Tea at Trianon: “Eddington” and the Death of Civility

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, August 12, 2025

“Eddington” and the Death of Civility

From Brownstone Institute:

Eddington doesn’t give us clean villains or heroes; but something worse: a world where good men are corrupted not by ambition, but by exhaustion, betrayal, and the slow evaporation of meaning. Joe Cross doesn’t sell out per se {et tu, Fauci}, but he does become the kind of man he once had tried to stop.

In its final act – without giving too much away – the film descends into a chaotic, hellish unraveling. Violence erupts. Messaging overtakes meaning. Competing outside factions, each claiming moral supremacy, tear the town apart. Cross is pursued, hunted, undone. And no one – not even the man I chatted with after the film – could quite explain what he had just seen. But that’s the point.

This isn’t just about Eddington. It’s about all of us. When civility disappears, when God is forgotten, when personal morality gives way to mass messaging and digital spectacle – along with solipsistic self-victimhood worship, we lose not just our mooring, but then our communities. When we lose agency, we become actors in someone else’s script; speaking slogans not our own; building someone else’s babbling to tower over you. That tower of babble infallibly fails and falls. (Read more.)