Tea at Trianon: Sanitation Power Does Not Permit Tyranny

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, March 23, 2023

Sanitation Power Does Not Permit Tyranny

From Jeffrey Tucker at Brownstone Institute:

Just who is being sanitized here? The plane, bus, or boat is presumably being sanitized by restricting your poison breath. But what if you are not sick? Doesn’t matter. Maybe you need to be sanitized from other people’s poison breath. Of course the mask does nothing of the sort but that’s a side issue. At question here is the power itself and the CDC’s legal right to make such a decision on its own.

The word itself got me thinking of its roots. Etymologically, the word has a number of iterations. Think of sanitize or sanitizer, the stuff people doused themselves with for two years while thinking that they were killing Covid even though it spreads not through surfaces but through aerosols. The word is also related to sane and insanity, as in one’s mind is in need of some kind of cleaning.

The root of the word is Latin: sanitas which means clean but a deep root is sanus which refers to health generally, mind, body, and maybe soul. A related derivation is the Latin Sanctus which means holy and apart, as in sanctuary, sanity, and sanctimonious. We can see, then, the easy identification of physical and spiritual health. Hence, the famous statement by the founder of Methodism: cleanliness in next to godliness. It seems true enough but can also lead to confusion: unclean/immoral/diseased; clean/moral/healthy. For hundreds and thousands of years, these words have bled into each other, fomenting every kind of dangers including institutionalized segregation and wanton cruelty toward the sick.

And speaking of bleeding, consider the word Sanguine, which is word we sometimes use but it refers also to a medieval temperament meaning that one is driven by the blood (Sanguine in Latin). When one got sick, it was believed that this was due to bad blood. One’s health (sanus) was compromised by the blood (sanguine), and hence the belief that bloodletting is a sure cure for every kind of malady, a practice that lasted into the 19th century with the use of leeches.

The conflation of ill health and immorality, both traceable to bad blood, is a persistent feature of history, as we learn from the Bible. Perhaps it made some sense for the lepers to be excluded from temple life but for how long? Decades? They had to undergo a ritualistic cleansing and blessing to reenter. This is a service that Jesus provided and it variously got him in some trouble.

This cleansing feature of religious practice shows itself in the use of holy water in Christian worship too. It is sprinkled in the final blessing and deployed in foot-washing ceremonies at the end of Lent in order to symbolically cleanse the body and soul to prepare for the experience of salvation. (Read more.)