zenpundit.com

“The conversation of these titled aristocrats, – most of them educated at Oxford and Cambridge, cultivated by foreign travel, and versed in the literature of the day – though full of prejudices, was generally interesting; while their manners, though cold and haughty, were easy, polished, courteous and dignified.  it is true, most of them would swear, and get drunk at their banquets; but their profainity was conventional rather than blasphemous, and they seldom got drunk till late in the evening, and then on wines older than their children, from the most famous vinyards of Europe. During the day, they were able to attend to business, if they had any, and seldom drank anything stronger than ale or beer. Their breakfasts were light and their lunches simple. Living much in the open air and fond of the pleasures of the chase, they were generally healthy and robust. The prevailing disease which crippled them was gout; but this was owing to champagne or burgundy rather than brandy and turtle soups, for at that time, No Englishman of rank dreamed that he could dine without wine. William Pitt, it is said, found less than three bottle insufficient for his dinner, when he ha been working hard.                                                            

 – Dr. John Lord, Beacon Lights of History, vol. V.  1885.  P. 231-232.

I’m fairly certain that the elite of today’s global hegemonic power are not going to come off nearly as well at the hands of historians writing in 2078 as did the Hanoverian aristocracy and gentry of the British Empire did at the hands of the Victorian era scholar.

REVIEWING LEARNING TO EAT SOUP WITH A KNIFE

“Learning to Eat Soup With A Knife -Book Review” is now up at Chicago Boyz.

ECONOMIC MAN VS. PRIMARY LOYALTIES

I’ve posted this over at Chicago Boyz.

Lex has strong objections to “secularization” as an explanation for tempering historical tribalism in the West. I’ll comment more as soon as I can.

Exceptionally busy day – I’ll try to get some quality blogging in late tonight. No rest for the wicked.

THE LOST WORLD OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS

Lexington Green has an interesting post “Do we really owe it all to the geography of the Norwegian fjords?” at Chicago Boyz that traces the culture of Anglo-American notions of political liberty to the nuclear families of the Norwegian fjords:

“Here is a whole corpus of writing about which I knew nothing. I have in the meantime obtained a copy of the translation of the Demolins book, Anglo-Saxon Superiority, To What is it Due? (1907). The beginning of it is a summary of the writing of M. de Tourville, which discusses how the Saxons came to dominate all the other invaders, Angles, Danes, Normans, because of their cultural practices, particularly nuclear families, which Tourville calls “particularist” social structure. The Saxons generated a unique type of state apparatus as a result, operating large states on a federal-type basis. For example, note this passage:

We know how, under Egbert, the Heptarchy fell under the domination of the Saxons. But the latter did not give the Angles a Saxon government, nor did they foist Saxon officials on them, for the good reason that their political development was most limited, their strength lying more in private than in public life. They never dreamt of administering conquered peoples in the fashion adopted by the Romans, and later by the Spaniards and the French. Their idea was rather — and has remained — a Federation. Thus were started by the Saxons that former United States of England. So little did they aim at constituting the model of a large empire, that their king continued to call himself simply ‘King of the Saxons of the West’. Yet he was sovereign over the whole island.

Remarkable if true. We see the Saxons at the earliest possible date showing the genius for distributed power and federal arrangements that we in the Anglosphere still have today. Unfortunately, the Demolins book, which I am halfway through, is more focused on reform in France a century ago, with the English case only as a background.”

Very intriguing. At the time the Demolins book was published, the troubled Third Republic was deeply split politically, socially and culturally. There was, to an extent, in France, a sense of anxiety over the might of the “Anglo-Saxon powers”, rising America and reigning Great Britain and paranoia about the aforementioned power’s distant Teutonic cousins in Wilhelmine Germany. On the other hand, admiration for British political institutions was not unusual among French intellectuals prior to the 20th century – Montesquieu and Voltaire being the most famous examples of that tradition.