Tea at Trianon: Helping Boys Become Men

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

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Helping Boys Become Men

From Life Site:

I think, for example, that everyone would agree that there is a generation of young men in our society who are disillusioned, angry, and frustrated. Suicide, for example, is pandemic among young white men. Many of them are unemployed, most of them are hooked on pornography, and as a result their relationships are often toxic or dysfunctional. Nobody really seems to care, either—books like Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men even carry a hint of triumphalism. To even talk about “men’s issues” is to incur the rage of a thousand feminists.

But Jordan Peterson is a man who is brought to tears when discussing the plight of young men, and he desperately wants to change their lives for the better. They are flocking to him in their hundreds of thousands, seeking advice and the tools to change their lives. Thousands of them are now crediting Peterson with transforming them from angry and dysfunctional to ambitious and “getting it together.” He is swiftly becoming a father figure to a generation of men who often grew up without one.

Where is the harm in that? Don’t the snarky liberal columnists deriding Peterson and the audience he is seeking to help think that it’s a good thing that young men are finding inspiration in someone who is telling them to get off the couch, get a job, become useful, and treat people well? Isn’t the fact that Jordan Peterson is reducing the risk of suicide in many young men a good thing for us all? What these angry progressive hatchet-men flailing at Peterson’s accomplishments don’t realize is that to his audience, it rather looks like they don’t care about the fate of hundreds of thousands of young men as much as they care about winning an argument on transgender pronouns.

Taking it a step further, consider the proliferation of the #metoo movement across North America. At the root of the issue is the fact that many men, from the entertainment industries to politics, have been acting predatory, crude, disrespectful—and sometimes worse. Enter Jordan Peterson, who has been urging young men to harness their sexual instincts, to treat women with respect, and to delay sex until marriage. He’s even addressed pornography, which many believe is partially to blame for our toxic sexual culture—and many men have already decided to kick pornography and all of its ugly objectification and sexual violence out of their lives—simply because Peterson advised them to. Don’t Peterson’s attackers find that to be a positive development? (Read more.)