Tea at Trianon: A World After Liberalism: A Review

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

Thursday, December 2, 2021

A World After Liberalism: A Review

From IM-1776:

A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right offers political advice to Christians. The problem is, it’s not good advice. The author, Matthew Rose, ably profiles five Right philosophers of previous generations — but fails to link this past thought in any meaningful manner to today. He instead uses this historical survey to lecture Christians they must anathemize today’s fast-growing post-liberal Right, while ignoring that all present attacks on Christians come from the modern left, the final form of liberalism. Rose can’t bring himself to criticize the left, so his book fails to provide prudent political guidance to Christians.

Rose begins, not by defining liberalism with any precision, although he seems to equate it with the Enlightenment, and thus autonomic individualism and egalitarianism, but by saying that “liberalism is losing its hold on Western minds.” True enough. Rose notes the great diversity among post-liberals, “nationalists, populists, identitarians, futurists, and religious traditionalists,” and he offers a very short, but generally good, thumbnail sketch of this present-day ferment. But then he throws all his insights away, saying “history offers a guide to the destiny of ideas” and “this is not a book about a present generation of radicals, but about a previous one.” Whereupon he retreats a hundred years and only ever views the present through the dead past.

Rose’s premise, never quite made explicit, is that the dividing line between left and Right is whether individual or collective identity should be the core of a society. But while certainly atomized autonomy has always been the touchstone of the left, and no doubt the Right thinkers he profiles regarded societal collective identity as crucial, Rose in practice equates collective identity with race — despite race being very secondary, or wholly unimportant, to nearly all of those he profiles. Rose is trapped and bound within the frames of the left, and the left loves nothing more today than demanding from the Right talks about race, with the sole goal of using it, in Scott Adams’s phrase, as a “linguistic kill shot,” obviating any need for facts and reason. Thus, Rose cites Saint Paul that there is “neither Jew nor Greek […] in Christ Jesus,” but he thinks this means Christians must adopt the left’s definition of racism, i.e. white people are evil and must acknowledge this by hating themselves and handing over power, money, and honors earned to non-white people.

Unfortunately, excessive focus on race is only the most glaring example of Rose’s frequent prostrations before the left (even though I don’t think he’s a man of the left himself). The author offers repeated pre-emptive apologies, such as for daring to actually evaluate Right thinkers objectively. “I hope that in treating them seriously I have done nothing to normalize any of the perennial diseases of the human mind.” When you announce in your Introduction that you regard the thought you are studying as diseased, you undermine your credibility. Equally tiring are Rose’s many other obeisances to the gods of the age, in major ways such as the laughable claim that “Christians must play an essential role in combating racism,” thereby ignoring that if racism is a sin, it is no special sin, merely one of the innumerable manifestations of the cardinal sin of pride, and in minor ways such as by using “CE” instead of “A.D.” I suppose, though, all this may be just the cost of admission to being published by Yale University Press — and, to be fair, this book is susceptible to an esoteric reading, in which this is a smokescreen designed to support an attack on liberalism, though I don’t think that is an accurate reading.

At least Rose admits that the modern left-dominated world has failed the young. “There are human needs that liberalism cannot possibly satisfy — needs that it now struggles to even acknowledge.” Among those are all the core needs of every human and every human society, “needs of the human spirit” he enumerates. Moreover, “To ask people to apologize for what they are right to value, and to be ashamed for what they are right to need, is to tempt political catastrophe.” Then he proceeds to ignore those needs and admonish us what we are right to value and right to need is only what the left tells us we should need and value, or we’re racist. (Read more.)