Shows: FestivalPod.org + LostProphets.org | Film: @JoinOrDieFilm | Policy: @DemocracyPolicy | Book: DedicatedBook.org | Newsletter: PeteDavis.substack.com
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How did FDR weave together a coalition to fight concentrated economic power?
A clip from the latest episode of "FESTIVAL with Pete Davis"—in which @ILSR's @stacyfmitchell explains how FDR brought together farmers, workers, and consumers to decentralize economic power and end the first Gilded Age.
FESTIVAL Episode 2 🎧 "Two Long-Haul Heroes (with Stacy Mitchell and Lawrence Lessig)"
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube — search “FESTIVAL with Pete Davis"
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Learn more at: newsletter.petedavis.org/p/f…
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Come celebrate the Ivan Illich centenary with us at Johnny Pistolas in DC on Thursday, September 24th at 7PM: partiful.com/e/SEGno7w6vHgub…
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Tort law is an under-appreciated pillar of democracy. Its heroes — plaintiffs’ lawyers — are, at their best, like the gallant guardians of certain Westerns, standing for the little guy against shadowy conspiracies of the wealthy and powerful. And if you visit Ralph Nader’s American Museum of Tort Law in Winsted, Connecticut, you will begin to understand how lawsuits are about so much more than serving one particular client: they organize affected people into collectives, uncover evidence relevant to the public beyond the courtroom, spur congressional investigations and criminal prosecutions, and even help bring about much-needed healing and closure. Ubi jus, ibi remedium — without remedies, there are no rights. That’s all Folks!
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If you end grades, you (mostly) end cheating. Replace them with the traditional feedback mechanisms: qualitative comments from a teacher who cares about you, particular (rather than industrial) relationship with the teacher and learning community, cultivating cultures of honor.
Colleges are testing new ways to catch AI use. Students keep finding new ways around them. For @NYMag, I wrote about the race to keep cheating. nymag.com/intelligencer/arti…
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This isn’t ideological libertinism—ungrading can be more vigorous than faux-precise, non-relational grades. There’s a heritage to this: Neil Postman had very interesting critiques of grading, there is a growing ungrading movement, there’s even a Catholic ungrading manifesto I found: churchlifejournal.nd.edu/art…
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DC/Baltimore area friends — in response to Dougald Hine’s wonderful call to action, we are gathering together for dinner to celebrate the centenary of the great Ivan Illich: the radical priest, the prophet of Cuernavaca, the deschooler, the booster of convivial tools, the denouncer of disabling professions, the performer of "little acts of foolish renunciation," and celebrant of friendship.
RSVP to this Partiful and once we know our headcount, we will find a fitting location around DC and send out the location: partiful.com/e/SEGno7w6vHgub…
Email elias.crim@solidarityhall.org for more information.
And check out the Lost Prophets episode about Illich for more information on the man himself: tinyurl.com/IllichLostProphe…
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There is a hatch through which you can escape all that’s false about this world: all the status games and addictive screens, the news cycles and passing fads, the abstract systems exhausting us with their data on how we are good or bad, up or down, in or out.
The escape hatch isn’t anywhere particular—rather, it’s everywhere particular. It appears when you decide to start loving any given particular place, as a particular place. The realm you are escaping is the realm of abstraction—being a unit among units, deploying resources among resources, browsing options among options. The promised land you seek is the land to which you make a promise—to treat it and all that comes with it as the particular, wonderful, concrete things they actually are; to take up your role as a member of it.
Now it’s not exactly right to call this an escape hatch, because when you climb through it, you’re doing the opposite of escaping. The world we are trying to escape is a world designed around escapism—its flashy novelties are here to distract us from feeling our needs and facing our limits. When you climb through the hatch, you finally stop escaping—by sticking around somewhere, you now have the stability to be who you are, with all your grief and shame, quiet hopes and dogged vices. And in the humiliation of accepting that, you surrender the lie that the old world sold you—that you don’t need one another, that your lives aren’t bound up in each other’s.
It’s also not true that climbing through the hatch frees us from all that’s false about the world. People are still people, and you are still you. But they’re now people you can work with, at a scale you can work with. Free from screens and narratives that flatten and separate, you can “convocate” with the real neighbors around you—you can weave threads of your callings together into a shared calling, and then participate in the natural drama and joy of living out that vocation together.
In the world on the other side of the hatch, you’ll find everything from this world—but you will find it inside out. You’ll still care about what they’re doing in Washington, but you’ll get there by following your neighborhood creek upriver to investigate what they’re dumping in the headwaters. You won’t give up on big dreams, but you will understand that you trade sight for scale: that you lose your bearings when names become numbers, eyes become maps, and friendships become laws. You’ll still care about people around the world, but you’ll learn to love People by first loving a person. And you’ll laugh at the most beautiful joke I’ve ever read:
O when the world’s at peace
and every man is free
then will I go down unto my love.
O and I may go down
several times before that.
The man who opened the escape hatch for me and millions of others was Wendell Berry, the farmer prophet of Port Royal, Kentucky. For his life and work, I am immensely grateful.
newsletter.petedavis.org/p/o…
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Dolly: “That’s what I want to be when I grow up. I’m gonna be trash!”
Philip K. Dick: “The symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.”
Psalm 118: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone”
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The LOST PROPHETS universe is extending! On Friday, September 11 at 1PM ET, Elias Crim and I are launching The Prophecy Workshop — a weekly online gathering for friends of the show and others who want to explore how we recover a spiritual politics, guided by the wisdom of the elders. More information here — hope to see you there: lostprophets.org/p/the-proph…
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Police and prisons are human institutions that should not be immune from: (1) democratic oversight and participation; (2) soberly facing their empirical reality; and (3) experimenting with alternatives (including unbundling their tasks) that could better achieve their purposes.
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I share this all because I'm worried we are going to lose one of the significant parts of the prison/police reform turn in the early 2010s, which is that more Americans had to encounter and grapple with the reality of prisons and police as they exist in practice, not in theory.
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