Saturday Commentary and Review #80
Marine Le Pen Ascendant, France's Demographic Civil War, The Greek Uprising of 1821 and its Western Backers, Woke Capital Explained, The Era of the Duel and Honour
If you scroll back through the archives of this Substack, you’ll notice that one of the most featured characters has been French maverick Presidential candidate Eric Zemmour, the firebrand media figure who has carved out a space on the hard right in French politics. As many observers have already noted, he has through sheer force of personality and will, moved the French political debate to the right, and not just marginally. In a country where social-democracy is all but gone, the debate is now between the centre, the hard right, and the far right, with the notable exception of Luc Melenchon, that old Marxist fox. The centre-right too has collapsed with the candidacy of Pecresse, under the weight of its uselessness. It is a spent force.
One development that was unexpected, but that should have been obvious in retrospect, is that Marine Le Pen and her RN (National Rally) have benefited enormously from Zemmour’s intervention. The logic went that his entry would have split the hard right vote, resulting in neither making it to the second round of the vote against the favoured Macron. Not just this assumption was made, epitaphs for Marine Le Pen’s political career were also being saved on various laptops among the French commentariat. Zemmour outflanked Le Pen to the right, and she suffered several defections from her camp, most notable among them her niece, Marion Marechal.
Instead, Zemmour’s effect seems to be in ‘normalizing’ Marine Le Pen and her RN. Ouflanking her on the right has led many to conclude that she can’t be that after all, not as radical as Zemmour. Macron is still favoured to win in the second round against Le Pen, but the polling is much tighter than it was five years ago, well within the margin of error. Anne-Elisabeth Moutet takes a look at Le Pen’s potential triumph:
She wants to abolish Jus Solis, birthright citizenship, to deny naturalisation to the children of foreign parents born in France, but has given up on banning double nationality. She no longer wants a return to the death penalty, which she advocated as late as 2012. As for gay marriage, voted through during the François Hollande presidency, she prudently suggests “a three-year moratorium”, which means in effect it’s no longer in question. (In all fairness, Marine Le Pen has always been a social liberal; old Front hands used to bemoan her “gay Mafia” of advisers a decade ago.) And while she recommended leaving Nato before the Ukraine-Russian war, she has since rowed this back to merely pulling out France from Nato’s integrated command.
So far, so Souverainiste — and often hard to differentiate from the historic wing of the Gaullist party that defined itself in opposition to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty.
Standard-fare Gaullism, in short. Her anti-EU stance actually did hurt her against Macron in the last election, as it was considered a bridge too far by those who were still undecided.
On her platform:
Last week Le Monde ran a three-page analysis that tried to “decode” Le Pen’s platform to demonstrate that she was still, in effect, a fascist threat. Its main proof was her promise, if she’s elected, to organise an early referendum on an immigration and national identity bill; a bill passed in this way legally needs not be examined by the Constitutional Council. The constitutional lawyer Dominique Rousseau was quoted calling it “un coup d’état” — even though the recourse to referenda was introduced by Charles de Gaulle in his Fifth Republic Constitution in 1958 (it was used twice by Le Général, and seven times since).
How Zemmour’s radical approach has helped “normalize” Marine Le Pen:
“Accusations [like Le Monde’s] help Marine Le Pen more than they hurt her,” says Jean-Yves Camus, France’s leading expert on domestic and international far-Right movements. “Rightly or wrongly, people compare her style — seemingly reasonable, becalmed — to Eric Zemmour’s; as well as her lack of ego to most of her competitors. She owned up to mistakes. She admitted that her niece Marion’s defection had hurt her, explaining she’d largely brought her up as a child. She has become humanised.”
French people, worried about voting for a ‘far right radical’, can now rest easy and vote for Marine because she, unlike that “nasty” Eric Zemmour, is now within the range of acceptable politics (in the present French context):
Camus compares Le Pen’s platform to the Italian academic Emilio Gentile’s ten-point list characterising a fascist movement. These include the doctrine of taking power by force, having a paramilitary arm, aspiring to a monopoly of power, territorial ambitions, and more. “Simply put, the RN isn’t a fascist party,” Camus says.
Different constituencies:
All of which makes her, on paper at least, a complementary figure to Zemmour — if they got along, that is. He appeals to more affluent and educated voters, to urbanites, and to the Southern départements of Languedoc-Roussillon and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur; but he fails with women (61% of his avowed voters are men). Le Pen’s strongholds, in contrast, are in France’s rust belt in the North and North-East, in any area of la France Périphérique, those small towns where businesses, public services and jobs have disappeared, and with women (55% to 45% men). He rouses his large audiences with old-fashioned flings of nationalist rhetoric; she comforts the members of her smaller gatherings and doesn’t shy from sharing her troubles with them.
The real threat to Atlanticism comes from their approach to Russia and Vladimir Putin:
Both have been unpardonably soft on Vladimir Putin — Zemmour because he has no foreign policy experience and relied on advisers whose rabid anti-Americanism fed their Russophilia; Le Pen because her party’s coffers are perennially empty and she twice had to beg for loans from Russian-owned banks based in Budapest, having been denied credit by virtue-signalling French banks. Ukraine harmed him much more than her, as he stuck to his positions for a long week, initially refusing the idea of welcoming Ukrainian refugees in France; while she condemned the invasion after a couple of days, calling Russia “the aggressor” and welcoming refugees.
Some are suggesting that Le Pen’s spike in polling is wholly manufactured to depress voting intentions for Eric Zemmour. It’s a dirty trick and one that falls well within the realm of possibilities. Either way, France has shifted significantly to the right, and another Macron win only kicks the can down the road once more.
There is an arrogance common to those ranging from the centre-right all the way to the left that insists that worries about demographics in one’s own country, whether they be declining birth rates, or immigration swells, etc., are little more than dogwhistles of fascism. By making this issue verboten, politicians in these countries have only served to empower those that then take up the issue. The migrant crisis in Europe resulted in Brexit, and also helped boost hard right parties throughout the continent, and those smart parties of the centre-right, like Austria’s ÖVP and Hungary’s Fidesz, who co-opted those concerns and rolled them into their own platforms.
It is only natural for people to be concered about the demographic health of their own country as it impacts almost every facet of their lives: taxation, schooling, security, economic opportunity, etc. To make discussion of demography somehow “beyond the pale” only raises suspicions among people as to what the elites actually intend to do, and inform these same people that their concerns do not matter and that they are in a way, superfluous.
The main issue in France’s election revolves around demography and the massive demographic shift that immigration has brought to the country when it opened its doors widely to migrants from Africa and the Middle East. A special focus has been put on Muslim arrivals, thanks to the repeated terror attacks that Islamist terrorists inflicted on France. Can one blame them for not liking Islam? Of course not, but people will blame them anyway. That is the accepted liberal conceit. Paul Morland joins the chorus of those decrying vast swaths of France as “Islamophobes”, as if not liking Islam and its philosophical and cultural attributes is somehow a “sin”.
“These French are bigots!”:
When I was 15, back in the very early Eighties, I spent the best part of a summer is a sleepy corner of “la France profonde”. The family I stayed with were hard-up members of the nobility, trying to earn a living from their meagre estate while the moat dried up and their chateau slowly tumbled about their ears. During the course of my stay, Madame — the mother of six — made a trip to Paris for the first time in decades. Normally unruffled, she returned in a state of shock. “Paris maintenant, c’est un macédoine,” she declared, meaning that, compared to the last time she had been there, the capital had become what we would now call “diverse”.
The French are decreasingly guarded about exposing their dislike of the emerging demography of France — where a large and growing North African population inhabits suburban rings around the tiny cores of many historic cities from the Mediterranean to the Channel. I thought of my hostess from 40 years ago when travelling with my wife near Rheims last year. Our hotelier, a woman with an elegant home and her own family mark of champagne, told us enthusiastically about the wonderful Monsieur Zemmour, an intellectual writer and broadcaster who had not at that stage declared himself as a presidential candidate but who she thought might just save France.
Arriving in the village in the Pyrenees Orientales where we spend much of our time, we heard the same from our elderly, highly cultivated neighbour and an artisan friend of hers. Of course, neither would actually vote for Zemmour if he stood, they assured us (not entirely convincingly), but he was very impressive. And had we noticed the first veils arriving in the nearest town and occasionally in the village itself?
French worries about demography have a relatively long history:
The French have long been obsessed by demography — and with good reason. When Napoleon dominated the continent early in the nineteenth century, his population was at least half as large as Britain’s — even including Ireland — and also half as large again as what was to become Germany. In its glory — in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — France was Europe’s population behemoth.
But whereas in the century before the outbreak of the First World War, France’s population grew from around 30 to around 40 million, Britain’s rose from around 25 million to around 45 million, despite the massive emigration by which people of British origin had settled vast swathes of the globe, from California to Tasmania. Over the same period, not only was Germany unified, but its population rose from a little over 20 million to around 65 million. Industrialisation was also slower in France than in Britain or Germany, in part due to the lack of raw materials; the best iron deposits were lost to the Germans with Lorraine. But it was a lack of manpower which proved decisive, whether in the factories or at the front.
It was clear long before the bloodiest battles on the western front that France was a second-rate power dependent on British and Russian allies just to hold its own. The defeat of 1870 at the hands of the Prussians and their allies was a national trauma; the ignominy of the lost lands beyond the ligne bleu of Alsace and Lorraine were deeply etched on French consciousness. And population — or lack of it — was blamed. As early as 1849, a French parliamentary deputy saw national decline as rooted in demography: “The first element of power is population, and on this point … France is in full decay.” By the time of the outbreak of war in 1914, more than half of French parliamentarians were members of the Parliamentary Group for the Protection of Natality. French family sizes had shrunk long before those of other European powers, for reasons till not entirely clear. We know enough to understand that the cause was a comparatively low birth rate, though, rather than a high death rate: perhaps the French peasants figured out how to limit their procreation earlier than people elsewhere.
The French long ago concluded that positive demography meant national security. What those historical figures couldn’t contend with was the arrival en masse of migrants from unassimilable cultures of the Maghreb, of Central Africa, and of the Middle East.
The issue:
The French population also swelled with the arrival of people from the former colonies, first the pieds noirs fleeing the conflict in Algeria, then Algerian Muslims and migrants from the once vast French Empire south of the Sahara. But here lay the rub. Earlier migrant groups had been quite easily absorbed. In the Pyrenees Orientales, for example, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards fled Franco’s advance in 1939, and today their descendants have completely merged with the locals who share their Catalan identity. But although France’s republican and secular ideology demurs from formally categorising citizens, those from more distant cultures have not integrated to the same extent.
Exacerbating effect:
But, since then, France has suffered particularly acutely from Islamist terrorism. The attacks on the Bataclan and the Charlie Hebdo offices are just the most notorious examples; similar incidents in a Jewish school and a supermarket, as well as the murder of a teacher offending Islamic sensibilities, have angered and stirred up the country. Around half of French Muslims report experiencing discrimination and two thirds believe their religion is negatively perceived by their fellow citizens.
The result of not allowing for debate on demographic changes? The significant shift to the right of the French populace as a whole:
In this febrile atmosphere, it is small wonder that two of the leading candidates in the fast-approaching presidential election are explicitly anti-Islam. Zemmour has said he is standing “to save France from Islam” and has called on Muslims to abandon their religion. Marine Le Pen has proposed a headscarf ban and compared Muslims praying in the street with the Nazi occupation. Not to be outdone, the centre has followed the lead of the Right: President Macron has vowed to fight “Islamic separatism” and his interior minister has taken an activist line in controlling Muslim political associations. Although the Left is generally more sympathetic to minorities, it has a strong tradition of secularism (laïcité) which often rubs up against Muslim practice.
Germany is the most important country in Europe, and when it eventually begins to assert its own interests and diverge from its American Lord, then Europe will follow suit. But France is the most important country to watch in the short and mid-term, as it is the tinderbox of the continent.
The Greek Uprising against Ottoman rule in 1821 was a cause célèbre in western liberal circles (Romantic Nationalism was in vogue then, and considered a liberal philosophy), best exemplified by Lord Byron’s arrival in the Balkan Peninsula to aid the Greek peasants in their quest for liberty.
From today’s Christian perspective, this conflict was rather black and white: Greek Christians freeing themselves from the yoke of Ottoman (Islamic) rule. What could one not like about this story? It has a purity of spirit, and almost everyone can identify with the plucky upstart seeking their own national freedom from an overbearing empire reliant on tyranny. My ancestors both failed and succeeded in that same quest (the removal of Ottoman rule from Europe, at least in their environs) from the 15th century through to the 19th.
This black and white view predominated among the western liberal intelligentsia at the time as well, which is why they agitated for supporting Greek efforts in places like London and Paris. Nick Burns explains how the Greek Uprising of 1821 was the first case of western interventionism.
Background:
In question then, as now, was the fate of a territory at the periphery of Europe with regard to a declining but still imposing power straddling Europe and Asia. As Ottoman forces clashed with Greek rebels for years after the outbreak of revolution in 1821, European liberal opinion was impressed by the Greeks’ pluckiness in resisting a much larger force on their home territory – and horrified by reports of Ottoman atrocities. The Greek cause suited Romantic ideas then in vogue in Europe, enticing many “philhellenes”, as supporters of Greece were called, including Lord Byron, to join the struggle. There was real bravery on display by Greeks throughout the revolution – but there were darker tendencies at play, too, and many philhellenes, encountering shocking brutality on both sides, quickly lost the simple sense of moral clarity they had set out with.
Ukraine achieved its independence after a referendum was held in 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed. In 19th-century Greece, however, there was neither the infrastructure nor the appetite on the part of Ottoman rulers to hold a vote. Greece’s journey to independence began instead with a popular uprising – planned by a secret organisation called the Friendly Society, which drew its ideas from the French Revolution and harboured a vision of restoring the grandeur of ancient Greece. But the uprising soon spiralled out of the society’s control as Greeks took matters into their own hands.
The lack of a “proper” Greek elite and the fusion of Orthodoxy with Hellenism:
For most of the Greek people, largely made up of illiterate peasants, revolt against the Ottomans did not reflect hopes for an independent national state – something that one would have struggled to explain to them – but rather a chance to “make the romeïko”. The romeïko, in popular conception, was an event with eschatological religious connotations that involved throwing off the Ottoman yoke and taking back Constantinople, reinstating not Athenian democracy but the Byzantine Empire.
Part of what is so remarkable about the Greek revolt is how it managed to fuse popular Orthodoxy and the vanguard Hellenism of the Friendly Society into a syncretic popular nationalism – the first of a kind that would soon sweep the world. As the revolution went on, Greeks began crying “Ellas anesti” (“Greece is risen”) – a twist on the Orthodox Easter refrain of “Christos anesti” (“Christ is risen”). After hoped-for Russian support failed to materialise and the prospect of taking back Constantinople faded away, popular sentiment remained in favour of revolt, the goal of which slowly transformed from romeïko to independence.
The price of sectarianism, according to today’s liberal:
But borrowing from traditional religion to guarantee mass support meant raising the spectre of inter-confessional violence. Rigas Velestinlis, a fascinating early figure of Greek nationalism killed by the Ottomans in 1798, had claimed the mantle of the ancient Greek legacy for all the inhabitants of Greece, whether ethnic Greeks or Albanians, Christians or Muslims. For Velestinlis, they ought to be united in resistance to the Ottomans. The uprising itself was less broad-minded. Greeks slaughtered Muslims in 1821 during the fall of Tripolitsa (now Tripoli), the Ottoman capital of the Peloponnese (the mountainous southern peninsula in what is now Greece), revolting European philhellenes who saw the bodies of women and children abandoned in the streets.
“Blood washes blood”, as per the Albanian Kanun of Lek (medieval code). Albanians, whether Greek Arvanites on the side of the Greek rebels, or “Egyptian” soldiers, sent to put down the rebellion, played an outsized role in this conflict:
At the outbreak of revolution in 1821, the Ottomans hanged and mutilated the body of the 84-year-old Orthodox patriarch – who had been doing his best to dissuade the Greeks from revolution. Mazower estimates that, during an infamous massacre on the island of Chios in 1822, the Ottomans killed 25,000 Greeks and sold another 45,000 into slavery, of a pre-revolutionary population of 100,000. The island’s population never recovered, and today is half that number. There were massacres too in Naoussa and Aivalik, and on Samothraki and Psara, from which the Ottomans carried away 500 heads and 1,200 ears.
Western support:
No one could agree on how to spend the money that started to come in from a loan organised in London. The Ottomans reorganised, conquering the town of Missolonghi – where Byron had died in 1824 – in a long and dramatic siege that drew the attention of Europe, during which a Egyptian army was despatched to lay waste to the Peloponnese and bring the restive Greeks to heel. The Greeks held out for six-and-a-half years, until the autumn of 1827, when the patience of the long-suffering Greek peasantry was finally beginning to wear out. Then, in a stunning deus ex machina for the Greeks, the Ottoman fleet was wiped out by an Anglo-Russo-French coalition in a single battle at Navarino – and Greek independence became a fait accompli.
and
The eventual intervention was the result of a sustained campaign of public pressure waged by intellectuals, politicians and activists, as well as, Mazower argues, fears about unrest in Europe if the Ottomans were not prevented from crushing the Greek rebels. During an age of conservative dominance in Europe, support for Greek independence provided an outlet for liberal sentiment and an opportunity for cultural figures to exert a new form of influence over foreign policy. Rossini composed an opera, The Siege of Corinth, in support of the Greeks; Eugène Delacroix painted pictures of the siege at Missolonghi and the massacre on Chios. Conservatives got in on the fun, too: Romantic reactionary Chateaubriand wrote a hit pamphlet defending Greek independence from a right-wing point of view, which helped turn France away from its previous pro-Ottoman position.
There was a high cost for this support, however:
In London, a newly erected system of loans to sovereign powers helped guarantee Greek and Latin American independence – yet its successors would later radically constrict the freedom of precisely these countries, as the conditions of multilateral loans became a powerful tool to wield over sovereign leaders in debtor countries. American humanitarian aid for the Greeks was a training ground for habits of administration and a cast of mind that have since been expanded across the globe with the rise of the US to the status of world hegemon. A precedent for “intervention” in other countries’ affairs, outlined in France’s invasion of Spain in 1823, was firmly established, with far-reaching consequences still felt in debates now over Ukraine.
Infused with the ideas that sprang from the French Revolution, western elites sought to take advantage of an uprising that had a different reason for breaking out. Nevertheless, the two were fused together to create an argument, one that won thanks to the military intervention of conservative western powers.
Everyone who is a subscriber here, whether paid or free, needs no introduction to the concept of “Woke Capital”. Therefore, I won’t say much here this time because the concept is rather self-explanatory. Instead, I’ll share with you an interesting piece from Darel E. Paul, Professor of Political Science at Williams College. Wesley Yang provided his own space to publish Paul’s own piece.
American capitalism has gone woke.
Whether we call it the “successor ideology,” “social justice,” “intersectionality” or “wokeness,” a radical new social belief system has captured nearly all the institutions of private power in the United States from the professions to academia and education to media to Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
The success of wokeness in the business sector is perhaps the ideology’s most surprising success. It has confounded much of the Republican Party that has spent the past forty years carrying water for American capital and now finds itself conflicted over granting tax breaks and regulatory relief to corporations that despise the party’s voting base and cultural agenda.
In some ways the fight in Florida is a microcosm of the American culture wars that date back to the 1970s. Yet thirty or fifty years ago corporations largely feared getting entangled in the politics of sexuality, abortion, or race. As Michael Jordon famously observed in 1990, “Republicans buy sneakers, too”. Today much of the business sector has thrown that caution to the wind and joined with cultural progressives to stand on the ‘right side of history’. The rest of the field stays silent; it is no longer possible to find any Fortune 1000 firm—not even Hobby Lobby or Chick-fil-A—espousing a conservative cultural position on a topic of political controversy in America today.
While we are accustomed to seeing culture war issues as an ideological struggle, the rise of woke capital suggests a better framing of our predicament. We are deeply mired in a class struggle. One could even compare this exercise of distant elite power to colonialism.. To put it in the starkest of terms: globalized professionals and managers are on one side; regional elites and the middle classes are on the other. The stakes are high, impinging on democratic self-government and the power to define reality itself.
Over the last decade American corporations have intervened in the political process repeatedly on the side of wokeness. Simply speaking out firmly against socially conservative bills usually does the trick. In this way woke capital scuttled religious freedom bills in Arizona (2014), Arkansas (2015), Indiana (2015) and Georgia (2016). Capital strikes are more rare but have been used in Georgia against a recent abortion law (2019) and a new election law (2021). The most significant woke capital strike in America is undoubtedly that against the state of North Carolina in 2016-17 over its Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act. The main intent of this law, better known as the “North Carolina bathroom bill,” was to overturn the City of Charlotte’s ordinance that granted transgender persons free access to sex-segregated facilities of their choice, including “restrooms, shower rooms [and] bathhouses”. The ensuing capital strike against North Carolina was broad and swift. Led by PayPal, the NBA, the NCAA, and the movie and television industry, the state economy suffered over $600 million in lost investment and revenue in the first seven months after the law’s enactment. After just twelve months on the books, the Republican-led state legislature cried ‘uncle’ and repealed the law.
more:
American capital is not uniformly woke, and neither are its CEOs. Unlike Bob Chapek, former Disney CEO Bob Iger repeatedly assumed progressive stands in the company’s name on matters of immigration, abortion, and homosexuality. But the phenomenon of woke capital is not driven by woke individuals in positions of power. Even Larry Fink, head of the $10 trillion investment fund BlackRock and arguably the most powerful woke CEO in America, is only one man. Instead woke capital is a consequence of a particular structure of capital concentration, of class relations, of class culture, and of broader American culture that has developed since the 1960s and gained particular solidity since the 1990s. The disappearance of already highly marginalized anti-woke capital in the 2010s is testimony to the powerful structural conditions under which we all now exist.
Understanding woke capital as a structure of power is the first step toward theorizing it and ultimately disciplining it. This task will not be solved at the next election or with the next piece of legislation, but only after years or even decades of struggle. Only once we understand woke capital and from where its power comes can we have any realistic hope of subduing it over the long run.
This is a very well-thought out piece. I suggest that you read it in its entirety.
“Honour” is a concept that stubbornly refuses to die in the West, despite the attempt to kill it by a thousand cultural cuts. The imposition of counterproductive concepts such as “Anti-Bullying Campaigns” have served to dent honour culture, in that people feel free to able to mock and insult others without recourse for the targeted individual. As Mike Tyson once said, “some people can say things because it’s illegal to punch them”.
That’s why this week we end off with a book review on the history of the duel, an activity wholly tied to the mast of the concept of honour.
Between the third and fifth centuries of the Christian era the major world religions ceased to sacrifice animals to appease their gods. For reasons that remain unclear, a practice that had been central to devotional behaviour for thousands of years came to appear grotesque. Joseph Farrell observes that the practice of duelling is now similarly ‘uniformly judged as outlandish and incomprehensible’, its ‘canons and creeds ... as beyond recall as the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians’. For five hundred years men of a certain rank settled disputes with sword or pistol in accordance with an elaborate etiquette involving a formal challenge, the appointment of seconds and the negotiation of a time and place for a contest governed by strict rules. The angry brawl was drained of passion, made mindful and even elegant. A doctor was always on hand, but deaths were common. Then, in the second half of the 19th century, the practice declined and disappeared. It’s ‘the sheer incomprehensibility’ of all this that prompted Farrell to write his book. If the duellists were Christian gentlemen, he asks, why did they not see the duel’s incompatibility with basic morality? Why didn’t the state intervene more effectively to prevent individuals from taking the law into their own hands? Why were so many men willing to risk their lives over disputes that often seem trivial?
Farrell looks at the medieval joust as an early example of ritualised combat, though in that case the contestants were usually the champions of a cause, or a lady, or simply fighting like athletes for a prize, usually before an admiring audience. He also considers so-called judicial combat, where it was understood that God would determine a just outcome. But divine intervention was not claimed for the duel. At stake was the question of honour. A gentleman could have any number of differences with his peers without coming to blows, but when his honour was sullied he was obliged to put his life on the line.
Honour, at least insofar as it gave rise to duelling, was theorised, Farrell explains, by the humanists of the Italian Renaissance. Frustrated with a Christianity whose precepts reduced all behaviour to questions of vice or virtue, the humanists turned to the classical world for a broader range of human possibilities, producing a body of literature that posited an ideal court society where morals and aesthetics merged in the supremely civilised figure of the courtier. Arising from a consideration of the dignity of the individual, honour was understood as a quality with interior and exterior aspects, a form of self-esteem requiring constant confirmation from the community. The honourable man sought to be generous, honest, elegant, courteous and courageous, and to be known for possessing these qualities. If a man could not think of himself as honourable, he could not have peace of mind; if others could not think of him as honourable he could not have a career, at least not at court. So honour exalted the dignity of the individual and at the same time placed him in thrall to the opinions of his peers.
Read the rest here.
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Leave a comment if the mood strikes you and use the share button to share this across social media. Hit the like button as well. And don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already. One guy sitting next to me at the cafe I'm at decided to sub for a year after I showed him why I was furiously typing away.
The main thing NC jettisoning its noble principles over a fairly paltry sum proves is that religious conservatives worship money just like everyone else.