“DCP” wrote: As is my (perhaps unfortunate) habit, I spent a few minutes today reading at an online site where the dominating spirit seems to be one of anti-religious mockery, contempt, and derision, where a perpetually-cultivated sneer appears to have taken on the character of a permanent rictus. And I couldn’t help but think of a passage from the Anglo-French writer, historian, and parliamentarian Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953):
The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him — that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization should have offended him with priests and soldiers. . . . In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.
We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.
It may surprise him that DCP wrote it, but it doesn’t surprise us. After all, G K Chesterton is one of DCP’s heroes too.“A thoughtful SeN commenter” wrote: It surprises me you'd quote Belloc, a famously bigoted man, but especially that line. After all, I'm fairly sure Belloc might've considered members of your own faith to be a foreign element in society. After all, one need only look at his attitude towards Jews. That bit about having one's cake and eating it is something Belloc used ten years later, in another book:
Jews, Belloc says, are an alien element in the body-politic; incapable of belonging to the culture. Even within the Barbarians chapter you quote, he shows some pretty bigoted viewpoints. Whether it's the explicit eugenicism in the opening paragraphs of the chapter, or the comments about art that would not go amiss at the N@zi Degenerate Art exhibition, or the description of "pragmatists" strutting like a... Well, suffice it to say, it's a racial slur and a considerable indicator as to who he considered a "Barbarian".You cannot have your cake and eat it too, you cannot at the same time have present in the world this ubiquitous fluid, yet closely organized Jewish community, and at the same time each of the individuals composing it treated as though they were not members of the nation which makes them all they are.
Belloc's evocation of this imagined past, of a Europe united and joined under Christendom, is a fantasy. Neither Europe nor Christianity had been united prior to that point, except perhaps as it existed briefly under the Western Roman Empire, and that a pagan empire until pretty much right before its collapse. Belief was neither consistent nor universal. And most of that history was lived under the tyranny of kings and petty lords. The fruits of what he considers civilization were a product of the people he snears at.
The man's ideas are just another reactionary decline narrative. The Europe that embraced his ideas consumed itself in the fires of the most horrific war imaginable, and gave rise to an increasingly secular society that actually did unify Europe into a union. Justice was achieved by the Barbarians, not him or his ilk.
Perhaps DCP’s next book to not finish could be “The Final Solution to the Ex-Mormon Problem.”
