The Stump

The Revolutionary Spirit promises—especially to the disaffected in extreme situations—a false hope in burning the status quo to the ground. It promises a new world order. It promises a reset. The Revolutionary Spirit inhabits the Left and the Right, but it must be resisted if we hope to participate in the desperately-needed, constructive work of political, cultural, and economic repair.

By acquiring sufficient acreage, typically a minimum of 500 acres, ideas can be given the isolation they need to have a chance at succeeding, unmolested by the outside forces of the world. Coupled with the beauty of the land and the built environment, the “castle,” a true local culture and community can arise.

Holding up a sign, sitting at a lunch counter, sticking a flower in a gun, setting up a tent, and occupying a space in the face state and corporate power is an act of utopian belief and faith. A belief, to go back to Berry's insight above, that something may not be--and should not be accepted as being--an economic, and therefore social, inevitability.

Is there an alternative to the Ted Lasso cynicism-versus-optimism dichotomy, an alternative that recognizes human limitations but nonetheless offers hope? I might start with becoming attentive enough to our ignorance, and expectant enough of our own mistakes that we not overshoot the scale of what we’re trying to do.

I didn’t intend to welcome two children into an era marked by so much bleakness and turmoil. With James’s help, I’ve remembered that there is no project more local, no gift more world-changing, than the calling of parenthood.

Sometimes an important change becomes evident only in retrospect - not while it’s happening across quiet broken days alone in a house while autumn succumbs to shadow and cold.

The tragedy of the hold Hoover’s rugged individualism continues to have on the American psyche in our increasingly atomized age is that his formulation risks presenting a false dichotomy between state control over an increasingly large swath of our lives on the one hand and society as comprised of individual and independent actors on the other.

Valetudinarianism connects arguments about the pandemic and the climate, with, on the one side, a distrust of experts and politicians, and, on the other, the belief that science (however defined) is paramount and must dictate, not simply advise, policy.

With the supply chain tangled, we have what may be a brief moment to consider its flaws without being blinded by the glare of its surface efficiencies.

How might we discern the truth in a mad time? Wendell Berry and G.K. Chesterton offer some wisdom.