Tea at Trianon: Life in the Ruins

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

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

Life in the Ruins

From The Public Discourse:

Taylor also notes that the age of modern reform, with all its accomplishments and benefits, tends to the malaises of disenchantment. It delivers freedom and power, but we find ourselves lacking horizons of meaning. Modernity provides freedom, yes, but a loss of higher purpose, of belonging to anything worth living (or dying) for. Modernity sweeps away superstition and ignorance, replacing them with instrumental reason and natural causes, but negates sacred structure and exalted dignity—everything is resource and instrument, including humans. Modernity dissolves organic societies and their despotic tendencies, but delivers the soft despotism of democratic paternalism. In short, the buffered self discovers itself to be free, but pointless. Enlightened, but an organic robot awaiting death. Democratic, but without the spirit or will to live for anything except comfort and distraction, lacking the spirit even to propagate. Disenchantment has its malaises, and we know this.

The malaises contribute to the suffocation felt by many, a sense of pointlessness. Malaise can take away hope and meaning and direction, flattening everything into a kind of very comfortable despair. Some don’t feel the malaise, but others feel it very intensely, clawing at the iron cage for a breath of transcendence and the beyond.

It’s no surprise, then, that a good many people, perhaps especially the religious young, view modernity with distaste and cynicism. Now that we are comfortably on the other side of scarcity, tyranny, ignorance, and the likelihood of dying young, it’s easy to overlook the material, moral, and political accomplishments of modernity and note only its fragmentation, irrationalities, alienation, and malaise. For some religious people, malaise provides a motivation to re-enchant the world, and, indeed, the theme and hope of re-enchantment is prevalent among young Christians. While I have genuine sympathy for their frustrations at the state of the world, too often they express a craving for meaning more than truth, and not always in entirely reasonable ways, including ways that exacerbate the anxieties and frustrations of the moment. (Read more.)