Porch Sittin'

My Weekend at the FPR Conference in Madison, Wisconsin

As promised, here is my recap of my FPR Conference weekend experience. Many wonderful conversations were had, people met, ideas exchanged, and beers guzzled. I met a handful of Twitter and Substack mutuals which was an absolute joy for me. Traditional Latin Mass on Sunday, which was a first for this Anglican. But, for the sake of brevity, I won’t expand on hardly any of these items below: I concentrate on getting to the conference and my takeaways from it.

Look later this week for a Part 2 of my previous newsletter, which will contain the practical strategies we are implementing at home to embody some of the things I discuss both there and here.

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My buddy Brandon driving the Caddy and his dad, Mike, riding shotgun.

Getting There

I knew nothing of Front Porch Republic until about six or seven months ago. If you are unfamiliar, here is a brief description of what they’re about from their defining collection of essays:

The writers are convinced that human apprehension of the true, the good, and the beautiful is best realized within a dense web of meaningful family, neighborhood, and community relationships. These writers seek to advance human flourishing through the promotion of political decentralism, economic localism, and cultural regionalism.

If you’ve read my essays up to this point on composting (here and here) you might have got the vibe that I’m something of a localist fella, and you were right. Over the years I’ve struggled with my own sense of rootlessness, a desire for a sense of continuity with the peoples and places that came before, a longing to understand the confluence of historical streams in which I stand. (I’ve read on Twitter that this is a pretty characteristically American thing. I guess I’m very American, then.) While reaching backward left my hands wet and empty, what it did catalyze was a forward-looking desire to give my descendants what I feel I lack, and I instead began to reach downward — into the soil, into my place. The place where my wife and children are, the place where my neighbors are, the place where my church is, the place where my coworkers and I labor for the good of our community.

“Dude come to front porch republic conference. Paul Kingsnorth.”

That was the whole text Brandon sent me. I didn’t know

Paul Kingsnorth

except by name, so that began my (rather shallow compared to some) dive into his essays on The Machine: his term for a culture and society that is increasingly post-nature, forming us into a post-human existence. It only took reading a couple pieces of his to say, “Yep, I’m going to this conference,” and make the necessary arrangements. In fact, the second of my compost essays is a response to Paul Kingsnorth’s question, “Is there anything left to conserve?” and his answer to that question. He is a thinker I respect very much, so the opportunity to hear him in person was something I didn’t want to miss.

Fast forward to Friday the 20th. I made an early-morning visit to Hartsfield-Jackson International in Atlanta, flew to O’Hare International in Chicago, Uber’d to a Dunkin’ Donuts about thirty minutes out of the chaos, and waited for my chariot to arrive.

And arrive it did.

As I sat there half-asleep, listlessly suckling my Pumpkin Chai, a ‘75 Cadillac DeVille came lumbering around the corner into the Dunkin’ parking lot. I have to believe that besides delivery trucks it’s the largest vehicle that lot had seen, possibly ever. The gravel vibrated, cymatically rearranged. Brandon shoehorned the Caddy into a parking spot that fit like a post-growth spurt shoe. I was sure that if we took too long the paint lines would bust from trying to hold so much car.

Brandon, a diesel mechanic by trade and fellow blue scholar, had his dad riding shotgun with him, Mike, from whom he’d learned to labor. Along the way they’d picked up none other than the dissident Canadian expat, trucker, author of the

Autonomous Truck(er)s

Substack, and host of the Voice of Go(r)d Podcast, Gord Magill. And now they were here to whisk me off into the sunset. The common thread between us besides a Y chromosome? A love for

Matthew B. Crawford

, at least. And soon it was going to be a localism conference, participating in and witnessing Gord’s prodigious capacity for consuming meat in various forms, and a desire for a future in which people are fully human. Perhaps those second and third items are redundant.

Left to right: me, Brandon, Gord. Behind: the ‘75 Caddy in all her glory.

I fell back into the couch that was the Caddy’s back seat. The engine roared to life and, after rolling onto the interstate in a Madisonward direction, settled to a low, contented purr. My body hummed like a tuning fork. There was a distinct lack of seatbelts clicking and snapping into place. Rebels, the lot of us. Classic rock played on the radio as the cooling midwestern air made our cheeks pink and our hair dance. When I closed my eyes, it felt like it might have actually been 1975.

The Conference: Some Takeaways

“I traveled 4,000 miles to talk to you all about localism.” So Paul Kingsnorth opened his introductory address, the irony of his presence juxtaposed with his topic not lost on him. As

Dixie Dillon Lane

pointed out in her summary of the conference, humor was a constant theme. The thinkers were erudite, serious, but not mirthless. Verbal jabs were legion — at culture, at thoughts, at each other — but one got the sense that fists flew largely out of respect for, or at least to seriously engage with, their target.

Now, I’m a plumber and an autodidact. I read, but not for a living, so many of the references felt like deep cuts I couldn’t grasp. That said, I walked away understanding more than I didn’t and with a clarified sense of what it might look like for me to engage in a mode of living that is human and humanizing, a mode I’d be happy to learn with friends and leave with my children and their children and their children after them. Particularly, these three words were impressed on me most deeply:

imagination, practice, holiness.

Paul Kingsnorth’s opening address at the FPR Conference, October 20, 2023.

Imagination

Eric Miller and Jason Peters presented on the human faculty of imagination as being instructed and fatal (which is to say, formed and necessary). Both speakers invoked Wendell Berry at different points, for Berry’s conception of imagination is one of sight, one in which whatever is out there to be perceived is seen most clearly, one which “thrives on contact, on tangible connection”¹ and, importantly, leads us to virtue. Part of this conception is accepting the limits of one’s ability to see: I can only be within a perceptible proximity to a small number of things at one time. Imagination, then, requires that I be attentive to what is local. Within those constraints, the good life — being in full possession of all virtue and exercising it in all places at all times — can be imagined and enacted.

If we do not have imaginations formed by knowledge, love, and compassion, then what we dream up is reduced to fantasy: the vicious, shadowy form of the imaginative faculty wielded by the idiot — literally, the “private person,” the solitary individual that cannot be lead away from himself. This is the opposite of the thick-presenced, creative member of a community.

Hearing their discussions reminded me of my time spent in St. Basil of Caesarea’s writings. In his homily “On Giving Thanks”, he offers a meditation on St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. Here’s my riff on Basil’s riff on Paul:

If we will not rejoice in hope, then we cannot hope in distress.

“Hope” is first a noun — the Christian hope — and then a verb, the activity one does to persevere through dark times. There is something formative about the intentional practice of rejoicing in that which is given to us as our hope that trains the theological virtue of hope, which I take to include the human faculty of imagination. As we attempt to live in a machine age, hope for a human tomorrow and the virtue-tutored imagination which envisions it are essential tools.

Practices

To merely imagine a fundamentally human life is not enough. We must live into it. Embody it. Enact it. Tessa Carmen and Adam Smith helped me think through this incarnational aspect. The Machine culture is selling us a particular vision of the good life that we don’t have to buy: a life which strips us of our agency, which disburdens us of all the pesky friction inherent to being with other people, which denudes us of our identity.

And, contrary to what you might expect to be said in this setting, total abandonment of modern tech was not suggested. Rather, ordering it to its proper place. For example, the internet can be used as scaffolding to our activities, but it ought not substitute all activities. If acquiring the knowledge you’d like isn’t on a strict (and short) timeline, why not ask a neighbor? A friend? An acquaintance? Vast intellectual and skilled resources are available in the people around us. Consistent use of a search engine habituates idiocy; consistent reliance on my neighbor habituates, among other things, love. In a machine society that values efficiency so highly, the former seems the better option; in the human society we’d like to imagine ourselves inhabiting, the latter is preferable.

If imagination is the faculty that allows one to clearly see that which is around them, then a practice is the means by which one actually makes contact with it all, contact that Berry puts in a reciprocal relationship with imagination. Adam Smith made the helpful comment that the material world doesn’t need to be reenchanted or remade in some way, it simply needs to be reengaged. Investing in practices that bring me into direct contact with the material world will restore to it a shimmering, magical quality, and, a la Crawford, it is these practices that form one’s agency and sense of it, and ultimately restores and maintains our humanity.

Holiness

The final thought for me comes from Paul Kingsnorth’s keynote address. He quoted a Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski, who said, “Culture, when it loses its sacred sense, loses all sense.” My Christian conception of holiness isn’t required for this to be true, but a sense of what Kingsnorth calls a “sacred source” is. Cultures that lose contact with their sacred source, with dwindling numbers of their devoted saints, will soon lose the center that holds. our word “holy,” as Kingsnorth points out, comes from the same Old English word from which we get “health” and “whole.” Each of us need to be whole people: body, mind, soul, and will all integrated into one. Such individuals, especially when they have frequent intercourse with the divine, are the ones who bring life, light, and, quite lacking in our time, sense. Integrated people reintegrate communities. Rightly ordered souls rightly order cultures.

Critically, Kingsnorth’s holy individual is not an idiot — a private person. Indeed, he cannot be. Holiness of this quality does not usually crop up in the remote, thin-souled, frictionless individual but is made through the efforts of community, community that is often at the margins of society. And yet, while it does require communion of souls, one must do from time to time as Kingsnorth has said and enter the dark cave of introspection. Alone. “Go in here to meet yourself, which is almost harder than meeting the devil, I think.” Seems right to me.

He ended his talk by saying, “We need saints: their love, their wisdom, and they often come from the edges into the center. They don’t just turn up; they are made.” They are imagined. They are practiced. Saints, through long years of ascetic training, are the kinds of people that can work towards making culture whole because they themselves are whole.

What It Looks Like

That’s the rub, isn’t it? How do we do this.

I think, as Tessa has suggested, we party well. We pursue the good with joy. We dance. The more people in a dance, the merrier. We learn to cook good food, and then eat it with gusto. If we can grow and raise the ingredient ourselves, even better. We learn an instrument to play the old songs and write new ones. We put on costumes and pick up some props to dramatize a poem or perform a play. We get our hands in the soil, start a compost pile, raise some chickens. We knock on our neighbors’ doors and learn to know them well so we can watch their cats when they go on vacation. We make every effort to humanize our corporate workplaces and resist the Machine-like desire for hyperefficient automatons. We make more beautiful crafts and more convivial tools. We celebrate the lives of saints with cakes and cordials and dainties. We fast to get hold of ourselves, and then give ourselves to God in prayer and worship. We make much of holidays and holy days and traditions.

These are not the final solution. Of course not. We cannot dance or sing or craft our way into a solution to our political divisions and economic woes.

Or…maybe they are the final solution? Because what are our political and economic difficulties if not the difficulties, vices, feuds, disagreements, anger, malice, and disasters between neighbors writ large?

In either case, these are the types of practices that further nurture the kind of virtue-oriented imagination which can make friends out of enemies, family out of strangers, and humans out of people.

My time in Madison gave me friends I’ll have for a lifetime, too many to list here, and taught me that in the American Midwest, cheese curds drop golden-friend from heavy laden branches onto banks of rushing ranch rivers, and that beer is always close at hand. Few things are more humanizing than a steady diet of organic, locally sourced cheese curds and beer shared among friends. But the things that are? I learned about them at the Front Porch Republic Conference.

1. Wendell Berry, It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays