“The Abolition of Man and the Invention of a New God.” Benjamin Myers lays out a vision for educating students to pursue good lives: “Both Lewis’ book and Marlowe’s play remind us that any human attempt to be our own god results only in our demotion to something less than human. Our form of education is either an initiation into the permanent things—into the Natural Law as embodied in our traditions and institutions— or it is an act of destructive folly wrapped in endless experimentation with social engineering.”
“Bottleneck Institutions.” Adam Smith considers what institutions might do to form people to withstand the whirlwind of digital technologies: “Articulating context is traditionally the work of the humanities, and this might be reason for optimism, since that work is traditionally done in-house. But I’m not sure humanities professors are going to save higher ed from AI (especially when they’re cheerleading the chatbots). Many are simply too professionalized to do the work. We’re hyperspecialists in the texts of our fields, trained by our graduate programs to do our part by ignoring the whole, even and especially when our “part” is to place those texts “in context,” be it literature or history or philosophy or whatever. But the work of preserving the cultural context in which that intellectual work makes sense can only be done by turning our granular attentions from our books, which for many of us contain the world, to our world, which is less and less able to contain our books.”
“Why We Must Fight the Demise of the Essay.” Nadya Williams argues we should defend the essay: “What might be the repercussions for our society if the newer generations of high-school and college students—who will then grow up to be the next generations of workers, including writers—will not have any familiarity or experience with the art of writing essays? Considering the catastrophic decline we are seeing in literacy—the result of both ubiquitous smartphones and the availability of AI for writing—it is only a matter of time before the quantity and quality of writers capable of doing heavy intellectual lifting with words will also crash. This is bad news for all democratic societies. “
“Today’s Poem: The Last Warm Saturday.” Sally Thomas remembers the wry and wonderful formalist poet Jane Greer: “Or to put it another way, it was hard to imagine that anything could be serious enough to get the better of Jane. She had survived cancer and, more recently, had made a full recovery after breaking her femur, in an incident that she refused to describe except as stupid. That she might not emerge victorious from this latest fray was unthinkable.”
“Doomer Optimism Gathering.” The Savage Collective and Doomer Optimism are hosting a gathering in Ligonier, PA that would likely be of interest to Porchers: “We’ll tackle some of the most urgent and thought-provoking questions of today. Together, we’ll explore the far-reaching effects of technology, the promises and dangers of transhumanism, and the search for meaning in a world increasingly defined by machines. Our discussions will challenge how the Machine influences everything from the structure of families and our relationship with the environment to issues of personal freedom and social inequality, all while celebrating moments of creative rebellion. Well-known writers, thinkers, and activists will lead our conversations.”
“Wrong From the Beginning.” Philip Jeffery describes coming of age in D.C. during the heady days of the first Trump administration. But his youthful failures to define what exactly the New Right stood for set him up for disillusionment: “I moved to rural Pennsylvania and developed a strong distaste for conservative politics. I’m left to sort through what attracted me to the New Right, where it went wrong, and where I went wrong. The movement’s initial appeal relied on many observations that I still think are true. Liberal ideology and institutions are not neutral—they obscure and legitimate certain unequal power relationships. A healthy community cannot live on “common ideals” alone—the common good has to have some material component. Neoliberalism and the global expansion of American capital have indeed failed working people and the poor—and maybe that was part of the point.” (Recommended by Gillis Harp.)
“Viral Language.” Helena Aeberli reviews Adam Aleksic’s Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language and suggests the state of our language may not be quite as rosy as he believes: “Aleksic describes the spread of viral terms like ‘girl dinner’ or ‘my Roman Empire’ as akin to borrowing quotations and neologisms from Shakespeare. Except there’s one major difference: the Rizzler song is not Shakespeare. Percy Jackson is not the Iliad, and scrolling through a TikTok hashtag is not the same as deep, sustained engagement with a work of classic literature. “Content” and “art” are not synonyms, and “creators” are not always creative.”
“Why Blue States Can’t Have Nice Things.” Jacob Savage asks why some cultures can build and fix and run things and others just can’t: “what’s different about places that still work? Why can Salt Lake County run a gem of a community farm? Why does Boise, Idaho, have a well-regarded county-run tubing operation when LA can’t even subcontract out a zoo? Partly it’s the unions, it’s interest groups, it’s our degraded political culture; in some cases, the sheer size of these states or metros—all the standard Abundance stuff. But I’d push back against Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. The belief that good governance can be engineered—that there’s a correct way to govern, some set of magical processes that, if followed, will achieve optimal results—is what led cities to outsource core functions to consultants and nonprofits in the first place. And replacing one bloated public-private technocracy with a slightly more efficient public-private technocracy doesn’t solve this fundamental problem. The red tape isn’t the cause; it’s the excuse.”
“’Get Good at Being Gods’: Entrepreneurialism and Idolatry.” Anthony Scholle reviews Erik Baker’s Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America and reflects on how many of us have come to imbibe entrepreneurial values without realizing it: “As I read I found myself in the pages. Medievals reckoned the mirror as a device not only of reflection but of revelation. I found Make Your Own Job to be similar. It revealed myself and the cultural zeitgeist I know so well in its pages. Moreover, in reflecting myself in it, it revealed how much I have bought into its assumptions. I felt like the proverbial fish in that story asking his friend, ‘What is water?’”
“Against Self-Optimization.” David Zahl critiques our culture’s obsession with exceeding natural limits and optimizing everything: “Peruse the internet or talk to peers at a party, and you’ll hear a dozen new ways to consolidate your energy, maximize your efficiency, organize your priorities, and make life more manageable. We are inundated with things that promise to make us, as Daft Punk puts it, better, faster, and stronger.”
