Tea at Trianon: The New Barbarians

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

Thursday, March 7, 2013

The New Barbarians

The slow decay of a society ends in total collapse. To quote:

Our Western civilization is collapsing. It has within it problems so fundamental as to bring the whole system down but our leaders and intelligentsia seem incapable of grasping the issues. It is as if there were a collective blind-spot as regards both the problem and the solution. Our governments are bureaucratic and unwieldy. People are enduring heavier taxes while the wealth is hogged by a few. Most seriously our fertility rate is below the average replacement rate.

We have surrendered our intellectual world to largely barbarian people.That last statement may come as a shock. We have traditionally thought of barbarians as pagans and intellectuals, i.e. civilised people, as being as far from barbarian as possible. In this modern none but a few odd balls can be serious pagans. That worldview simply does not thrive in a world as permeated with Christianity as ours. But barbarism is always with us. By barbarian I do not mean a wood or stone-worshipping heathen. These barbarians, not unlike those of Roman days, are quasi-Christian. Back then they were heretics now they are apostates. Back then they came in vast migrations but now they have grown up amongst us.

By barbarism I mean a mind for whom there is no objective moral law and where, ultimately, might is right. By barbarism I mean a mind that neither recognizes nor respects the Sacred. Such a mind might dabble in a kind of secular pantheism by which I mean not that God and the material world are somehow one but that the only kind of sacredness is the material world.A sacred material world takes precedence over the needs of individuals, communities and the human race. This barbarism allows the killing of babies in the womb and eventually after they are born. It allows the killing of the sick, the weak and the disabled. It does not just allow them it celebrates them. It holds them up as acts of compassion, heroism, good. This barbarism exalts the freedom, the autonomy of the individual.The ruthless individual, the solo hero, is the true star of all its stories, its gore-filled sagas and spectacles.

The barbarians are in control.The West has once again succumbed to them. Back in the days of the Empire though the barbarian people came with families, clans, traditions and a culture. They came from outside, admiring the Empire they occupied and wanting to share in its wealth and security even as they brought it down. Crudely and inconsistently they at least believed in a law that implied some recognition of the Natural Law. These new barbarians, having grown up in the West, despise the very foundations it was built on. To them there is no Natural Law, no truth save that which science can attest to and that only because science, for the moment, has such great cultural standing. Yet the science is always selectively cited. 'Reason' is their banner but it is really rationalisation. To them Christianity in particular, and religion in general, has no future. To them only their hedonistic, amoral, materialist ethos has any validity and any right to allegiance. They are as drunk on their new found power and influence as the ancient barbarians, and the pagan Romans before them, once were. (Read entire post.)