Tag: nature
Mill, Hayek, and Our Midas Plight
Call it Factory Planet: a world in which natural processes are treated as parts of a vast world-machine operated to produce a maximum amount of wealth for humans.
Last Call at Descartes’ Bar and Grill
Washington, Connecticut. The urge, some might say mania with which our species has attempted to distance itself from Nature is a defining occupation and...
A Long, Long Row
“Hontar: We must work in the world, your eminence. The world is thus.
Altamirano: No, Señor Hontar. Thus have we made the world. Thus have...
Of Games, Gadgets, and God
Coeur d'Alene, ID. One evening our family and two cousins were playing Uno. It’s a simple game requiring nothing more than a deck of...
Descartes, Algebra, and Alienation
Democratizing eighth-grade algebra promotes social justice. (Brookings Institution)
Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization. Complete analogy. (Simone Weil)
Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. ...
Brave New World Reconsidered: A Tale of Two Gnosticisms
Many who are alarmed at the prospect of the “abolition of man” have found in Huxley’s Brave New World a dark and salutary warning...
Science and the Spirit in an Age of Hostile Presumption
Washington, CT. Winter was a hard-nosed professional this season just past. It sunk its icy teeth in long and hard and mocked us with...
Why we do not own a Television
April was "Media Awareness Month" at our sons' school. I took a couple weeks off from the Porch, and I also published a...
The Wise Old Œconomist
Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. Before it became a science of supply and demand and the circulation of commodities, economics was originally understood as the...
Crunchy Pope, Part Two: Against Gnostic Economics
The obscuring of the faith in creation is a fundamental part of what constitutes modernity.
As I survey all the perplexing shifts in the spiritual...