Enjoying the view from Limbo
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 26, 2024 · Last modified April 27, 2024
Socrates, in The Republic, defines the five essential forms of government in rank order, from most to least just: aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny. His cleverest rhetorical trick, the most famous (and probably least understood) conceit in the dialogue, is his redefinition of aristocracy by means of the radical proposal that in order to realize a truly just city in practice, philosophers would...
In honor of the passing of Daniel Dennett, I offer the following foray into my misspent youth, in which I assess Dennett’s materialist critique of consciousness in some detail. Read at your own risk. Daniel C. Dennett’s Sweet Dreams, though concluding with some positive suggestions regarding avenues of future consciousness research, exists primarily as a clearing house for his most developed efforts to...
Ten years ago, early in the second term of America’s first overtly socialist presidency, I wrote a book review at American Thinker, “Progressivism: Revenge of the Sociopaths,” outlining the unofficial blueprint, published a century earlier, for the Marxist transformation of America, namely Philip Dru: Administrator by Edward Mandell House. A few years later, I incorporated that review into my series, “Progressivism 101,” on...
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....
Books / Ideas and Reflections / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published May 10, 2023 · Last modified May 12, 2023
One of the more overt and disquieting symptoms of the English-speaking world’s sleepy descent into totalitarian self-obliteration, aka “social democracy,” is the recent trend in the publishing world towards the shameless raping of famous works of literature in the name of rendering them more inclusive (read relativistic and propagandistic), by revising their content — i.e., changing the words and ideas bequeathed to us...
The publisher and copyright holders of the famous children’s stories of Roald Dahl have systematically expunged certain progressively offensive words from the new editions of his books, in order to bring them into line with current progressive notions of “inclusiveness” (read Marxist mind manipulation). A character who was “enormously fat” is now simply “enormous,” lest anyone be infected with the horrific, antiquated idea...
I see that the estate of George Orwell, apparently related to its namesake’s legacy roughly as Nietzsche’s sister Elizabeth was related to his, has given its official stamp of approval to a feminist retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Though the new story will allegedly present Orwell’s dystopia from the perspective of Julia, Winston’s love interest in the original, the explicit emphasis on the “feminist”...
In this age of no-fault faults, and tolerance reinvented as a form of moral lobotomy, nothing could be more antithetical than a dose of good old-fashioned discrimination, which is to say judgment that dares to speak its name. Hence, since I am nothing to this age if not antithetical, I take this moment to reveal my personal identity in the only form anyone...
The only depiction of Hell that carries any emotional weight with me is that of Dante Alighieri, who imagined his realm of eternal punishment with less attention to the details of Church teaching than to his own rational mind’s sense of cold, hard justice. Each man judged unworthy of salvation is consigned to spend eternity in what we might call the hell of...
Anyone who writes for attention is not a real writer. Writing is spiritualized hiding. It is no accident that Shakespeare, the greatest of all writers, is the one about whose life and person we know the least. He wrote dozens of the most magnificent works in literary history, and yet we are not certain who he was — or even whether he was....
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