News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We arrived in Santa Barbara in the wake of rain and hail and the midst of strong winds. But the sun came out, and I can see why lots of people with a lot of money move here. That dynamic, however, makes for some real challenges as the cost of housing balloons.
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Jeff Taylor reflects on what an Iowan can learn from living in Alabama and soaking up some Southern culture: “Agrarianism is more than the South and the South is more than agrarianism, but the two converge in a way that we don’t see with other parts of the nation.”
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Martin Schell relates the challenges of tending trees in the tropics: “A tended garden inevitably involves some choices, as well as planning which tree species will fruit better with more sunshine.”
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Mark Botts identifies the features of an inspirational speech: “Of all the speeches I have heard in-person and not in a movie, or play, recording, or manuscript, a few have reached the pinnacle of being inspirational.”
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Anthony Esolen remebers his neighborhood playground and commends the kind of neighborhood that develops around outdoor childhood play: “It’s children that make the neighborhood, and when children are outdoors, you’ll want porches in the front of your houses, so that you can see the streets where they often play, as we did.”
I recently finished drafting a book chapter about Frederick Douglass, and I find his complicated view of moral progress fascinating. On the one hand, he was well aware of the uneven manifestation of justice. But his life experiences predisposed him to hope for inevitable moral progress. Someone born into chattel slavery, who spent decades fighting for the cause of abolition and women’s rights, and then sees remarkable success and spends his old age serving the country that once legalized his oppression, has good cause to connect the technological developments he witnessed with moral developments. I can’t help but think, though, that a longer perspective, one that includes Reconstruction and Jim Crow and Civil Rights, nuclear war and surveillance capitalism, would have to acknowledge that the moral arc of the universe appears quite uneven and that technological improvements don’t necessarily correlate to moral improvements. Nevertheless, here is Douglass on material and moral progress (from an essay reprinted in this fascinating book):
Material progress may for a time be separated from moral progress. But the two cannot be permanently divorced. . . . Steam and lightning and all manner of labor-saving machinery have come up to the help of moral truth as well as physical welfare. The increased facilities of locomotion, the growing inter-communication of distant nations, the rapid transmission of intelligence over the globe—the worldwide ramifications of commerce—bringing together the knowledge, the skill, and the mental power of the world, cannot but dispel prejudice, dissolve the granite barriers of arbitrary power, bring the world into peace and unity, and at last crown the world with just[ice], liberty, and brotherly kindness.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro