anarchonomicon.substack.com
A piece I wrote on one of the most fascinating and incredible thriftstore finds I've ever stumbled upon.
The Edwardians and Victorians were not like us, they believed in a nobility of their political class that's almost impossible to understand or relate to, and that believe, that attribution of nobility is tied up with something even more mysterious: their belief in the fundamental nobility of rhetoric.
Still not sure entirely how I feel about this, or how sure I am of my conclusions but this has had me spellbound in fascination and so I wrote about it.
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Notes -
I'm not sure this is actually bad. Oratory is an attempt to convince someone of your ideas for reasons other than the quality of your arguments. The heirs of that process are every Madison Avenue advertising executive, every clickbait article writer, every Twitter mob. It isn't good and we only think it is because things in old books once had high status, and advertising is low status, and because of the halo effect where the fact that many orators used oratory for good goals rubs off on oratory itself.
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