Tea at Trianon: Democracy and Religion

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

Saturday, July 30, 2016

Democracy and Religion

From Intellectual Takeout:

John Adams once said that the U.S. Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious people.” He seems to have an ally in Harvard professor Clay Christensen, the scholar behind disruptive innovation theory.

Christensen, a Rhodes Scholar and the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at the college’s business school, appeared in a video that is picking up steam on Youtube. The clip recounts a conversation the professor had with a Marxist economist from China. Christensen asked the Fulbright Scholar if anything had surprised him during his visit to the states. This was the response he received, as told by Christensen:

I had no idea how critical religion is to the functioning of democracy. The reason why democracy works, is not because the government was designed to oversee what everybody does. Rather, democracy works because most people most of the time voluntary choose to obey the law. In your past, most Americans attended a church or a synagogue every week, and they were taught there by people who they respected. Americans followed these rules because they had come to believe they were uncountable to society, they were accountable to God.
(Read more.)