Enjoying the view from Limbo
The essence of education is the gradual widening of horizons, which means, most precisely, the extension of one’s view of life, which is necessarily limited at the outset to one’s nearest and most immediate surroundings, to encompass increasingly distant and obscure elements of existence. The widened horizon, in turn, provides a truer context within which to perceive and understand the near and immediate....
What is Progressivism? / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published June 14, 2020 · Last modified June 15, 2020
You have been hearing it for months. It has been a constant background chatter, a shiver at the surface of daily life. It insinuates itself into almost every conversation with relatives, old friends, coworkers, random acquaintances. “This virus is so frightening.” “I’m worried about my kids getting this thing.” “What scares me is the second wave — that might be even worse!” Late...
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...
During this Pandemic that Ate a Planet, Sweden and Sweden alone has refused to be sucked into the vortex of self-interested media fearmongering, progressive globalist propaganda, and totalitarian social experimentation. She has refused to succumb to the abject, life-annihilating terror of death; refused to play the immature game of prolonging the inevitable by hiding under the bed hoping that somehow an unpleasant reality...
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...
One of the most disturbing social symptoms of America’s coronavirus epidemic is a malady we may call mathematical hysteria: the inability, and even unwillingness, of millions of ordinarily rational adults to look at the numbers dancing before their panic-stricken minds with any sort of context-related sobriety. And perhaps the ugliest manifestation of this mathematical hysteria is the moral argument that this outbreak warrants...
According to experts, the coronavirus pandemic could be with us for eighteen months, two years, or forever. During this time, experts explain, it is essential that humans avoid all unnecessary contact with other humans, in the name of preventing the spread of this virus which has already spread so widely that no one has any idea whatsoever how many people have contracted it....
“What if everyone joined the crowd except me? What if everyone were smiling, growling, hissing, chanting, cheering, and singing, but I were not included? What if, having grown tired or frightened of being left out — or rather, of the strain of standing apart — I should discover that they would no longer accept me at all? That I had missed my chance...
Being a true student is harder than being a true teacher. For the teacher, who of course was once a student, has already survived the soul’s harshest test, namely discovering that which is uncomfortable to see, while the student is still facing this trial. Not merely facing it, in fact, but wading through its unexpected depths, stepping painfully among its unseen jagged rocks,...
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