Tea at Trianon: God, Reason and Our Civilizational Crisis

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, March 22, 2015

God, Reason and Our Civilizational Crisis

From The Public Discourse:

No culture is without its blind spots. The Roman Empire embodied many errors, such as slavery and a widespread contempt for human life. These and other features of Roman society were called into question first by Judaism and then by Christianity. Yet even today we continue to refer with admiration to Roman civilization and its many accomplishments. By contrast, no one speaks of the former Soviet Union or Castro’s Cuba in these terms. In short, most people do recognize that, at some level, there are qualitative differences between societies and cultures.

On one level, civilizational preeminence can be understood in material and technological terms. Civilization, however, has always implied more than technological prowess. The Greeks and Romans didn’t refer to outsiders as “barbarians” simply because of the latter’s apparent military inferiority. Educated Greeks and Romans also believed that certain aspects of their own cultures, such as the forms of government developed in the Greek city-states, the legal institutions forged by Rome, and the singular philosophies developed by thinkers such as Aristotle and Cicero, accorded with the truth about how things should be and therefore constituted a standard by which to assess other cultures.

Hence, when Alexander the Great started adopting Persian dress and demanding that his Macedonian soldiers accord him the honors given to Asian potentates, the historian Arrian records that Alexander was openly criticized by some of his officers. In their view, one of the greatest warriors of all time was embracing habits they considered to be decadent precisely because they were incompatible with the Greek attachment to liberty, however imperfectly realized. Freedom, to their minds, was an intrinsically superior state of existence to one characterized by the despotism that had marked the far wealthier but defeated Persian Empire. (Read more.)