Front Porch Republic
Just a quick note to call attention to a new group blog called Front Porch Republic, which I accidentally learned about via my friend and local Wichitan Russell Arben Fox, he of In Medias Res.
Front Porch Republic's sub-heading on its banner reads, "Place. Limits. Liberty." and its central premise elaborates on those concepts. It's worth quoting here in its entirety:
The economic crisis that emerged in late 2008 and the predictable responses it elicited from those in power has served to highlight the extent to which concepts such as human scale, the distribution of power, and our responsibility to the future have been eliminated from the public conversation. It also threatens to worsen the political and economic centralization and atomization that have accompanied the century-long unholy marriage between consumer capitalism and the modern bureaucratic state. We live in a world characterized by a flattened culture and increasingly meaningless freedoms. Little regard is paid to the necessity for those overlapping local and regional groups, communities, and associations that provide a matrix for human flourishing. We’re in a bad way, and the spokesmen and spokeswomen of both our Left and our Right are, for the most part, seriously misguided in their attempts to provide diagnoses, let alone solutions.There's some very good writing by some very smart people over there. I look forward to visiting.
Though there is plenty we disagree about, and each contributor can be expected to stand by the words of only his or her own posts, the folks gathered here more or less agree with the above assertions. We come from different backgrounds, live in different places, and have divergent interests, but we’re convinced that scale, place, self-government, sustainability, limits, and variety are key terms with which any fruitful debate about our corporate future must contend. We invite you to read along, and perhaps join the discussion.
2 comments:
Thanks for the link, John, and I'm glad you've found the site intriguing. I'm enjoying consorting with the thinkers there very much. In many ways, it's a deeply conservative place, and has thus far attracted mostly conservative--paleoconservative, really--readers and writers. But they're also, for the most part, hostile or unhappy enough with modern liberalism that they're interested in hearing from quasi-socialists like myself, so long as our views have a localist angle to them. The real question, for me at least, is what about those times when you think a liberal answer is the best way to achieve social or local or even "conservative" goals? Because, of course, it often is. I've tried to make that point a couple of times there in connection with farming and public schooling, and so far they haven't thrown me out. So far, so good, I guess.
Yessir. I know they're conservative, but they're not Randians or arguing we need to hole up in caves in Idaho, either. Besides: I'm partial to the image of porch culture. I buy into the basic premise; but as you say, there'll be some inevitable disagreement as to how to go about achieving a community that embodies these premises.
They also seem to have some affinities with the basic assumptions (though not necessarily the regional inflections, so far as I can tell) of the Southern Agrarians (of I'll Take My Stand fame).
You said,
The real question, for me at least, is what about those times when you think a liberal answer is the best way to achieve social or local or even "conservative" goals? Because, of course, it often is. I've tried to make that point a couple of times there in connection with farming and public schooling, and so far they haven't thrown me out.
Yeah: and to your list there I'd add "livable cities." It seems pretty obvious to me--but then, I'm speaking both out of ignorance and my past experience of living in a city called Houston--that, given the combination of government sanction/complacency that led to the state of things complained against in Front Porch Republic's manifesto, we're going to need some over-arching reverse-engineering to achieve a meaningful livability in our cities.
Capitalism, whatever its other virtues, doesn't seem much interested in "community" beyond seeing its members as potential consumers only--unless, alas, prodded from without. Would it not be refreshing for a business, when considering where/when to locate or expand, to seriously and genuinely engage with the question of whether doing so will benefit the community, making its members' lives better? Churches aren't exactly analogous to businesses, I know, but what I've been saying above reminds me of a joke I heard while I was living in Mobile: "When a Baptist says a neighborhood is 'unchurched,' that means there's not a Baptist church there."
Anyway. When I ran into Front Porch Republic, some of the things I read there resonated with some things I've written over at my cycling blog. But, if Wichita is to become bike-friendlier, that's going to happen at the level of infrastructure; and, tempted as I am to buy some reflective paint and sneak out at night and paint sharrows on a couple of major east-west streets--just a couple, mind you--things are such that the government, I'm pretty sure, would frown on such citizen activism. So: I'll do what I can to achieve what I and others want via other means . . . which will, sooner or later, require government intervention.
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