Tea at Trianon: A Caste System Threatens the West

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, August 10, 2021

A Caste System Threatens the West

From The Brownstone Institute:

If you test positive or refuse to be tested at all in New Zealand, prepare to be shipped out to a quarantine camp recently established by the government. Shocking, yes, but we have an analogous system in the US. If you test positive (which is not the same as actually being sick), you will be removed from school or forbidden from coming into the office. You could lose your job – or refused the opportunity to earn money.

In many places in the country and the world where you travel today, you are subject to quarantine unless you can present a clean Covid test. The same is happening with vaccines, with new edicts from governments that their cities will be disease free and no one unvaccinated will be allowed to enter buildings or eat in restaurants.

All these policies that stigmatize those perceived to be sick, excluding them from society, follow directly from a strange twist in Covid policies. We started presuming that many or even most people will get the disease but seeking only to slow the pace at which it spread. Over time, we began to attempt the impossible, namely to stop the spread altogether. In the course of it, we’ve set up systems that punish and exclude the sick, or at least relegate them to a second-class status (a Scarlet Letter C on their chest, as it were) while the rest of us wait for the virus to go away either through a vaccine or some mysterious process by which the bug goes into retirement.

What really is going on here? It is resurrecting what amounts to a pre-modern ethos of how society deals with the presence of infectious disease. It’s not clear whether this is by accident or not. That it is in fact happening is indisputable. We are hurling ourselves in fits and starts toward a new system of castes, created in the name of disease mitigation.

Every pre-modern society assigned to some group the task of bearing the burden of new pathogens. Usually, the designation of the unclean was assigned based on race, language, religion, or class. There was no mobility out of this caste. They were the dirty, the diseased, the untouchables. Depending on the time and place, they were segregated geographically, and the designation followed from generation to generation. This system was sometimes codified in religion or law; more commonly this caste system was baked into social convention.

In the ancient world, the burden of disease was assigned to people not born as “free;” that is, as part of the class permitted to participate in public affairs. The burden was borne by the workers, merchants, and slaves who mostly lived away from the city – unless the rich fled the cities during a pandemic. Then the poor suffered while the feudal lords went to their manors in the country for the duration, forcing the burden of burning out the virus on others. From a biological perspective, they served the purpose of operating like sandbags to keep those in city free of disease. Pathogens were something to be carried and absorbed by them and not us. The elites were invited to look down on them, even though it was these people – the lower castes – who were operating as the biological benefactors of everyone else.

In religious teaching, the classes designated as sick and unclean were also considered unholy and impure, and everyone was invited to believe that their sickness was due to sin, and thus it is correct that we should exclude them from holy places and offices. We read in Leviticus 21:16 that God ordained that “Whosoever he be of thy seed in their generations that hath any blemish, let him not approach to offer the bread of his God. For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or anything superfluous, or a man that is brokenfooted, or brokenhanded, or crookback, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken.”

When Jesus came to heal the sick and the lepers in particular, it was not only an impressive miracle in itself; it was also something of a social and political revolution. His powers to heal freely moved people from one caste to another merely by removing the stigma of disease. It was an act imparting social mobility in a society that was very happy to do without. St. Mark 1:40 records not only a medical act but a social one: “And Jesus, moved with compassion, put forth his hand, and touched him, and saith unto him, I will; be thou clean. And as soon as he had spoken, immediately the leprosy departed from him, and he was cleansed.” And for doing that, Jesus was expelled: he “could no more openly enter into the city, but was without in desert places.”

(This is also why Mother Teresa’s work in the slums of Calcutta was so politically controversial. She was seeking to care for and heal the unclean as if they are just as deserving of health as everyone else.)

It was not until the early 20th century that we understood the brutal scientific intuition behind these cruel systems. It comes down to the need for the human immune system to adapt to new pathogens (there has been and always will be new pathogens). Some people or most people have to take the risk of getting sick and acquiring immunity in order to move a virus from the status of epidemic or pandemic to become endemic; that is, predictably manageable. By the time the pathogen reaches the ruling class, it becomes less life-threatening. The lower classes in this system operate as the tonsils or kidneys in the human body: taking on the disease to protect the rest of the body and finally to expel it. (Read more.)