By Russell A. Berman · Monday, January 2, 2023 The following comments refer to Robert Redeker’s piece from Le Figaro on December 30, 2022, published in English translation on TelosScope here.
In a notable comment in The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud compares Oedipus Rex with Hamlet in order to describe what he calls “the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind.” Between Sophocles and Shakespeare, civilization underwent an enormous increase in the control of affect and a withering away of the formerly unmanaged space of some original freedom. Of course Freud was talking about widely separated historical moments, ancient Greece and Elizabethan England. Today, through hyper-acceleration in a much shorter period, we are undergoing a comparable quantum leap of control (see: surveillance) accompanied by restrictions on free speech and free thought unthinkable only a few decades ago.
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By Robert Redeker · Monday, January 2, 2023 The following text originally appeared in Le Figaro on December 30, 2022, and is published here in English translation with permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here.
In 1793, the great German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte discovered what the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris does not know today, if one can judge by the complaint that he filed against the author Michel Houellebecq, i.e., that freedom of thought is divine. Let us listen to Fichte: “It is both a human and divine truth that man has inalienable rights and that freedom of thought is one of these rights.” What does that mean? It means that denouncing and opposing freedom of thought is blasphemous; that this sort of anger simultaneously offends the divine part of humanity and, indirectly, God himself; and that this sort of attack is dehumanizing because it attempts to tear out of the human conscience what God himself gave it.
Through its legal action, the Grand Mosque of Paris poses two risks, for the writer and our country: the risk of forcing the writer, a candidate for the Nobel Prize, to live under close police protection or, in other words, to become a sort of prisoner of conscience in his own country, and the risk of inciting a fanatic ready to spill the blood of the man targeted as an “Islamophobe.” Let us recall that since Islam is not the state religion of France, one has the right to speculate, perhaps erroneously, that it is wrong and alien to the soul of French civilization. One similarly has the right to discuss this idea, as long as one stays at the level of general ideas and refrains from defamations or direct calls for violence.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, August 8, 2022 The following comments refer to Mathieu Slama’s “How Brilliant Scientists Damage Democracy,” which appears here.
Among the many features of the COVID crisis, one stands out as particularly consequential: the attribution of ultimate and exclusive authority to science. Public statements abounded urging that we “follow the science,” and signs popped up on front lawns across the country advertising that the residents “believe in science”—as if science were a matter of belief rather than skepticism, observation, and experimentation. There was of course little attention to alternative scientific claims or debates within science. Instead of a scientific event, we witnessed the assertion of authority by way of the invocation of science or of what came to pass as “science.” The mandate to “follow the science” blindly has come to mean “follow the leader,” with no questions asked.
For large swaths of the public, the scientific label carries with it the implication of veracity: science, as opposed to religion (which is otherwise the proper subject matter of belief), is truth. Indeed the equation is a formula for modernity, which is why bizarre variants of modernization repeatedly cast themselves in the role of science: for Communism, the “science of Marxism-Leninism,” and for Nazis, “race science.” Nor do we have to look that far afield to those extreme cases in order to find reason to question the absolute truth claim of science. One can point to scandals like the Tuskegee experiment and to the regular reports of fraud and retractions, even in the most prestigious scientific journals. Just recently one reads that research reported in the journal Nature concerning Alzheimer’s may have been fraudulent. Following that science probably wasted millions of research dollars.
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By Mathieu Slama · Monday, August 8, 2022 These remarks on the French Science Council were published in Le Figaro on July 7, 2022 and appear here with permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here.
The Science Council met for the last time this week and has issued its 75th and final opinion. It will disappear officially on July 31. In its final statement, it underscored the importance of better scientific education for the youth, who will be the public leaders of the future, and it recommended the creation of a “Council of Science,” which would consist of a “group of scientists of the highest quality” to advise the head of state. Whether these recommendations are followed or not, it is likely that some new organ will be established in the coming months. In any case, we are at the end of an institution that played a decisive role throughout the public health crisis, and it is useful to offer a preliminary evaluation of it.
Composed of brilliant individuals and our best scientists, the Science Council—despite all the talent that it has included—has been one of the principal architects of the democratic debacle of the health crisis. And if there is a lesson to be drawn from this fiasco, it is that science should never be a substitute for politics and that political decisions cannot result simply from scientific expertise—at the risk of profoundly degrading our democracy.
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, December 8, 2021 The stunning end to the twenty-year war in Afghanistan with an unambiguous defeat has had little consequences in American domestic politics. To be sure, the final rout may have contributed to President Biden’s decline in public opinion polls, but there are plenty of other reasons for that. The end of the Afghanistan War, surely a matter of historical import, just disappeared into the news cycle. After the lives lost, the resources wasted, and the ideals betrayed, one might expect the political class to pay attention and to demand accountability. Yet no one seems to notice.
Such an accounting could take the form, for example, of congressional hearings—but instead Congress prefers to rehash the sad political circus of the January 6 riot. It has no time for the two decades in Afghanistan, telling evidence of our legislators’ priorities. Instead of congressional hearings, a special commission might be convened, serious and bipartisan, such as the one that followed on 9/11. No one is taking this road either. Enormous expenditure of resources and a defeat clearer even than the exit from Vietnam, and Washington doesn’t care.
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By Christophe Guilluy · Wednesday, December 8, 2021 Christophe Guilluy is a geographer and observer of French society. Christopher Caldwell comments on his work here. This interview appeared in Le Figaro on November 21, 2021 and is translated with permission by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here.
Q: Several months before the presidential election, how do you see the political situation in France?
Christophe Guilluy: Fundamentally nothing much has changed since 2017. I did an interview about the duel between Macron and Le Pen, which I described as a chemically pure cleavage: the popular classes against the professional upper classes, the metropolis against the periphery. None of that has changed at all. The core of Macron’s electoral support is still made up of the bourgeoisies of the right and the left, the boomers, the retirees, people fully integrated into society. And for a good reason: he is the only candidate who defends the economic and cultural model of the past twenty years. Therefore, the electorate willing to follow him is the one that is integrated into this model, that benefits from it or is protected by it, such as the retirees for example. Starting from that, he can count on a hypersolid foundation of those 25%. This has not changed since his election.
On the other hand, there are the disaffected, those no longer integrated economically, those we used to call the middle class.
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