Tea at Trianon: American Individualism

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

Sunday, May 1, 2022

American Individualism

From The Public Discourse:

Social conservatives used to have a much more nuanced understanding of the development of modern liberalism out of the medieval Christian world. Our insistence on individual immortality, an idea hammered home by the almost preposterous teaching of the resurrection of the body, ought to make Christians dyed-in-the-wool individualists.
What’s wrong with good old-fashioned American individualism? This question has been simmering for a long time—at least since the end of the Cold War, when conservatives had to decide whether they were allowed to fully celebrate a victory over the dead body of socialism, or whether we needed to beat our own breasts with mea culpas for our own virulent individualism.

We learned from such converts from Marxism as Alasdair MacIntyre and Elizabeth Fox and Eugene Genovese that, while Marxism was not the solution, the Marxist critique of liberal individualism was so radically true that I guess we could say we are all communitarians now. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s writings about the Gulag were not as widely circulated as his Harvard Address, which served up a pretty even-handed critique of Russian communism and the soulless individualism of the West.

Before the end of the Cold War, the term “individualism” was not thrown around so frequently as a term of abuse, even by Christian conservatives, because of the more evident, ghastly effects of socialism—both the National Socialism of Germany and the international socialism of the USSR and its allies. Yes, there was some effort to distinguish conservatives from Ayn Randian individualists, or to tame “individualism” to Christian purposes by the use of the term “personalism.” But the Marxist critique of bourgeois individualism stuck like clay: it was hard to divest the notion of the individual of the filthy connotations of materialism, consumerism, and selfishness. Still, conservatives did not publicly attack the belief in the value of the individual human person, invested with God-given dignity and rights.

In the twenty-first century, that has changed. (Read more.)