Enjoying the view from Limbo
During the past several weeks, Korea has had an unusually long and severe rainy season, one of the worst I have experienced during my sixteen years in this country. Predictably, as with any weather event whatsoever, not to mention any mention of any weather event, the country is now awash in climate change doomsday prognostications. Say the word “rain” to anyone here today,...
Tolerance is not equivalent to approval or “acceptance.” On the contrary, the very notion of tolerance presupposes differences of opinion, disapproval of behavior, and perhaps even personal distaste. In a political context, tolerance entails a willingness to forego any legal objections against, or punishments for, beliefs or behaviors that are regarded as socially unorthodox or disagreeable to the common view, but which have...
One of the great falsehoods of late modernity is that our political structures are so ingeniously self-renewing and self-correcting that the days of the just revolution are over. This position is not only untrue, but likely an indication of devious motives on the part of those who maintain and seek to perpetuate it. For political leaders to say, as President Biden and others...
The Enlightenment has thrived in today’s popular imagination and in the social sciences that are its children (products of the Enlightenment’s attempt to reduce human nature to just another subject of empirical investigation) on the basis of certain myths. As these myths are used to justify so many absurdities today, from our theories of public education to the sheepish surrender of our common...
Failed rhetoric.— “Everyone knows that” is merely a rhetorically aggressive way of saying “Everyone believes that” — for there is literally nothing that everyone knows. And nothing could be more certain than this: Anything that “everyone believes” is likely false, since most people are completely ignorant of all but the most quotidian facts. Hence, when a person insists on a point of argument...
The great modern error, resulting from the spiritual dialectic of modernity: desire as depth. Thesis: Reason is a calculative response to the imperatives of passion; hence the passions comprise the original “state of nature.” Antithesis: If passion is our original nature, then reason, which dilutes or repurposes passion, is a corruption of nature. Synthesis: Desire is reality; reason is merely the deforming mask...
“Love is blind,” they say. The same, however, might be said just as surely about anger, envy, indignation, and above all, fear. Any passion, if allowed to become dominant in the soul, causes blindness. For by highlighting an object exclusively so as to make it appear overwhelmingly preeminent within its context — which is in effect to remove the object from its proper...
How many elderly people will spend the last year of their lives isolated from most of their kin, wishing in futility for one last family holiday gathering that will be denied them by holier-than-thou politicians and self-righteously “compassionate” family members? — all those politicians and family members pretending that they are depriving these old folks of their last moments of earthly joy out...
It’s a quiet Saturday here in Day Something of the emergency to end all emergencies. I am hiding out in my favorite work space, trying to make the most of the unexpected time afforded by the corona-virus-delayed start of the spring semester. “Never let a crisis go to waste,” as Rahm Emanuel, a Clinton-Obama strategist and thug, famously said. Without further ado, then,...
A student sent me an e-mail yesterday which consisted of one simply-worded, but far from simplistic, question: “How can I be rational?” The question has perennial importance, of course, and may in a sense be the defining concern of the human soul. However, as the obstacles to living in accordance with reason grow more pervasive and pernicious with each generation, the notion of “being...
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