Enjoying the view from Limbo
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...
A few years back, Jordan Peterson, a University of Toronto professor of psychology, shot from little-known academic to international celebrity intellectual, based largely on his strong remarks against politically correct language laws on an Ontario public television program. Watching Peterson’s rise to prominence, I recognized in his trajectory many of the same crossroads choices I had been dealing with myself as a writer,...
Jordan Peterson, Canadian professor of clinical psychology cum politically incorrect lightening rod cum global celebrity self-help guru, has, unfortunately, fallen prey to the demons of fame, self-importance, and the sense of irrational urgency — “it has to be me, it has to be now” — that attends the sudden explosion of unexpected praise and mass admiration in the life of a thoughtful but...
There is no point in trying to explain any of this, but perhaps by placing it all out there in some semblance of order, a coherent picture will emerge in someone’s mind — preferably not the picture that keeps trying to form in my mind as I look at all of it. Donald Trump summarily canceled sanctions his own administration had leveled against...
One of the great modern diseases is our obsession with quantifying the intrinsically unquantifiable. The successes of the modern natural sciences have fostered an unjustified faith (and faith is the right word, since this belief is pure dogma) that a superficial approximation of scientific method may be applied to human life itself — to morality, society, education — with similarly salutary results. The...
What is Progressivism? / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published November 25, 2017 · Last modified November 26, 2017
Big news in South Korea this week, captivating the nation, concerns a North Korean soldier who risked almost certain death to escape from his communist hell under gunfire. Meanwhile, a minor news item in Canada, quickly swept under the rug of political correctness, concerns the free world’s cowardly escape from civilization into the nightmare of quasi-communist tribunalism. To punctuate this absurd historical crossroads...
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