Pruning the Paragraphs

Here is a paragraph I had to prune from an essay I’m finishing up but that I think still has some worthwhile comparisons:

One also wonders whether some reactions spawned by Jussie Smollett’s alleged attack, qualify for “religiofication,” which is what American philosopher and longshoreman Eric Hoffer once defined as “the art of turning practical purposes into holy causes.”* If Smollett staged such an attack, he would be not unlike the innkeeper at the beginning of the Quixote (I, iii). For the innkeeper is someone who, being something of a knight in his younger days, is willing to placate his meddlesome guest Alonso Quijano. Quijano went mad by reading too many books of chivalry, and now wishes to be ordained into knighthood under the name Don Quixote. The innkeeper believes that by pretending (or acting) to be a knight, and going through the motions of ordination, he will send this madman on his way, and away from the inn where he causes mischief. In doing so, the innkeeper almost plays Don Quixote’s game-of-pretend better than the Don himself, for the innkeeper has inverted Hoffer’s formula and turned the Don’s holy cause into a practical purpose.

*Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951), (New York: Harper & Row, 1966) § 1, p. 15.

Chivalry didn’t die in France–like Burke bemoaned–because chivalry had been dead for well over a hundred years prior to the Revolution. If chivalry hadn’t died, Cervantes could not have written Don Quixote (1605). But hundreds of years after Cervantes and Burke, people are still chasing windmills. Over at The American Conservative, Gracey Olmsted writes:

This is what the “spirit of the gentleman” used to provide: a reasoned, courteous atmosphere in which public discourse could take place—where opinions could be stated without savagery, and received without rancor. The problem is that gentlemen are out of popularity on left and right—for reasons [Mark] Mitchell makes clear in another FPR post.

The gentleman is unpopular with the left and “PC” crowd because, in Mitchell’s words, he “is one who is willing and able to judge well. He is discriminating in his judgments and does not shy away from making hard distinctions even when they cause him discomfort and even when he is forced to stand alone [emphasis added].” Such discriminatory value judgments will not be honored on the modern university campus, nor even in the larger political world.

I suppose a rather ungentlemanly act would be to point at that last line from Olmsted–“Such discriminatory value judgments will not be honored on the modern university campus, nor even in the larger political world“–and say, yes, that may be true, but that is also a very narrow and reductive Weltanschauung. There is plenty more to life than universities and politics, particularly if you’re too poor and/or live under a gerrymandered regime.

Plenty of Americans live their day-to-day lives in a brave new world beyond the constraints of chivalry and bureaucracy.