The Stump

Wendell Berry has written endlessly about the goodness of local work; if, for Berry, the goodness of such work is connected to agrarian virtue, while for Jackson it is connected to ecological necessity, does that make much practical difference?

Scruton, from that day in France until the end, could never situate himself in the fugitive and cloistered comfort of the academic and intellectual orthodoxy.

If beer and football are just the modern bread and circuses of a declining empire, then these are spectacles best avoided. However, if such gridiron microcosms of the human experience can unite us with our neighbors and point us to the bigger and more real story, then football, for all its flaws, deserves a yell, maybe two.

To acknowledge the harm that has been inflicted on uncountable human lives is to invite doubt about the underpinnings of our technologically sophisticated world. That is an uncomfortable and lonely place to be. Yet it’s necessary if humans have any hope of reclaiming their birthright at mama’s breast.

What is being outlined here is fundamentally a Wendell Berry conservatism: our solutions are not global in nature. They might not even be national in nature. It asks individuals to get involved at the lowest possible scale, in church and on school boards, to be productive in the home and show up in a community as ways to build an emergent virtuous and meaningful life now.

We are the blind, each calling out that which we are so sure we see. No longer aware that the sight we now marvel at is little more than one conceived and praised in our internal darkness... And what becomes of a world under such stewards like me?

“Choose you this day whom you will serve,” the Old Testament leader, Joshua, charged his fellow Jews. And that choice, while crucial, while fundamental, must also be borne out during a lifetime of choices.

Are those who question transhumanist progress or Metaverse predictions just knee-jerk Luddites whose visceral reactions are worthy of only a patronizing pat on the head for not seeing their own privilege? As might be expected of a Porcher, I don’t think so. Instead, those who are hesitant about digitality are remembering what it means to be embodied human beings and acknowledging the gravitas of reality’s bite - even when reality bites.

What if our expectations of politicians whom we mock or despise are simply unrealistic and guided by the standards of this world? The faith of some regular Americans in their ability to achieve social reform already amazed de Tocqueville in the 1830s. But this mindset, flowing so naturally from the much-lauded Protestant work ethic lulls us into this optimistic feeling that somehow we can just muscle our way to a perfect solution or compromise, if only we work hard.

Back of all this you might hear a rabble-rousing Palestinian Jew from a couple of millennia ago promising that the truth, once known, will set you free - but that poor soul on a collision course with Golgotha was assuming that truth could be disentangled from all the elegant technocratic lies it’s wound up in.