News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I believe we've had our last frost here for the year, so my pepper starts and corn seeds are in the garden, and spring chores are occupying much of my spare time. We've been having lovely weather, so it's a treat to be outside as much as possible.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about hipsters, cellphones, and Mondragón.
- Alexander Zubatov reflects on a recent trip to India and finds, despite rather extreme cultural differences, much to learn from and admire: "Something here was working in its way… and maybe more than just something. There was, we had concluded well before the tail-end of our journey, much here that was working very well indeed."
- Christine Norvell introduces some key definitions and themes from Josef Pieper: "I am convinced that the busyness of our age detracts from our ability to see the worthy work we do, to see ourselves as whole persons. Filling our days does not necessarily lead to fulfillment."
- Talia Barnes explores ways we could push back against the tendency for us to become the tools of our digital tools: "We might trade needing more for wanting what we already have. Maybe we accept the products we think we deserve. Maybe changing the status quo begins with realizing we deserve better."
- Alexander Salter reviews John A. Burtka's Gateway to Statesmanship and considers what makes for wise political leaders: "When we refuse to engage our fellow citizens, we are also taking a public position. There is such a thing as non-partisan economics. But there is no such thing as non-political economics."
- Christopher J. Lane takes a walk and ponders the nature of desire: "what would I do if I won one of those Really Big Lotteries? You know, a Powerball jackpot north of $300 million, or something like that. To my small mind, that represents vaguely limitless financial resources. Maybe, with inflation, you need $700 million. . . . So, good Porcher-daydreamer that I am, my fantasy preserved a semblance of the “Place” part of the slogan, even if it lost any true 'Limits' in its grasping for 'Liberty.'"
In honor of the John Lukacs issue of Local Culture that is on its way to subscribers, I thought I'd share a typically feisty--and brilliant--paragraph from At the End of an Age:
The confusion and the split-mindedness characteristic near or at the end of an age appears. Most “Conservatives,” votaries of what is still wrongly called “capitalism” and of technical progress, deny the need to preserve or conserve. Most “liberals” still cling to outdated dogmas of the so-called Enlightenment, unwilling to question the validity of “science.” This kind of schizophrenia is evident, too, among the Greens or environmentalists—otherwise an interesting and promising appearance of a movement that, for the first time in modern history, prefers the conservation of Nature to the inroads of Finance and Science—since the same “Greens” who militate in favor of laws and authority to halt the ravages against nature at the same time militate against laws and authorities that still claim to protect families and forbid abortions. The very word “environmentalism” is inaccurate and even misleading, as if mankind were one thing and its “environment” another. Instead of recognizing their unavoidable coexistence, many environmentalists are also anti-humanists, wishing to exclude all human traces from their cult of wilderness and wildness. They are unwilling to recognize how one of the finest achievements of the Modern Age—in its art, in its habitations, indeed in its civilization—was the gradual formation of landscapes, from which a human presence is not, indeed cannot be, excluded, since the ideal landscape suggests a harmony between the land and the signs of a habitation therein.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro