Tea at Trianon: At War with God

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, January 20, 2022

At War with God

From First Things:

Outside consciously religious communities, which now amount to a counter-culture, generational reality for most people can be summarized in one word: fewer. Fewer brothers, sisters, cousins, children, grandchildren. Fewer people to play ball with, or talk to, or learn from. Fewer people to celebrate a birth; fewer people to visit one’s deathbed. In a way that is not generally acknowledged, the sexual revolution has produced a relationship deficit. And since we are social creatures and define ourselves relationally, this shortage means that we face an identity deficit. Who am I? This is a universal, inescapable question. Because of the revolution, many of us have lost the material with which to construct an answer.

As our individual lives become more disordered and bereft, so do our politics. The first use of the phrase “identity politics” appears in a manifesto published by radical African-American feminists in 1977—just as the first generation born into the revolution was coming of age. For those who haven’t read it, the Combahee River Collective manifesto is a poignant window onto modern times. It declares, in essence, that its signatories—all women—are giving up on the men in their lives. They are banding together for a future that does not include unreliable boyfriends and husbands. There is a straight line from that declaration of failure to the one uploaded by Black Lives Matter last year (and subsequently removed), which likewise denied healthy relations between the sexes and within the natural family, and failed even to mention fathers or brothers. Both proclamations signify that political identity has become a substitute for familial and communal bonds. Both are rooted in a fury at creation itself—an anger at the disruption of the natural order, which the creature now claims the right to re-order.

These are the facts of life in our times, the essential features of the world our children are inheriting. Facing them without blinkers or sugarcoating, what’s a believer to do?

The first imperative is compassion. If we are to rebuild from the rubble we’re surveying, we must grasp what underlies it: massive, often misunderstood and unseen suffering. This includes the suffering of people in factions that commonly oppose the Church. It’s easy, especially among traditionalists, to dismiss the public enactments of identity politics with derogatory terms like “snowflake,” “coddled Millennial,” and “spoiled brats.” Easy—and wrong.

There is a common denominator beneath the bizarre rituals occurring on campuses and elsewhere, beneath an increasingly punitive social media, beneath the performative rage of BLM—indeed, beneath cancel culture itself. It is anguish. These days, many people who claim to be victims are indeed victims. But they are not victims of the oppressions and exclusions they’ve been taught to make central to their self-conceptions—the “gender binary,” “heteronormativity,” “structural racism.” (Read more.)