Enjoying the view from Limbo
The Polish Ministry of Education has removed a passage from a new school textbook related to sexuality in modern times, due to public criticism of its offensiveness. Here (and I apologize in advance for assaulting your innocence with such smut) is the offending passage: Increasingly sophisticated methods of separating sex from love and fertility lead to the treatment of sex as entertainment and...
This morning I noticed two news items that tell a very consistent story, a story that would seem ominous, were we not all resigned by now to the irreversible trajectory of our civilizational decline. Since, on the other hand, we all know (I presume) that we are currently and inevitably cascading into the darkest night — though not necessarily the longest one —...
No one who sincerely espoused an attitude worthy of the name “multiculturalism” would ever imagine that multiple cultures — let alone all cultures — could or should coexist under an umbrella of mutual love and acceptance; for this would be to denigrate the very notion of culture. As though the various ways of human living, developed over centuries of survival, poetry, and faith,...
The desire to be heard vs. the desire to be understood.— Heraclitus spoke for all time: “One is worth ten thousand to me if he be the best.” “‘Like a dog,’ he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.” Kafka thereby describes the condition of every one of us in the very late modern world, hounded, herded, and...
Len Goodman, a BBC personality of some sort, joked during a discussion of various foods related to the Queen’s jubilee that he had once been hesitant to try curry, which his grandmother used to refer to as “foreign muck,” although he has since become an enthusiastic curry eater. In response to this utterly innocuous comment — the sort of comment that could only be...
Someone has leaked a draft of a U. S. Supreme Court decision, written by Samuel Alito, indicating that the court has voted to strike down Roe v. Wade, the notorious 1973 case that was decided in favor of making abortion a federally guaranteed right. Contrary to the political hay being made of this by the left in general, and the Democratic Party in...
I do not always agree with Garry Kasparov on general matters of ordinary politics, but on Putin and the current stage of Putin’s war of conquest against the West, I know of no other popular voice today who speaks with such clarity and uncompromised principle. Of the many appeasing & contrary to history and reality pieces I have read during Putin’s war of...
Ideas and Reflections / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 10, 2022 · Last modified April 22, 2022
On being “absolutely modern.”— We naturally get excited about new ideas, new explanations. In such excitement, all past ideas seem paltry and passé. Such is the nature of enthusiasm. The whole world reflects our excitement back at us, reinforcing the illusion of absolute certainty attending the compelling new thoughts and their accompanying feelings. Hence, all previous modes of thought appear to us as...
Seeing the imperfection of things, it is always tempting, at least to those steeped in centuries of progressive thought in all its forms, to allow disappointment with the imperfect to transmogrify into an assumption that things could have been better. But from a non-progressive point of view, it does not follow from the fact that something is disappointingly inadequate that there must have...
There is all the difference in the world between describing certain beliefs or assumptions as “intolerable” or “unacceptable” as a point of rhetorical emphasis, and describing them this way as a matter of practical governmental policy, i.e., between strongly disapproving of someone’s thoughts and actively engaging the coercive power of the state to criminalize and punish those thoughts. Unless, that is, one happens...
Follow: