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Sagging Porches
Friday, December 3, 2010, 5:16 PM

At one time the website Front Porch Republic stood as a shining light, celebrating an open and public discussion of the limits of government, the intrinsic necessity of conceiving of ‘place’ in the human drama, and the acknowledgement of ‘liberty’ as a requirement inherent in the notion that human discourse is an essential element in the total dimensions of human existence.

FPR has a brilliant stable of writers/thinkers and for a very long time provided an exciting and ebullient discourse that drew some very intelligent people into a vibrant and often erudite discussion.

Somewhere along the line FPR derailed. To be honest, I’m not sure exactly when but it seems that the overall tone of the website moved away from the ideas and principles of republicanism and toward some ‘second reality’ predicated on a derailed and perverse statism.

Surely there were other signs: the webmaster (or someone) took to ‘deleting’ comments found unacceptable without notifying the offender, posts that were judged to be too “conservative” were ordered edited, the shift away from republicanism became apparent particularly in Dr. Medaille’s blogs explicating Catholic Distributism which appears to require a ground defined by the idea of an elite, consolidated regime that would nuture and subsidze (among others) the valorous subsistence farmer, where the subsistence farmer would now become the beneficiary of the transfer of wealth, the Welfare Queen of the new, wholistic and Earthcentric, Regime.

‘Conservatives’, both bloggers and commentors have abandoned FPR, perhaps reaching denuoement with the withdrawal of arguably their most important writer/thinker, Caleb Stegall, this week. It appears Mr. Stegall withdrew in protest to Dr. Medaille’s latest post.

I’m no expert on internet ‘blogs’. I assume the problems related to FPR are yet another and ongoing example of the human condition but it seems to me that given the outstanding beginning and the stated objectives of this crew of intellectuals and academics they could have succeeded, grounded as they are, on Bill Kauffman’s ideas of ‘place, limits, and liberty’, ideas that are inherently celebrated and revered in the American psyche, ideas that by their very definition reject the derailed foreign ideologies dominating modernity.

Perhaps FPR has fallen victim to what a friend referred to as “socialist succotash!”


Gnostic Meditations and other stuff!
Wednesday, October 27, 2010, 8:53 PM

Here are some insightful excerpts from, “Secret Cinema: A Gnostic Vision in Film,”  a book by Wake Forest University English Professor, Eric Wilson:

http://www.voegelinview.com/secret-cinema-gnostic-film-pt1.html

Professor Peters, a clever writer and provocateur at The Front Porch Republic defines a ‘gnostic’ as an individual not very happy with reality. And, I like that definition very much, though it’s lacking in depth.

What has me pouring over my Stein is Voegelin’s comment in “The New Science of Politics” that:

“Gnostic movements were not satisfied with filling the vacuum of civil theology; they tended to abolish Christianity. In the earlier phases of the movement the attack was still disguised as Christian “spiritualization” or “reform”; in the later phases, with the more radical immanentization of the eschaton, it became openly anti-Christian. As a consequence, wherever gnostic movements spread they destroyed the truth of the open soul; a whole area of differentiated reality that had been gained by philosophy, and Christianity was ruined.”

The above strikes me as an explication or the denouement of (tensional movement?) evil in a derailed world-immanent reality, where that truth that addresses the question of the order of the soul is ‘repressed,’ and the spiritual effort as Voegelin says, is to destroy that order (soul). Perhaps, it is best understood as that pneumopathology, that infection of the spirit, that inhibits and interrupts and acts on the transition of the modes of being from potentiality to actuality revealed in the mode of ‘time and temporal existence.’ (See Edith Stein’s “Finite and Infinite Being 38-9). 

I’m going to take Martha and go see M. Night’s latest, “Devil.”

“All creatures,” St. Edith writes,”have a triune structure as substances that stand upon themselves and that are filled with meaning and power. And all self-dependent structures pertain to a triune (body-soul-spirit) unfolding of their being.”


David Brooks Goes Wobbly on Suburbs
Wednesday, July 7, 2010, 1:49 PM

“Whatever the reason,” writes Prof. Deneen, clearly sporting for another round of epic battle, “it’s good news indeed. Score 1 for FPR, zero for the PoMoCons.” But Brooks’ defense of the suburbs was wrongly grounded. Here’s why we know better and shouldn’t waver.


Joe Escalante on Restoring Faith
Tuesday, June 8, 2010, 10:06 AM

Let’s take the solemn dress code away from the Goths, the Rosaries away from the gangs, the blood & death fixation away from the scene-kids, the art away from the academics, the Latin away from the Harry Potter geeks, the bi-location away from Siegfried & Roy, the exorcisms away from Art Bell, the Angels away from Hollywood, the bling away from the players, the stigmatas away from the Arquettes, and the ghosts away from the new agers. In Denver there’s a beautiful downtown cathedral called the Church of the Holy Ghost. Who’s not curious about what goes on in there?

Read it all.


“Chosen, But Not Special”
Saturday, June 5, 2010, 8:22 PM

I find this Michael Chabon op-ed, written in the wake of Israel’s interception of the Gaza flotilla, to be remarkable, and not in a good way. A few extremely cleverly oblique references to God, while the figure who identifies that God rather than merely naming him — guess who? — is comprehensively repressed. Chabon apparently wants his fear to be taken seriously that inside any gentile who dares suggest Jews evolved themselves extra-big brains must be an anti-Semite. So fine: I don’t think Jews have been hated, or continue to be hated, because they’re crafty, Mr. Chabon. It’s not because they’re “the people of Maimonides, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and Meyer Lansky.” It’s because they’re the people of Moses.


A Unity for the Good: Benedict’s Rhetoric and Economic Thought as Social Solidarity
Tuesday, May 25, 2010, 10:21 AM

In response to the Rhetoric Society of America’s inquiry – what are Pope Benedict’s reasons for positioning the Catholic Church as an essential link between enterprise and justice, and as a significant voice in the public discussion of globalization – I suggest a “spiritual argument of restoration.”

Leaders of the Catholic Church since the rise of industrialization have affirmed the rights of labor. An argument could be made that without Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which criticized communism and capitalism while supporting private property and the growth of unions, Western labor movements would have been weaker. Such teachings have strongly recurrent themes: an emphasis upon the human person, the dignity of work, and the importance of community. These take strong precedence over the state and market, which must possess the moral foundation of a dignity inherent to humanity, and gifted by the Creator, to properly function…..

(more…)


The Rustic Belt
Friday, April 16, 2010, 11:02 AM

I’m up at Bloggingheads talking American “rustics” with Jim Pinkerton — folks I sometimes refer to, in a spirit akin to Hunter Thompson’s, as “rubes.” One big question is whether Mead’s much-discussed foursquare categorization of Americans — Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, and Wilsonian — is good enough today at capturing what’s going on in “rustic” America. Probably not, I think. I can’t be the only one who looks back on Thompson radicals of ’70s Colorado and sees an embryonic coalition: Freak Power and Rube Power. Echoes, perhaps, of what Reihan alludes to with the motto Keep America Weird — borrowed from a place where you can find rubes as well as freaks: Austin, TX.


Berry Revisited
Monday, March 22, 2010, 6:45 PM

Apropos of my remarks below, a reader writes:

It seems to me that you’re taking his quote about the politicization out of context, first of all. He’s downright Aristotelian, it seems to me, in his conception of what politics is. What makes me say this is the role he sees marriage playing in the life of a community. It’s vital. It’s at the heart of it. And it forms the model, writ small, of what the polis ought to be, writ large. Only affection and love, mutual concern, generosity, forbearance: these alone can sustain politics. And, you’ll notice, these are vital for marriage. Now, Aristotle doesn’t say that. But he does talk about the relation of man and wife as a relation of equals, and as a kind of domestic polis.

So when he talks about marriage becoming political, he obviously does not mean political in this more edifying sense. He means it in the sense you indicate, that of competing rights claims, etc. He calls this kind of marriage “politics” in the lowest contemporary sense of the word. It’s about grasping, rather than giving. It’s about one-upsmanship rather than forgiveness. It’s about getting what I can, rather than giving all I can. And this is a picture, too, of the worst kind of politics.

Now, this kind of politics is, perhaps, all that is possible on our current grand scale. It’s obvious that Berry’s — and Aristotle’s — preferred kind of politics is only possible on smaller scales. And this, even as he contemplates the nature of “a public” versus “a community” in “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community.” The rules governing each of these is different. And it’s not the simple public/private divide.

Our Fair Share of Whirlwind
Monday, March 22, 2010, 6:54 AM

I was going to post something on the latest dreadful new census commercial, but this will serve us all pretty nicely.


A Sprawling Debate
Saturday, March 20, 2010, 2:56 PM

In a recent post, Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute takes on Austin Bramwell’s argument that suburban sprawl is the result of government planning. How can this be, O’Toole asks, when notorious sprawls like Houston don’t even have a zoning code? Bramwell responds by pointing out the litany of non-zoning regulations that discourage mixed-use neighborhoods scaled for pedestrians. He points out that in Houston buildings must be set back at least 25 feet from the street and provided with free parking–which pretty much guarantees a landscape of strip malls.

I can’t add anything to the debate on land-use law, although Bramwell’s case seems pretty convincing. But there is a broader issue that’s worth isolating from the specific details. That’s the meaning of “planning”. While O’Toole sees planning primarily in fiats concerning ends–what gets built where–Bramwell recognizes that government can exercises as much influence by determining the means of economic activity.

To use a popular example,  American cities and states rarely decree a price floor for residential real estate. But by imposing building codes that require the use of more expensive materials, they effectively set a minimum price for housing. Sometimes results like this are an unintended consequence. In other cases, governments use indirect regulation to influence behavior without being seen to do so. Consumer preference for detached houses with a scrap of yard is one factor contributing to sprawl. But “hidden” planning is evidently another, as documented by countless studies of the housing policies of the 1940s and ’50s, which included the physical destruction of hundreds of traditional neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal.

You’d expect libertarians to be sensitive to subtle forms of influence as well as obvious coercion. But they often fixate on gross  attempts to regulate citizens’ behavior, while ignoring “nudges” like the location and dimensions of highways and other roads, a tax code that favors home-owners over renters, and a political commitment  to keeping gasoline cheap. A reasonable case can be made for all these policies. But let’s not pretend that our built environment is exempt from planning just because it hasn’t been decreed by a dictatorial Secretary of Suburbanization.

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