Enjoying the view from Limbo
Books / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 21, 2023 · Last modified July 22, 2023
Milan Kundera, the Czech-born, French-naturalized novelist — I avoid the standard appellation “Czech novelist” out of respect for Kundera’s own reasons for rejecting it — died last week. I will not describe him as the greatest or most important European novelist since World War II, as some might, not because I question that judgment but because I am wholly unqualified to make it....
Nothing epitomizes the moral and political discourse of this moment more definitively than the rhetorical reduction of all dissenting opinions or alternative voices to just so many expressions of irrational hatred. This is what our age of rambling academic Marxism and raging democratic tribalism have wrought. Having forsaken the rational assumptions that (a) there is an ahistorical truth and (b) all meaningful thought...
The only thoughts that ultimately matter much are those which we may, following Nietzsche, call “thoughts out of season.” This is true in part because seasonal thoughts, by definition, do little to advance the discussion, and tend to merely amplify the ambient noise, but mainly because such thoughts, being reflections of one’s time and surroundings, are often difficult even to classify as thoughts...
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