Online activity requires idleness in real life. Real-life activity requires idleness online. You may draw the inference from these iron laws. But here as a stop-gap measure are some extracts from Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, by J. G. Lockhart, son-in-law of the Scottish Prospero.In November 1826, Scott was fifty-five years old and visiting Paris to obtain material for his great biography of Napoleon Bonaparte (1827). The Bourbon Restoration was eleven years old and Charles X was attempting to impose a throne-and-altar regime by decree. Sacrilege was once again a capital offense. Scott, no friend of the Republicans, wrote this in his journal:
“The most dangerous point in the present state of France is that of religion. It is, no doubt, excellent in the Bourbons to desire to make France a religious country; but they begin, I think, at the wrong end. To press the observancy and ritual of religion on those who are not influenced by its doctrines, is planting the growing tree with its head downwards. Rites are sanctified by belief; but belief can never arise out of an enforced observance of ceremonies; it only makes men detest what is imposed on them by compulsion.”*
Scott puts his finger on the fatal flaw in restorations. They attempt to revive a defunct social order with legal imposition of its external forms. A man who wishes to believe may realize his wish by pretending to believe, but a magistrate who compels men to pretend they believe will engender detestation. And Charles X was, indeed, overthrown four years later.While passing through London on that same trip to Paris, Scott noted a curious paradox in his diary. A man who actually know the inside story is the man least likely to tell that story straight. Knowledge in great affairs entails involvement in great affairs, so any man who has the skinny is going to spin. And the greater his knowledge of what really went down, the smaller his interest in candidly sharing that knowledge with us
“If Talleyrand, for example, could be communicative, he must have ten thousand reasons for perverting the truth, and yet a person receiving a direct communication from him would be almost barred from disputing it.”
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