Enjoying the view from Limbo
“Say things as simply as possible” — in order to be understood as widely as possible. “Live in accordance with the norms of your society” — in order to be accepted. “Do not do what will be seen as inappropriate, foolish, or out of step by the people around you” — lest one be rejected or even condemned by others. “Keep up with...
When theoretical reason is forsaken in favor of practical reason as the human standard — or, to say the same thing, when the theoretical is reduced to the status of handmaiden of the practical — this will necessarily have certain verifiable and visible effects on life in the civilization in which this reversed perspective takes hold. In brief, this reversal reduces thinking to...
The human ego is a clever, skulking beast, always ready with a scheme to protect itself against the humiliations inherent in so much of human life, specifically by artfully reframing these humiliations as acts of will, and ascribing causality to what is in truth only an inescapable effect, distorted by imagination. Necessity is the mother of invention, and few needs are greater in...
Ideas and Reflections / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 10, 2022 · Last modified April 22, 2022
On being “absolutely modern.”— We naturally get excited about new ideas, new explanations. In such excitement, all past ideas seem paltry and passé. Such is the nature of enthusiasm. The whole world reflects our excitement back at us, reinforcing the illusion of absolute certainty attending the compelling new thoughts and their accompanying feelings. Hence, all previous modes of thought appear to us as...
Ideas and Reflections / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 12, 2018 · Last modified July 9, 2018
One of my great bugaboos in conversing with my sometime allies in the American conservative movement is their all too frequent infatuation with, and deference toward, free market economic theory. Let me state this as clearly as possible. Economics in the modern form — the form into which it has evolved since, like its sisters among the “social sciences,” it detached itself from...
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