Enjoying the view from Limbo
The past century of human civilization has increasingly defined itself as the age of the labor-saving device; that is, of endlessly-developing technological advances aimed at reducing human effort and freeing up our time and energy for “more important things.” But what happens when the labor being saved by our technology is specifically the kind of labor that was previously dedicated to those very...
Artificial intelligence is to the realm of learning and knowledge what the welfare state is to the realm of practical motivation and productivity. Reducing the sense of lack, need, and concern in practical life makes people not only less likely to want to work hard, less willing to devote their lives to some kind of meaningful productive activity, but also, at the highest...
All of us are born in a cave, Socrates teaches (Republic VII), staring at shadows cast upon the back wall by images held in front of a fire behind us. From this starting point, he explains that education is the process of turning around in our chairs to see the fire, the objects dancing before it, and the men holding those objects, and...
Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 16, 2023 · Last modified July 23, 2023
Almost two thousand years ago, the Romans rounded up Christians and other offenders against official beliefs and fed them to wild dogs and lions, as a form of popular religious expression/entertainment. A few hundred years ago, it was Christians of Europe and America rounding up alleged witches, and burning them at the stake or hanging them, as an expression of religious orthodoxy. What...
Death by Education / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 2, 2023 · Last modified February 3, 2023
An adjunct professor foolish enough to teach an art class at a totalitarian reeducation camp in Minnesota (aka Hamline University) showed a medieval painting depicting Muhammad, after having directly advised students in the course syllabus and during the semester that this painting would be shown and discussed in her online lecture, and offering an opportunity for any students who might be inclined to...
There is very little profit to be made from the truth, whereas there is tremendous profit to be made from lies. The reason is simple: People pay for what they think they need, and most people feel an overwhelming need for comfort and reassurance, which are precisely what all effective lies (and liars) are offering. Truth, by contrast, neither cares what will make...
Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published May 31, 2022 · Last modified June 26, 2022
The primary aims of the university, from its medieval foundations until about fifty years ago, were to prod a young person into doubting his youthful certainties, to shake the foundations of his most cherished and comforting assumptions, to push him into a vast, confusing marketplace of ideas and sensibilities, where…
Increasingly, we are becoming a world without questions. A world that cannot ask questions, both in the sense that the most humanly necessary questions are subject to restrictions and public mockery precisely to the extent that they are humanly necessary, and in the sense — far more decisive in the long run — that we no longer have the desire to ask these...
You cannot do what you have never attempted. You cannot attempt what you have never imagined. You cannot imagine what you have never seen. You cannot see what your faculties have never sought out. You cannot seek out what you have never desired. You cannot desire what you have never thought of. You cannot think of what you have never experienced. You cannot...
You may learn from your anger, but you cannot learn while angry. Anger is an intellectual ditch: no movement possible, all reality transformed into a dark hole in which the soul gradually buries itself in an attempt to justify its perspective by denying the possibility of light. The required spiritual change does not necessarily entail denying the condition that occasioned the anger, which...
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