Hierarchies of Duration

Klara’s school is closed again, which seems to be the rule this semester, so I’m intensively mothering and working at the same time. I will respond to the excellent comments in the thread on the importance of cultural discernment and the preservation of the canon when I get a moment to myself but in the meantime, here is a quote from Renaud Camus’s novella Ørop:

To erase all heritage, impose the perpetual present, and guarantee that history not return because there would be no more history, no more past, no more centuries, the ideal of equality proved itself to be of matchless efficiency. The taste for the arts, the love of literature, the appetite for knowledge, the aspiration towards the examined life, all became deeply suspect over time. These dispositions of mind, which in the past had been highly esteemed and honored, were now regarded as affectations, superstitions, attempts at a dubious social magic, as the great wits of the capital put it: so many shameful attempts to reestablish or maintain hierarchies relating to duration, and that were to be dismissed as such. Since aspirations of this type were suspected of being linked with heritage, with lineages, with the slow work of families (or, worse yet, just some of them) to become intimately acquainted with beauty and intelligence, they were accused of representing a challenge to equality, an illicit privilege, indeed an expression of contempt on the part of those once privileged by fate vis-à-vis those who would today lay claim to its favor. Therefore, due to the presumed relationship between these inclinations and the accident of birth, and thus the past, and thus reviled history, they were criticized as a humiliation for those who did not profess them.

Camus, Renaud. Ørop (p. 9). Vauban Books.