Tea at Trianon: The Revolutionary Intolerance of Academia

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

Friday, June 7, 2019

The Revolutionary Intolerance of Academia

From The New York Post:

A huge amount of attention and public anxiety has been expended on the plight of free speech on campus. Every season the situation seems to get a little worse. Guest speakers are routinely shouted at, de-platformed, or disinvited. Students and teachers alike are bullied into silence or craven apology by self-appointed virtue-crats in college administrations and among designated victim groups among the students.

But the issue isn’t really, or not only, free speech. Bret Weinstein, a former biology professor, was hounded out of Evergreen State College when he objected to a “Day of Absence” rally that insisted that all whites stay off campus for a day. Since then, he has been frequently invited to talk about free speech on college campuses. But he notes that the real crisis in education isn’t about free speech. Rather, it is about “a breakdown in the basic logic of civilization.”

Academia is the crucible, the engine room of this rot. But the breakdown of which Weinstein speaks isn’t confined to college campuses. The revolutionary intolerance that has made college campuses so inhospitable to free expression and the impulses of civilization has also deeply affected the woke mandarins of social media and Big Tech. It has made serious inroads into the HR departments of the Fortune 500 and elsewhere in the world of business. And it has insinuated itself into the values and practices of most governmental agencies, many of which have yet to meet a politically correct left-wing cause they do not embrace.

The economist Herb Stein once observed that what cannot go one forever, won’t. In the coming decade, we will see many so-called liberal-arts college close their doors. We will also see more alternatives to traditional colleges. Many of these will be on-line. Some will be local, ad hoc ventures. All will be rebelling against the poisonous hand of identity politics. (Read more.)