Greetings from the Porch,

I'm on the road this week to speak at a conference at the College of the Ozarks, part of the Work Colleges Consortium and, more importantly, home to the talented Matt Miller.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about enclosure, AC, and virtue.

• Casey Spinks warns of impending war: "We are mediated from war—largely because we are mediated from reality—now more than ever."

• David Bannon reflects on Wendell Berry and grief: "Wendell Berry speaks of death in ways few of us can express."

• Christine Norvell ponders the significance of a particular tree: "Wild yet humble, the sycomore fig is a remarkable symbol of the Christian life, beautiful in its simplicity."

• Russell Arben Fox reviews John de Graaf's new film: "Econoclast: Herman Daly and the Gospel of Growth is a short, earnest, and intense tribute to a tall, soft-spoken, and rather non-confrontational man."

• K.E. Colombini celebrates books: "Someday our children may read those shelves the way Ruth Swain read her father's—not as a catalog of books but as the story of a life, with all its detours and discoveries."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about war this week (and if his Dwight Macdonald readings pique your interest, be on the lookout for Michial's forthcoming essay on Macdonald).

I greatly benefited from Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. What a remarkably well-written intellectual biography of a fascinating and complex person and thinker. I’ve always been daunted when trying to read Wittgenstein—he’s gnomic, and I didn’t understand the shifts in his own thinking or the context of the debates he was entering. Monk’s biography gave me the context needed to better understand Wittgenstein’s writing. (Plus, what an interesting person! Thanks to his father, he was among the wealthiest Austrians after World War I, and then he gave away his inheritance. He taught at rural elementary schools in Austria. He urged his Cambridge students to go into medicine or the trades rather than pursue academic careers. He liked bad Westerns.) There were many threads I attended to, particularly Wittgenstein’s work on aspect-seeing, but one was Wittgenstein’s critique of “the idolization of science,” which he saw as, perhaps, “the most significant symptom, and perhaps even a contributory cause, of the decay of our culture.” What follows is a quotation from Wittgenstein and then Monk’s comment on it:

“Science and industry, and their progress, might turn out to be the most enduring thing in the modern world. Perhaps any speculation about a coming collapse of science and industry is, for the present and for a long time to come, nothing but a dream; perhaps science and industry, having caused infinite misery in the process, will unite the world—I mean condense it into a single unit, though one in which peace is the last thing that will find a home.”

“Because science and industry do decide wars, or so it seems.”

“The darkness of this time”, therefore, is directly attributable to the worship of the false idol of science against which his own work had been directed since the early 1930s. Thus, his “dream” of the coming collapse of science and industry was an anticipation of an age in which his type of thinking would be more generally accepted and understood. It is linked with his remark to Drury: “My type of thinking is not wanted in this present age, I have to swim so strongly against the tide. Perhaps in a hundred years people will really want what I am writing.” And yet, if “they” mean to do it, and the apocalyptic view is not absurd, then that time might never come. There never would be an age in which his type of thinking was wanted.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro