Tea at Trianon: In Defense of Fathers

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

Saturday, April 2, 2022

In Defense of Fathers

From Chad Pecknold at The Postliberal Order:

Like all men educated over the last four decades, I was taught that patriarchy was a very bad thing, and that I must do everything in my power to, well, not wield “patriarchal power.” To be a good progressive, I needed to recognize the power of a whole new range of protected classes, but the one class which was absolutely not protected was the one I now occupy most fully: fatherhood. Nina Power notes that despite the decades of moaning about the patriarchy, the evidence tells us a different story. Whatever judgments we make about what it is, and isn’t, we don’t live in a patriarchy, and haven’t for a long time. Power points to the very inconvenient and tragic fact that one in four children are fatherless — which is not to say that any child exists without a father, but that the father has vanished. They are not sleepless due to the night time feeding regime, they are just entirely absent, and wherever they are present, their role as father is seen as something expendable and unnecessary, or at least secondary, and auxiliary. Fathers are rarely portrayed or recognized as essential to our social and political flourishing.
Nina Power is an English philosopher who has most recently written a tour de force defense of patriarchy in What Do Men Want? Masculinity and Its Discontents (2022). Her critics claim that she exaggerates the crisis that faces men, but the extraordinary response of men to the basic cri de coeur of Jordan Peterson — that men aren’t just important but necessary and essential to society — suggests that the problem cannot be overstated. Of course, Power is no conservative, but a radical thinker of the Left who is transgressing the very pieties of progressive gender fluidity. It’s part of the strange horseshoe dynamic that a new-left thinker with an impeccable pedigree of postmodern training would harken back to themes that once would have been heard on the lips of Phyllis Schlafly. This is also why she’s joined the most talked about new “horseshoe” of a magazine, Compact, which unites the new left and new right against both libertine and libertarian iterations of liberal power —and of course, boasts two Postliberal Order writers, Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, in an eclectic stable of contributing editors.
In her essay for Compact, Power smartly observes that the modern liberal order came up with inspiration not from a recognition of the importance of the father, but that of the brother. The watchword of the French Revolution was fraternity not paternity. Though Power does not observe the theological dimensions of the appeal to fraternity, they only strengthen her argument, for the French political appeal to “fraternity” is theologically incoherent as the Religion of Man recognizes no Father under whose paternal gaze we could even become brothers. And this incoherence is manifest in the way that the “Regime of the Brother,” as Juliet Flower MacCannell named the original enlightenment critique of patriarchy, essentially dissolves sexual difference. Men are supposed to act like women, and women are to act like men. “The Regime of the Brother” thus erases fatherhood and motherhood, and replaces the father with a “hedonistic brother” who is emblazoned in material culture as the irresponsible, feckless “frat boy” who is riddled with vices to a degree that the libertinism becomes the central image for male “fraternity” utterly detached and disconnected from the paternity which is essential to men, and without which, fraternity stands as a grotesque parody of Christian sodality, patriarchy turned upside-down. The “porn-addled young man” is in some respects the very core of the critique of “patriarchal privilege,” and yet it’s precisely the absence of the father we see in the cultural iconic “frat boy” - always a “bro” and never a “dad,” never a father with responsibilities, with watchfulness, with something valuable to watch over even if it means personal sacrifices of self greater than even sleeplessness. (Read more.)