Enjoying the view from Limbo
To avoid death at all costs is the primary aim and concern of human life — so says this late modern age, which at the same time is so smugly proud of having scientifically proven that life does not exist, but is merely an epiphenomenon of accidental material interactions. To avoid death at all costs is to define oneself as subject to continuous...
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 22, 2020 · Last modified December 25, 2020
Strictly speaking, the opposite of life is not death, but rather non-life. Everything depends, then, on how one defines life, in order to determine, by implication, what non-life entails. That is to say, it is possible that death is not essentially opposed to life at all, if life is defined in such a way that non-life may be attributed to a being that...
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 4, 2020 · Last modified December 5, 2020
To escape a perceived object of fear, late modern humanity will eagerly sacrifice anything — up to and including human life itself, the soul of man. In self-defeating hopes of protecting his most worthless and subhuman objects of desire — immediate comfort and immediate pleasure — late modern man will enslave both himself and his neighbor without hesitation, even seemingly without differentiation, thereby...
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...
Death comes to all, whether we imagine it everywhere and spend our lives running and hiding from it, whether we seek and embrace it in an act of cowardly bravado aimed at alleviating our overactive imaginations, or whether we simply live our lives to the best of our abilities secure in the awareness that someday it will come. It is coming in any...
No one intuits the basic moral tenor of an age more clearly than those with a vested professional interest in accommodating themselves to that tenor for personal gain, such as advertisers and other pitchmen. If you want to understand the moral condition and collective priorities of your social environment, spend a day analyzing the advertising techniques and campaigns most pervasive in the mass...
If every single Republican in Washington, D.C. over age fifty tests positive for COVID-19, and not a single one of them dies or even becomes critically ill, will the media still try to cite this spread as evidence that America needs more lockdowns, masks, social distancing, and mass hysteria to save us from this deadly contagion? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. In...
I am the last person to go around denigrating a person’s dying wishes, let alone advising that anyone ignore or outright refuse to respect a person’s dying wishes. As Milan Kundera says in his excellent musing on artistic intentions, Testaments Betrayed, if a farmer on his death bed tells his son not to cut down the old tree next to the house, we...
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...
One of the paradoxes of this age that has forfeited all belief in a reality beyond immediate sense perception, and all humanity beyond the material mechanism, is that people, though no longer believing they exist, have become hysterically obsessed with prolonging their “life” (i.e., their illusory appearance of self-moving unity) regardless of the cost. No price is too high to pay for a...
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