Tea at Trianon: Corporate Puritanism

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, October 12, 2021

Corporate Puritanism

From The American Conservative:

A term frequently flung about in Eden-Olympia is “corporate puritanism”: It captures both the absolute workaholism of the park’s corporate class and their disgust with the ordinary grime and messy civic give-and-take of the outside world. Now, this puritanism coexists, in another prophetic flourish from Ballard, with a kind of controlled hedonism. In those all-too-brief hours when the executives don’t work, they get kinky, to put it mildly: hard drugs, sadomasochism, even random ultra-violence directed against people outside the park.
We will return to this transgressive impulse. But to understand it, we have to attend to the other major features of Eden-Olympia. The second feature is that it’s a profoundly anti-political place. Here, I want to briefly pause and note that Sophia-Antipolis is the name of an actual, Silicon Valley-style business park in southern France, mentioned in Ballard’s work. Antipolis is the ancient Greek name for nearby Antibes. “Antipolis” literally means opposite the city—that is, opposite Nice. But the ancient name happens to be nicely evocative of what these business parks are like, to Ballard’s mind: anti-polises, anti-cities, the opposite of what the ancient city represented, the ideal of the city as a family of families, a political community, a space for cultivating civic virtue.
“An invisible infrastructure took the place of traditional civic virtues,” Paul tells us.
At Eden-Olympia, there were no parking problems, no traditional burglars or purse-snatchers, no rapes or muggings. The top-drawer professionals no longer needed to devote a moment’s thought to each other, and had dispensed with the checks and balances of community of life. There were no town councils or magistrates’ courts, no citizens’ advice bureaux. Civility and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia, in the same way that mathematics, aesthetics and an entire geopolitical worldview were designed into the Parthenon and the Boeing 747. Representative democracy had been replaced by the surveillance camera and the private police officer.
Again and again, Eden-Olympia’s architects drive home this point. In a telling exchange, Paul tells one executive that “‘there’s no drama and no conflict [at Eden-Olympia]. There are no clubs or evening classes….’
‘We don’t need them [the executive responds]. They serve no role.’
‘No charities or church fêtes. No fund-raising galas.’
‘Everyone is rich. Or at least, very well off.’
‘No police or legal system.’
‘There’s no crime, and no social problems.’
‘No democratic accountability. No one votes. So who runs things?’
‘We do. We run things.’”
At Eden-Olympia, the private has somehow completely swallowed the public, eaten it from the inside out. Morality, if it can be called that, is baked into ergonomics. You don’t debate great public issues, or allow the ancient rivalry between classes to play out in a real political way. There are cameras everywhere, and a private police force to respond to any abnormalities that might concern the executives. Again, Ballard is prophetic here: For us, morality, insofar as it exists, is programmed into our smart phones. Things no longer get debated, but algorithms ensure that we are steered away from “extremist” ideas, the definition of which is ever-shifting, according to the needs of the system. (Read more.)