The Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal): Armistice Day

November 11, 2008

Armistice Day

I suppose the First World War was the last chapter in one facet of the great social upheaval ushered in by the French Revolution. It obliterated the last remaining wisps of the ancien régime throughout Europe, leaving behind a continent of resentful, exhausted survivors who, even in the face of the collective insanity of that horrible conflict, soon enough turned their nations to mutual slaughter once again. Everyone notices that the Second World War was caused by the First, and all the ancillary conflicts around the globe spawned by the outcome of the Second World War can be traced back through the Second and the First to The French Revolution and the utter transformation of social relations demanded by it.

If Chou En Lai didn't really say, "It's too soon to tell," when asked his thoughts on the impact of the French Revolution, history will insist that he would have had to have said that, being Chou En Lai, and ascribe it to him.

The Armistice, entered into on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, halted the age-old murderousness of Europe for a time, and for that we can all be grateful. Only a few short decades after Armistice had been achieved the murderousness returned, redoubled in viciousness and on a truly global scale, the Second World War, which we have not yet outlived, consequence of the First. But there is that oddly symmetrical moment, 11/11/11, the six ones of the Armistice, that pause of peace, to look back on in wonder.

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For some years now I've travelled bumptiously about the internet commenting on other people's blogs under the pseudonym "peter ramus," pointedly and I regret to say at times heatedly disclosing the general shape my own intricately devised misapprehension of current events in contradistinction to the remarkable torrent of misapprehensions made known daily on that medium by everyone else.

Nominally I associate myself as much as possible with the views of those who seem to know what they're talking about, but often enough I find myself obliged, like so many others, to go on about things I'm not in the least qualified to address simply because it is my way when the opportunity presents itself. I find this shortcoming as personally irritating as it is to those I've favored it with over the years, an as yet irrepressible feature of my discourse. Thus the admittedly defensive assumption of the nom de blog, "peter ramus."

"peter ramus" isn't to be confused with Peter Ramus, another fellow entirely, who lived and died a long time ago around the sad times leading up to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France, an event which saw his own undoing in the chaotic days that followed.

He was a zeolot, Peter Ramus was. He had a particular bone to pick with Aristotle over the stuff and substance of rhetoric, which led him to propose revolutionary changes in the subject and manner of teaching which prevailed in higher education in those times. A quaestio was convened, a solemn gathering of all the branches of civil society, to see what was to be done about him. The King sent a man, and the Church sent a man, and of course the University of Paris couldn't help but send one, too. Unsurprisingly, they found overwhelmingly in favor of Aristotle and against Peter Ramus. In addition, it pleased the members of the assembled body to pronounce Peter Ramus personally disagreeable and notably ugly to boot. Strictly as an aside.

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