Tea at Trianon: Old Men Forget

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, November 19, 2021

Old Men Forget

From The Imaginative Conservative:

Generational differences are often exaggerated, but I’ve always thought them useful. Are younger liberals and conservatives different from their elders? I think it’s obvious that the young Wokesters differ from the older ones in significant ways that are often terrifying to the oldsters. When many of our proto-woke Silent Generation and Boomer Liberals said to stick it to the man, they seem never to have seriously considered that they would ever be “the Man” to whom it was being stuck—or that the younger generation would not even be able to say what a “man” is. Yet that is what has come to pass.
Similarly, many conservatives who had found the perfect three-legged stool in Reaganite fusionism never dreamed that there would be challenges to a view of the world that was liberal but aware of the illiberal foundations necessary for a liberal polity and a kind of modified liberal philosophy to survive. I think sometimes that my slightly older friends and colleagues are mystified as to why younger people are turning away from the more “traditional” conservativism that characterized so much of the Republican party and the world of think tanks over the last few decades. That devotion to keeping the institutions going while trimming back excesses that characterizes the conservatism of the last few decades is now derided by many younger conservatives who refer to “Conservative Inc.” Older conservatives are often mystified by the turn among the religious conservatives toward more “radical” views of liturgy, moral theology, and sometimes ecclesiology and church-state relations. In a recent discussion, a stalwart older scholar claimed, to my surprise, that one of the Catholic academic guilds to which we both belong ought to reject the Traditional Latin Mass.

“Old men forget,” Henry V says in Shakespeare’s famous speech. Yet I’ve come to think that the problem with old men is not that they forget, but that they cannot forget. Specifically, they cannot forget the battles that raged when they were in their twenties and thirties.

Many conservatives of Silent Generation and Boomer vintage found that in Reagan, John Paul II, and Billy Graham a political and religio-cultural modus vivendi had been reached. No longer would conservatives be “reactionary.” They would make a kind of peace in politics with the New Deal and the Administrative State and even, to a certain extent, the Great Society. They would make peace with what is good in the Enlightenment, feminism, liberalism, ever-expanding human rights, and all the rest—making sense of the modern world even though it could not do so itself. (Read more.)