Tea at Trianon: Recovering the “Habits of the Heart” in John Ford’s 'Stagecoach'

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

Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Recovering the “Habits of the Heart” in John Ford’s 'Stagecoach'

From Onalee:

Sociologist Robert Putnam identified in Bowling Alone and other studies, the enormous loss of community connection that has taken place over decades in our society. Movies of Hollywood’s golden age carry a mysterious aesthetic and moral power to build social capital and social unity.
Recently at the Educational Guidance Institute (EGI) we finalized our new curriculum, Teaching and Learning Civic Engagement through the Art of Classic Film. There, our Unit 2 features the theme of care and defense of the Common Good with classic westerns like High Noon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. Yet it was within the past several weeks when my friend, Sam Morales asked me to write a piece on Stagecoach for his Substack that I realized:
John Ford’s 1939 masterpiece is one of the best vehicles for all of us, across the generations and across the cultural and political divides, to ponder the question: WHAT MAKES A GOOD CITIZEN?
This is where the idea of teaching and learning the Aristotelian “Habits of the Heart” of our title for this post kicks in: the characters in Stagecoach teach us timeless lessons about human nature itself. From the beginning scenes we learn human beings do in fact share a common human nature. This was the big IDEA that started to get lost centuries ago in the long history of Political Theory. Which tradition of thought about human nature is true? The nominalism of William of Ockham and rationalistic dualism of Descartes OR the classic tradition of Aristotle, Cicero and Thomas Acquinas carried on by 20^th century philosophers such as Jacques Maritain, Josef Pieper, Mortimer Adler, Alisdair MacIntyre, and Heinrich Rommen? (Read more.)