News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
After a cool, wet spring, our garden is now nearing the peak of summer's bounty. I see lots of canning and pickling in my near future.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about markets, slop, and Alyosha.
- Christian McNamara describes the fate of a beloved local cinema and considers what a localist attitude toward change might be: "The demise of Cine 4 in its original incarnation followed by its resurrection in spirit in the form of the Flint Street Theater is an important reminder to those of us who cherish local institutions. . . . The preservation of local culture isn’t simply about looking to the past, but also about having a future-oriented vision for how to maintain what is essential even in the face of change."
- Adam Smith talks with Marie Glusenkamp Perez, a congresswoman representing Washington State's 3rd District who quotes Wendell Berry poetry: "I actually wrote to him, because you know his book, The Unsettling of America, was a retort to the 1974 Farm Bill, and I lived in that, in the Ag Bill markup. Yeah, I wrote to him, and I got to talk to him on the phone, and he said I was the first member of Congress to write him."
- José Marichal warns about the dangers of relying on algorithms that are necessarily detached from reality: "One insight I’ve gleaned from studying social media for two decades is that these platforms reformulate our ground truth, or the way in which we collect knowledge about the world. All data is an abstraction from the real, but social media encourages us to forget that lesson. Whether we are on social media or not, we use cognitive shortcuts to make sense of a complex world. This is why we have stereotypes and biases. AI models do the same thing."
- C. Ben Mitchell meditates on how the furnishes in old English churches (and indeed in all churches) shapes those who worship there: "I have become increasingly aware of the ways our furniture forms us, our imaginations, and our practices. The books, the kneelers, the altar, and the rails are visible reminders that the liturgy of these churches is the 'work of the people.' Those Christians who receive the Word and Sacrament are not mere observers, but participants in nearly all aspects of the service. The furniture is itself sacramental, a visible token of a spiritual reality."
- David Bannon ponders Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's response to his son's death: "Goethe once wrote to his friend Friedrich Schiller that he feels closest to nature when he follows his own nature. Now alone in the second story, he recalls wading through wet meadows by the Saale River, catching frogs with August when his son was eight years old. Past and present combine in a poignant arc. Goethe weeps."
An FPR contributor sent me a couple of books, including Helena Norberg-Hodge’s Ancient Futures. It’s a fascinating and sharply observed account of what she observed when she moved to Ladakh, a Tibetian region near the borders of India, Pakistan, and China. She learned their language and studied their culture, and then watched as Western-style development came to the region and unraveled their traditional way of life. Norberg-Hodge doesn’t romanticize their old patterns, but she does insist on a net accounting of the costs and benefits of development, and she critiques simplistic standards of judging “progress”:
Using Western yardsticks can be very misleading. . . . The limited nature of communication in Ladakh has . . . taken on a different meaning for me. The incredible vitality and joy that I experienced int he villages was almost certainly connected to the fact that the excitement in life was here and now, with you and in you. People did not feel that they were on the periphery; the center was where they were. Having the rest of the world through TV in your living room may not be as enriching as we tend to think. It may have just the opposite effect in fact. The idealized stars make people feel inferior and passive, and the here and now pales in comparison with the colorful excitement of faraway places.
I certainly do not want to find myself in the position of defending illiteracy. There is no doubt that the Ladakhis now need to be able to read. In our society, being illiterate in effect means being powerless. Because of ever-larger political units, we have become utterly dependent on the written word. However, in the traditional culture, the scale was such that if you could speak, you were in a position to influence decisions. Even if you were illiterate your power to decide matters affecting your own life was actually greater than that of the average citizen in the West. Illiteracy in the traditional context was not what the term implies in the modern world.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro