on them. We do not know enough about them; we do not have a particular enough sense of their danger. Most of us, for example, not only do not know how to produce the best food in the best way—we don’t know how to produce any kind in any way. Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato. And for this condition we have elaborate rationalizations, instructing us that dependence for everything on somebody else is efficient and economical and a scientific miracle. I say, instead, that it is madness, mass produced. A man who understands the weather only in terms of golf is participating in a chronic public insanity that either he or his descendants will be bound to realize as suffering. I believe that the death of the world is breeding in such minds much more certainly and much faster than in any political capital or atomic arsenal.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro