Enjoying the view from Limbo
Mike Lee is almost certainly the closest thing to a bona fide constitutional conservative that the U.S. Senate currently has to offer. Like all men, he is flawed and will sometimes let his heart be swayed by pragmatic interests. And like all politicians, he must always be viewed with a healthy skepticism, given what any modern politician must do to win elections and...
There is a natural breaking point in human connection, a borderline beyond which all goes slack, from which point the closer we are, the more distant we become. Intimacy is misunderstood as the elimination of all barriers and distance. In fact, it depends utterly upon the maintenance of natural distance. Intimacy exists in the tension between our need for distance and our willingness,...
It is standard among today’s professoriate to teach Plato’s Apology with perplexity or mock-sophistication, agonizing over efforts to make sense of the charges against Socrates, seeking to persuade the students (and themselves) that those charges as recorded — impiety and corruption of youth — were “trumped up,” or perhaps merely a cover story for more immediate personal or political motives. For Athens was a...
Yesterday, I noted that there is a discernible movement afoot among some factions within the American “conservative media” to encourage their readers or listeners to detach themselves from Donald Trump, as he begins to seem like a liability going into the midterm elections. As I explained, this trend does not represent a serious attempt to reassert conservative or constitutionalist principles in defiance of...
The clever fence-sitting, bandwagon-hopping, finger-in-the-wind, trail-sniffing businessmen of the “conservative media” who pretend to be leaders and trend-setters — perhaps best epitomized at the moment by the teenage “debate champion” Ben Shapiro — are quietly urging their Republican-friendly audience to stop making everything about Donald Trump in these months leading up to the midterm elections. Their reason for this urging, quite explicitly stated,...
Do not attempt to live in ordinary ways — to “carry on with your life as well as possible” — during times of crisis and decline. When oppression is ascendant, liberation naturally becomes, or ought to become, the central theme of practical life. If it does not, then you are living in detachment from your true situation, which is never advisable and may...
I dislike surprises of the sort that are imposed upon one by other people — surprise visits, surprise parties, surprise invitations, and the like. The reason is simple: I do not waste time, and therefore experience imposed surprises not as welcome salvation from life’s tedium, but as an interruption of something I had previously judged to be essentially worthwhile or necessary in favor...
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...
There is much talk these days of “threats to democracy.” But the greatest threat to democracy today may be the incessant talk of threats to democracy. For a threat is something to fear, and when men are driven by fear, they will sacrifice nobler aspirations in a heartbeat in the name of removing the source of their fear. Beware those who beat the...
Finnish prime minister.– Late modern humanity is terminally boring, predictable, soulless, and finds its truest level of being in an imaginary world populated entirely by fifteen-year-olds raised by hookers and drug pushers. Jane Austen would not recognize this race. Wilde’s Dorian Gray, on his lowest night of drug-addicted slum prowling, would find the Finnish prime minister simply too gross and bland to be...
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