Enjoying the view from Limbo
If the purpose of life were simply to be alive in the biological sense, then every human being would have fulfilled his purpose at birth, or rather before birth, and would therefore stand to gain nothing by going through with the rest of the process — nothing but more time. But who would carry on merely for the sake of carrying on, without...
Marvelous Marvin Hagler died over the weekend. (Yes, for the uninitiated, “Marvelous” was his legal first name, adopted in response to his perennial sense of being disrespected by the image-obsessed sports media.) I have lost all my youthful enthusiasm for spectator sports, as I believe is proper and natural as one matures, as well as being almost morally mandatory in this age in...
On the philosophers and the sophists– Heraclitus: “One man is worth ten thousand if he be the best.” Jordan Peterson: “Why be a rigorous teacher for three hundred university students when I could be a self-help guru for three million YouTube subscribers!” On self-government– The less centralized the state, the more localized the rule. The aim is to approximate as far as possible...
How many elderly people will spend the last year of their lives isolated from most of their kin, wishing in futility for one last family holiday gathering that will be denied them by holier-than-thou politicians and self-righteously “compassionate” family members? — all those politicians and family members pretending that they are depriving these old folks of their last moments of earthly joy out...
This autumn, Pope Francis shocked the world by finally saying something rational, religious, and rhetorically out of step with this progressive moment — the occasion was duly noted here in Limbo — namely that “gossiping is a worse plague than COVID.” As my adopted home of South Korea gradually returns to something the government calls “Level 1.5” social distancing (don’t ask), thus more...
Today, hundreds of millions of men and women from most of the nations of the developed world have been herded into mass hysteria and precipitous panic over a virus outbreak that has proved to be no more ravaging than a bad flu season, an illness that is having its severest effects mostly among the small proportion of the population that is already at...
An enthusiastic and diligent student who has been studying Plato with me for several months — we were in the middle of a close analysis of Book III of the Republic several weeks ago, when coronavirus “social distancing” interrupted our conversation — sent me an e-mail yesterday to share his distress over the current situation. You know, students like me don’t know how...
Popular sages and life-advice dispensers are very good at issuing ready-made, one-size-fits-all commandments on how to live well. They tend not to be quite so good at following their own advice, however, partly for the obvious reason that most easily-synopsized “rules for living” must be kept so nebulous or generic in form that one who is clever enough, and motivated enough, will always...
A lot of people, from Trump on down, and from all political angles, are in love with the “war analogy” with respect to this virus outbreak. I have rejected that analogy on its face for a number of reasons until now, but since so many insist on invoking it, let’s go there for a moment. An enemy is at the gates. The entire...
It’s a quiet Saturday here in Day Something of the emergency to end all emergencies. I am hiding out in my favorite work space, trying to make the most of the unexpected time afforded by the corona-virus-delayed start of the spring semester. “Never let a crisis go to waste,” as Rahm Emanuel, a Clinton-Obama strategist and thug, famously said. Without further ado, then,...
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