Tea at Trianon: Normophobia

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, April 9, 2024

Normophobia

From Mary Harrington at First Things:

So instead of writing a policy paper on how to shore up family life against a solvent tide, I want to address the ideological basis of this problem: namely, the contemporary consensus that makes an enemy of the unchosen, the normal, and the given. In the spirit of the age, let’s name this consensus uncharitably, and with our own rhetorical interests in mind. Let us dismiss the self-justifications about inclusion, marginalization, and so on that lubricate its spread. Let’s call it bigotry, a fear of the normal. Normophobia.
Normophobia frames everything conventional, average, given, assumed, traditional, and normative—whether its origin be physiological or cultural—as arbitrarily and coercively constructed to support vested interests, particularly those of white, Christian, heterosexual men. Radical normophobes describe their aim explicitly as the total eradication of this (they claim) artificially naturalized domain of the “natural,” in favor of untrammeled, free-floating, individual desire.

Family is at best weakly defended against normophobia. Normophobic consensus operates by smearing every argument from normativity or nature by association with the specter of fascism. And as Wilhelm Reich implied in the words I have used as an epigraph, the very givenness of family patterns aligns the family with constraint, with limitations on desire, and hence—in the moral landscape of progress-as-freedom—with the authoritarian bogeyman. (Read more.)