Tea at Trianon: The Uses of Disgust

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

Thursday, July 14, 2016

The Uses of Disgust

From Dr. Esolen:

In a world not gone psychotic about sex, the people involved would be promptly and severely disciplined. Where in the United States in 1950, even in the most liberal and agnostic universities, would the orgiasts not have been suspended or expelled? But now, nothing; the sense of disgust is gone.

Or rather it has not gone, because it cannot really ever be obliterated from our systems. Gangrene smells bad to us. We can, however, make a fetish of the disgusting: we can pervert ourselves so that we delight in what is foul precisely because it is foul. That was the “genius” of the Marquis de Sade, the unacknowledged master of ceremonies of the French Revolution. What had been unspeakable became a matter of pride: raping women and little girls while slitting their throats, inserting explosive cartridges into their orifices, slaughtering people and then stripping them and placing their corpses in obscene forms of copulation, causing the elder liberal Malesherbes to watch as his children and grandchildren were decapitated one by one…. There is no end to perversion, once the barrier of disgust has been publicly breached. It is not merely that you do not hide it anymore. You take pride in it. You put it on parade. You must: your own repressed disgust compels you.

Our sins are, for now, less likely to shed blood, other than that of the unborn children served up to Moloch for what the Supreme Court is pleased to call our autonomy and economic planning. For now. But consider the depths we have already achieved. One Dan Savage, about whom the least one can say is that he is a psychological wreck, whose advice column is filled with creepy-boy obscenities and creepy-boy delight in sickness, whose least disgusting sin is to promote adultery to stave off sexual boredom—he is a thousand times more likely to address your middle-school students and to be praised by their teachers, than is a saintly man or woman of God. (Read more.)