Tea at Trianon: Transhumanism, Mothers, and Replacism of the Body

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

Sunday, October 27, 2024

Transhumanism, Mothers, and Replacism of the Body

From Mary Harrington:

One of my core arguments in Feminism Against Progress, is that the story of the industrial age is one of enclosure. This is a dynamic that, at every step, “liberates” a store of captive value by dissolving what was previously ordered relationally, in a process the political economist Karl Polanyi calls “disembedding”. Once stripped of social governance, the now “liberated” land, resources, creatures, or people are subjected ever more nakedly to the pressures of the market, which delivers economic gains but at considerable, albeit frequently obscured, social cost.
Ivan Illich’s 1980 work Gender explored specifically the “disembedding” of men and women, via the destruction of socially-governed distinctions between the sexes. This process, in his view, is the key enabling condition for modernity, in that it allows homo economicus to emerge as our era’s aspirational ideal. (Read more.)