Alexandre Lefebvre at Noema:
In Jean Bodin’s “Colloquium of the Seven About Secrets of the Sublime,” a fabulously wealthy Venetian nobleman named Coronaeus invites six guests to his home for a week of amusement and conversation.
By day, the guests stroll the gardens, enjoy lavish meals, play with optical illusions, take naps and read. But by night, when wine begins flowing, things get feisty. Coronaeus, a devout Catholic, planned the week to learn how the rest of the world lives and thinks. This is why his guests are a Lutheran, a Calvinist, a Jew, a Muslim, a skeptic and a philosophical naturalist. Together, they debate everything under the sun — including the nature of the sun itself. Their sharpest clashes concern what it means to live well and the ultimate purpose of human life, as they alternate between attempts at persuasion and the realization of its futility.
Suppose we wanted to repeat the experiment in 2025. More pointedly, let’s put ourselves in Coronaeus’s shoes: a wealthy and comfortable hegemon at a time when his hegemony was challenged. In the 16th century, that meant being Catholic. In the 21st century, it means being liberal while the liberal-democratic order begins to crack. So, if we, like Coronaeus, want to understand how our rivals live and think, who should we invite?
It’s obvious: Liberals should seek out the most articulate and thoughtful representatives of regimes from around the world that are threatening to dethrone liberalism from the political, social, economic and cultural pre-eminence it has enjoyed for roughly the past 75 years.
More here.
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