Tea at Trianon: Therapists of Decline

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 16, 2021

Therapists of Decline

From Chad Pecknold at The Postliberal Order:

Rod Dreher’s influence on conservative therapies is distinct from Douthat’s talk-therapy and from the Storeys’ nostalgia for an American “liberalism” that sits pretty with all its “pre-political” sources. Indeed, Dreher has distinguished himself as a tremendous chronicler of liberal ills. Like Douthat, he is willing to stare down the decadence directly, but unlike Douthat, he often advocates for purer therapies that take into account the mood of his generation.

One obvious way of reading The Benedict Option is as a typical conservative treatise on decline. The prognosis is devastating—nothing will survive the acids of liberalism, get ready for things to get much, much worse. The only hope for Christians to retain their way of life is by some sort of “strategic retreat.” For some years, Dreher’s therapy actually looked like a real break from liberal order. He gave birth to the idea of little Benedictine-esque communities of work and prayer that would one day rebuild civilization after liberalism had laid waste to all of it. It’s romantic in both the bleakness of diagnosis and the idealistic and ever-distant hope for our political future. But it fit the mood of conservatives whose Reaganesque optimism had been dashed by reality, and sold extremely well as a result.

More recently, Dreher has revealed another way to read his work. I don’t mean as a therapist of decline—he’s always been the quintessential type—but rather as the flipside of the sort of right liberalism that utterly depends on the “little platoons” of “pre-political” civil society. Consider his recent, surprising attempts to pivot from the narratival perch of St. Francisville, Louisiana, to playing in the sandbox of international power politics in Central and Eastern European countries, giving keynotes on “national conservativism.” Amish means to Orbanist ends, perhaps?

Dreher himself seems uncertain, and also impatient with the very question of his coherence as a conservative. After Dreher repeatedly attacked his American Conservative colleague Sohrab Ahmari, Ahmari raised a series of questions intended to help Dreher articulate how he holds apparently contradictory views. (Read more.)