Tea at Trianon: Characters of Our Own Creation

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, May 5, 2022

Characters of Our Own Creation

From Big Think:

Consider three strands of evidence. First, the neuroscience. The linguistic explanations we create of our own behavior are generated by the language centers in our left cerebral cortex. In people whose brains have been surgically split in two, by severing the corpus collosum that links the left and right cortex, this means that language-generating machinery in the left cortex is necessarily completely oblivious to the machinations of the right cortex. As it happens, the right cortex sees the left half of the visual field and controls the left hand. So, when people with split brains are asked verbally to explain the actions of their left hand, you might expect them to be utterly mystified. But not at all! They are all too ready to confabulate a credible-sounding (though entirely baseless) explanation. (Read more.)