Enjoying the view from Limbo
Books / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 21, 2023 · Last modified July 22, 2023
Milan Kundera, the Czech-born, French-naturalized novelist — I avoid the standard appellation “Czech novelist” out of respect for Kundera’s own reasons for rejecting it — died last week. I will not describe him as the greatest or most important European novelist since World War II, as some might, not because I question that judgment but because I am wholly unqualified to make it....
When theoretical reason is forsaken in favor of practical reason as the human standard — or, to say the same thing, when the theoretical is reduced to the status of handmaiden of the practical — this will necessarily have certain verifiable and visible effects on life in the civilization in which this reversed perspective takes hold. In brief, this reversal reduces thinking to...
In early 2020, moved by nothing but the basest of all human motivations, petty fear of personal harm, the populations of the entire civilized world succumbed to the basest of all human inclinations, the urge to protect one’s physical existence at all costs by harming or destroying others. Lacking the self-reliance and strength of their prehistoric ancestors, however, they allowed this latter urge...
The human ego is a clever, skulking beast, always ready with a scheme to protect itself against the humiliations inherent in so much of human life, specifically by artfully reframing these humiliations as acts of will, and ascribing causality to what is in truth only an inescapable effect, distorted by imagination. Necessity is the mother of invention, and few needs are greater in...
There is more life and sincere exertion of real power in a random blade of grass than is exhibited by any statesman today. There is more discovery in the way a morning breeze can draw the discrete perceptions of many days into a unified experience in the mind than in all the public school textbooks being ground into the immobilized souls occupying today’s...
Necessity is the mother of invention. Progressivism seeks, as a matter of overt principle and coercive policy, to eradicate all necessity — material want, physical disadvantage, social failure, feelings of inadequacy or self-hatred, emotional insecurity. Thus, to the extent the progressives are successful, they will, as a consequence of the covert principles and authoritative policies of Nature, eradicate all invention, or at least...
A man when alone — I mean truly alone, not merely waiting for others to arrive — occupies his own depths. He lives in ocean currents and the most profound silence. Two such deep-flowing individuals, in conversation, may hope to preserve some of that serious silence between them. For the source of all conversation — using that word in its essential, definitive sense...
Donald Trump, most of whose likely voters are the sort of people who act outraged every time a progressive dares to question the saintly perfection of the United States military, or any individual member of that military, has allegedly called fallen soldiers “losers” and “suckers.” If he really said it, which I do not doubt, since Trump has probably called everyone outside of...
A team is where a boy can prove his courage on his own. A gang is where a coward goes to hide. –Mickey Mantle, The Quality of Courage (Bison Books edition, 1999), 90 Collectivism, as a moral premise, is essentially the denial of the ultimate value, or rather the ultimate existence, of the individual. Individualism, as that term is used all too often...
We live in the age of The Group. Group fear, group laughter, group compliance, group protest. As I have said many times, following Socrates, every crowd is dumber than its dumbest member. “Group activity” and “group thought” are euphemisms for death and stillbirth, respectively. No group achieves more of positive value than any individual member, acting alone or in coordination with one or...
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