Tea at Trianon: Remember When Pride was a Sin?

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, July 9, 2022

Remember When Pride was a Sin?

From The Daily Wire:

DailyWire+ addition Jordan Peterson issued a scathing review of Twitter following the social media platform banning him this week. They locked Peterson’s account after he posted his thoughts on transgender actress Elliot Page.
“A few days ago I penned an irritated tweet in response to one of the latest happenings on the increasingly heated culture war front. In response to the decision of an actress — actor — named Ellen – Elliot Page. I am employing this awkward and impossible naming style because it is now apparently mandatory and am probably doing it wrong…I’m trying to make a point,” Peterson began in his reply.
“I’ve essentially been banned from Twitter as a consequence. I say banned although technically, I’ve been suspended. But the suspension will not be lifted unless I delete the ‘hateful’ tweet in question, and I would rather die than do that.”
Next, the Canadian psychologist went over what the tweet said and what he believes the violation may have been, despite Twitter never specifying which part of the rules he violated. (Read more.)

From Denis Prager at Real Clear Politics:

Marxists support the obliteration of the male-female distinction because the only distinction that matters to Marxists is that of class. The other explanation is that the endgame of leftism is chaos. It is related to the first explanation, since the obliteration of all distinctions is chaos. Distinctions mean order. Having no distinctions means chaos. I came to realize the significance of distinctions when writing my commentary on the first five books of the Bible ("The Rational Bible"). The Bible's moral order is dependent on distinctions. Among them are:

Man and God

Good and evil

Human and animal

Holy and profane

Parent and child

Man and woman

Beautiful and ugly

Distinctions are so important to the Judeo-Christian moral order and weltanschauung that making distinctions is what God did for the Six Days. While they are known as the Six Days of Creation, the fact is that after creating the "heavens and the earth," God does little creating. After Genesis 1:1 the only things God creates are the animals listed in 1:21 and the human being (1:27). So, then, what did God do for the remainder of the Six Days? He created order out of chaos.

That's why the second verse of Genesis may well be the second-most important verse in the Bible (Genesis 1:1 is the most important because if you don't accept its premise, none of what follows matters): "And all was null and void," meaning all was chaos. Chaos is the natural state of the world. The transformation of chaos into order necessitated God.

Order is composed of distinctions. Natural order was dependent on the distinction between night and day and land and sea, and moral and social order was dependent upon the distinctions listed above. And while they are all dependent upon God, the Bible describes only one of them as "created" by God -- the human being as male and female. (Read more.)