Tea at Trianon: "Moral Panic"

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

Monday, October 26, 2015

"Moral Panic"

A discussion on teenage crime from Reid's Reader:

The use of the term “conversation”. Whenever I hear this term used in the context of a social debate, I know something dodgy is being sold. As when the propagandist for euthanasia lies through his/her teeth and says “We’re not promoting euthanasia – we’re just starting a conversation.” That sort of thing. The opinionated columnist who said that we needed a “conversation” with teenagers about sex was promoting the erroneous ideas (i) that public debate would miraculously clear the air; and (ii) that a one-off course of intensive propaganda aimed at teenagers (which, stripped of euphemisms, was what she was really talking about) would change teenagers’ sexual behaviour. Both these assumptions are wrong. Neither debate nor propagandising will change unacceptable teenage behaviour. (Read more.)