Enjoying the view from Limbo
Noam Chomsky has joined the rising chorus of those who would like to use the pandemic as an opportunity to push the world toward Chinese-style totalitarianism, suggesting that the most suitable way to manage the “problem” of unvaccinated individuals is for the community to isolate these people and, if necessary, let them starve. Referring to the prospective condition of the unvaccinated after they...
Many are cheering on Rand Paul in his demand that Anthony Fauci be fired for his role in funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab and then repeatedly denying this fact to the U.S. Congress. Is it wrong for me to hope that Fauci will never be fired, and on the contrary that he will continue to live in the public eye —...
Relative standards.– Joe Biden is a doofus, an ignoramus, and a habitual liar. His special handicap, however, is that as a lifelong Washington politician, people expect him to be slightly more clever at hiding these deficiencies, or at least to be surrounded with handlers who will be clever at hiding them for him. The opposite was true of Biden’s presidential predecessor, who was...
A convenient naïveté.– What if the great modern certainty, namely that the cosmos has no purpose (which is another way of saying that there is no cosmos), is, like most certainties, merely a matter of faith, answering to a deeply felt need? In that case, the great modern certainty would be an ingeniously subtle expression of underlying purpose — and not just a...
Colin Powell, who served as national security advisor, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and then secretary of state, respectively, under three Republican presidents, has died. I have no special interest in or admiration for Powell, but I see nothing about the man’s death that excites any particular urge to sully a grave. By contrast, Donald Trump, a very former, absolutely defeated...
Many years ago, I spent several months engaged almost exclusively with this question: What is a face? The synoptic version of the conclusion I arrived at through those months of rumination: A face is the surface of a soul. For nearly two years, we have lived in a world that has outlawed faces, which is to say that in the most profound sense,...
Hatred of “elitism,” with its inherent suspicion of anything that seems to imply a standard of human superiority, follows inevitably from long immersion in political and moral egalitarianism. Democracy, the political product of the principle of equality run amok, is the fertile soil of egalitarianism’s most spiritually invasive weeds, gradually fostering a general, almost instinctive anti-elitism. In practice, this anti-elitism constitutes a most...
The envious.– He is envious; let us hope that he will not have children, for he would envy them because he cannot be a child anymore. –Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §207 (Kaufmann translation) To envy is to judge the world, and your own life, prematurely and superficially. Envy takes root in an assumption that you know many things which you do not know,...
Once, while discussing Brave New World with a Korean student, I introduced Alexis de Tocqueville’s incisive warning of a new political danger simmering within the age of modern liberalism, a tyrannical form of democratic paternalism which he evocatively named “soft despotism.” The aptness of this contextual discussion was obvious, for at its best, Huxley’s dystopian novel is little more than a progress report...
He sees that something may bring tangible benefits and boons, and yet lead to decay and deterioration in the long run — and he is therefore eager to retain at all costs the vantage point needed to discern the difference between short and long. He is suspicious of everyone inclined to speak of certain positive conditions arising in our times (such as the...
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