Tea at Trianon: Does American Culture Celebrate Mediocrity Over Excellence?

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, December 29, 2024

Does American Culture Celebrate Mediocrity Over Excellence?

Very much so. From Culturcidal:

Getting beyond that, it’s impossible to deny that Ramaswamy is right about America’s culture emphasizing the wrong things. It starts right at the top. You can tell a lot about a culture by who it gives attention, rewards, and makes into heroes. Who is that in America? You can see it in who our kids want to be. Do they want to be scientists? Entrepreneurs? Soldiers? Computer programmers? Pastors? Not so much…
If our entertainment industry and society treat smart kids like “nerds,” act as if people who work hard are “boring,” and treat moral people like “prudes,” “hypocrites,” or “dorks,” we’re teaching people not to be these things. If we treat successful people like they somehow cheated to get there and poor people as if they’re noble by virtue of being poor, we’ll end up with a country full of resentful poor people who will claim they don’t want to be rich because they think it’s, “bad.”
Perhaps worst of all, if we treat kids like they’re pieces of glass that will break if they’re pushed too hard, they won’t have what it takes to do anything truly exceptional. The sort of people who create new companies, build rocket ships, and code paradigm-changing pieces of software are not working 40 hours per week from home. They’re getting after it in a way that many people never do in their whole lives. Furthermore, the skills it takes to do those things are typically not the same skills you get from being an influencer, a model, a star football player, or a badass who can wreck five guys in a fight, which are the types of things we lionize in American society. (Read more.)