Critically Thinking about Our Future
And — arguably more importantly — our children's future...
My most recent guest commentary was well received. Thank you.
One supportive reader wrote me that I should read: “How a communal banquet became a battle for the soul of France”. I did and it is reposted below, as it applies in spades to the U.S….
The brilliant author is Clayton Wood, a lawyer, pastor, and nonprofit leader serving families and children in Eastern Tennessee. Kudos to Clayton!
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ABOUT 3,500 people in Colmar, France, sat down last weekend to eat choucroute, drink wine, and sing the old songs. They wore berets. They broke bread together on long tables. They were loud and happy and French. And the radical left lost its mind.
The company behind the gathering is called Le Canon Francais. For roughly £60 you get four courses of regional food, all the wine you can drink, and several hours of what can only be described as communal joy. The crowd is young, mostly in their 20s and 30s. The songs are old standards by Michel Delpech and Joe Dassin, songs their grandparents loved, and these young people know every word. The phenomenon has swept provincial France, filling hangars and fairgrounds, drawing thousands at a time.
For the hard left party La France Insoumise, this is a provocation. They cite a conservative investor with a 30 per cent stake. They complain about the pork on the menu. They allege racist chanting, though a BBC reporter on the scene witnessed nothing of the kind. A city in Brittany has already moved to ban a future event. Police in Caen are investigating allegations of racial provocation. The left is working its levers to make sure the French stop gathering to be French.
Why This Should Matter to You —
I want to tell you why this matters to me personally, and why it should matter to you.
My wife Danielle lived for a semester in France and speaks the language. I worked in Strasbourg. France is not a foreign country to us in the way it is to a tourist who spent a long weekend in Paris and came home with a refrigerator magnet. We love France. We love what France has produced: the architecture, the literature, the food, the faith, the military history, the accumulated genius of a civilization which has contributed more to Western life than almost any other nation on earth. When I talk about what is happening in France, I am not celebrating. I am mourning.
We took our family to France a few summers ago. The Louvre was magnificent. We did not pay for a tour of Versailles. I have a love for history and the internet, and I was more than capable of walking my family through the Hall of Battles myself, explaining the paintings that line that extraordinary gallery, paintings that chronicle the changes in French warfare from the age of Clovis to the age of Napoleon. You can watch the armor disappear and the cannon appear. You can watch the flower of French chivalry give way to the modern general pointing at maps. It is a stunning visual education in a single corridor.
I was describing one painting in particular when a staff member approached me. Then another. They informed me that I was not permitted to conduct a tour without paying a fee. I explained that these were my children. They came back. They told me I needed to be quiet.
I was speaking at a normal conversational volume. And it was only then that I realized which painting I had been standing in front of when they first approached. It was the Battle of Tours. Charles Martel. The hammer of the Franks, the man who stopped the Umayyad advance into Western Europe in 732, the battle that many historians argue preserved Christianity as the faith of the West. Other tour groups had moved past that painting without a word from their guides. Our informal family conversation about it drew staff intervention.
I do not know with certainty what was in that employee’s mind. I know what I observed. And I know that what I observed fits a pattern I had been noticing throughout the trip.
Paris was not the city my wife remembered from the early 2000s. It was not the city I remembered from the 1990s. The City of Light, the city of Napoleon III’s grand building campaigns, the city of accumulated Western beauty, was still physically there. The Haussmanian boulevards still stretched toward their appointed horizons. The stone still gleamed. But something had changed at the level of daily life that no amount of beautiful architecture could conceal.
Some Evidence of the Decline —
My bag was stolen at the train station. Inside the bus station, men were selling fake tickets to confused tourists and the station employees regarded it with complete indifference. In a grocery store, I watched a man stuffing wine bottles into his pants while employees looked on. When I told him to stop, one of the employees shrugged at me and said: ‘Man, this is Paris.’ In a park, a man came at my family in a threatening way, demanding money and then wanting to fight when I did not comply. A woman ran over and sent him packing before the situation required me to act. I was grateful to her.
Please hear what I am saying about what I observed on my middle-class once-in-a-lifetime trip to a Paris marred by petty crime. I am not making an ethnic argument. The people causing these problems were not a single ethnicity, and ethnicity is not the point. The man in the grocery store stuffing wine bottles into his pants was not doing so because of where he was from. He was doing so because nobody in that store believed there would be any consequence.
Here is what struck me. These were not Jean Valjean’s people. Victor Hugo’s immortal thief stole a loaf of bread because he was starving, because his family was dying, because the law had become a machine of cruelty rather than justice, and his crime is one that even the most conservative reader understands as a cry of desperation. The people I was watching in Paris were not desperate. France has a welfare state. They have housing. They have food. They have health care. They are not stealing because they are starving. They are stealing because they have concluded, rationally given what they have been taught and what they have observed, that nothing matters, that there are no consequences, that the universe is morally indifferent to what they do.
Moral Indifference (aka Relativism) —
And where did that conclusion come from?
France produced it. Not the France of Clovis and Charlemagne and Charles Martel, not the France of the great cathedrals and the Chanson de Roland, not the France of St Joan of Arc and the Christian civilization that built Versailles and the Louvre and the Hall of Battles. The other France. The France of the Sorbonne in 1968, of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida and the generation of critical theorists who made it their life’s work to dismantle every foundation of Western moral order, who taught generations of impressionable young minds at universities across the world that truth is a power game, that institutions are instruments of oppression, that the very concept of objective moral reality is a lie told by the powerful to keep the powerless in line.
They were enormously successful. They tore down the foundations. They exported their tools to every graduate school in the Western world. And now France is living in the rubble.
When you remove the transcendent foundation of moral life, when you convince people that God is a fiction invented by the powerful and that sin and righteousness are primitive superstitions, you do not liberate human beings. You orphan them. You leave them in a world where nothing ultimately matters and no one is ultimately watching. Some people, through sheer force of character or the residual moral capital of their upbringing, continue to behave well anyway. But a civilization cannot run on residual moral capital indefinitely. It spends down. And when it is gone, you get men stuffing bottles of wine into their pants while employees shrug.
This is why the banquets terrify the left. The men and women in berets singing Joe Dassin songs in a hangar in Colmar are not doing anything aggressive. They are not marching. They are not making demands. They are eating choucroute and singing the old songs and being glad to be French together. But that simple act of cultural affirmation, that cheerful refusal to be ashamed of who they are and where they come from, is a direct challenge to the ideology that requires shame as its operating fuel.
You cannot build a post-national global order if people insist on being French. You cannot construct citizens of the world out of people who want to be citizens of France. You cannot dismantle Christian civilization if people keep celebrating it with wine and song. The project of the radical left requires that people be cut off from their roots, that they be made to see their heritage as a wound rather than a gift, that the Charles Martel painting in the Hall of Battles be quietly skipped so that nobody stands in front of it and explains to their children what it means.
The founders of Le Canon Francais say they are reviving an ancient French tradition of the banquet populaire, the people’s feast, a communal gathering that every French village used to hold as a matter of course. They say they want the lawyer sitting next to the baker, talking. They say people have grown isolated and lonely and that eating together is a form of healing. They are almost certainly right.
The Left Opposition —
The hard left says the banquets are backward-looking, a caricature, not representative of modern France. By modern France they mean the France they have been building: post-Christian, post-national, post-truth, a France that has traded its birthright for the ideology of people who hated everything that made France worth visiting in the first place.
France survived external conquest. It survived the German occupation. It survived Napoleon’s overreach and the Revolution’s terror. What it may not survive is the internal decision to be ashamed of itself, to treat its own civilization as the problem rather than the inheritance.
Three thousand five hundred people in Colmar eating choucroute and singing the old songs are not the problem. They are the last, joyful, slightly defiant evidence that something worth saving is still there.
I hope France finds the courage to agree.
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So good! Now if we can help Americans do this as we celebrate 250 years!
The crumbling of empires is mirrored in its decline in civility. We seem increasingly unable to disagree without contempt, correct wrongdoing without cruelty, or defend our convictions without trying to humiliate someone. Courtesy, restraint, modesty, gratitude, and respect for others are too often treated as signs of weakness rather than evidence of character.
Abigail Adams wrote, “If we mean to have Heroes, Statesmen and Philosophers, we should have learned women.” She understood the tremendous influence women have upon the moral and intellectual character of a society. Women help shape homes, children, communities, and future generations—not because this is their only possible role, but because it is an enormously important one.
I have been reflecting upon my own generation. In my youth, I wanted to outman any man. Annie Get Your Gun’s “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” was almost a girlhood mantra for me. Women rightly sought education, opportunity, independence, and recognition of our abilities. I remain grateful for those freedoms.
Yet somewhere along the way, our pursuit of equality sometimes became confused with the idea that men and women must imitate, compete with, or diminish one another. Too often, society has devalued fatherhood, motherhood, fidelity, modesty, spiritual leadership, and the daily sacrifices required to build a stable family. We now see some men withdrawing from the traditional responsibilities of fatherhood, protection, provision, and spiritual guidance, while some women are encouraged to measure liberation by how publicly they can discard modesty or imitate the worst behavior once associated with men.
Equality should never have required either sex to abandon dignity, responsibility, or the qualities that allow men and women to strengthen one another.
Where did we go wrong? Perhaps we began confusing freedom with freedom from all restraint, confidence with aggression, equality with sameness, and personal fulfillment with freedom from obligation. We taught people to claim their rights, but not always to honor their duties. We weakened the institutions that once taught self-control, service, reverence, and accountability, and then seemed surprised when loneliness, disorder, and incivility followed.
The part of this article that spoke most strongly to me was the picture of people sitting together, sharing food, singing familiar songs, and rediscovering community. We need more experiences that bring people together—not to exclude or condemn others, but to restore fellowship, gratitude, responsibility, faith, and mutual understanding.
A healthy civilization needs honorable men and honorable women. It needs fathers and mothers who understand that raising children is sacred work. It needs adults willing to model the civility, discipline, courage, and kindness that we hope the next generation will inherit. <><