Brigitte Macron, “tolerance training” and the tyranny of the minority – L’Express

The statement, which is striking in its naivety, is very unwelcome at a time when school is the scene of community demands from certain Muslims. As we know, courses on the recent history of the Middle East or colonization, subjects such as equality between men and women, the representation, for example, of nudity in painting or positions such as defense of freedom of expression are today unwelcome by some students, so much so that teachers sometimes censor themselves. Recently, the ban on the abaya in schools showed that the 2004 law had not closed the debate on the wearing of ostensibly religious signs or outfits. These intransigent positions may be a sign of a conservative practice of Islam and not of Islamist aims, but the border turns out to be blurred and the signal sent by these Muslims to secular France is the same: refusal, in the face of the principles of the Republic, to make concessions.

To think that some course of tolerance could overcome the tensions which result from this intransigence, either by convincing a stubborn minority that it must adapt to a majority culture, or by demanding more benevolence from an already generous majority , is to condemn yourself to failure. What helps us understand this is the “minority rule”. In the words of the former trader and statistician Nassim Nicholas Talebauthor of Black Swan. The power of the unpredictable, who devotes a long development to it in another of his books, Play your skin : “All it takes is an intransigent minority […] reaches a tiny level so that the entire population must submit to its preferences.

To support his point, Nassim Nicholas Taleb takes the example of kosher drinks. During a barbecue with friends in the United States, he realized that a Jew had just drunk the same lemonade as him without checking the label or asking if the drink was kosher. Surprised, the statistician then observed that all the drinks offered during this butt pinch were kosher. Better still, he adds, a very large proportion of drinks sold in supermarkets in the United States are kosher. In other words, it is very common for Americans to consume kosher drinks without knowing it. For what ? Because someone who eats kosher will never eat foods that are not kosher, but a consumer of non-kosher products is not prohibited from eating kosher. For a drinks producer or barbecue organizer, it is therefore more practical to only offer kosher drinks. To put it another way, kosher is necessary, because the intransigent minority (kosher consumers) does not make compromises, while the flexible majority (consumers of non-kosher products) is ready to make them.

Taleb analyzes several phenomena in this light. For example, he explains: “The original spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire [est] largely due to the frenzied intolerance of Christians, their unconditional, aggressive and recalcitrant proselytism. Roman pagans were initially tolerant of Christians, as the tradition was to share the gods with other members of the empire. But they wondered why these Nazarenes did not want to give and take from gods, and offer their Jesus to the Roman Pantheon in exchange for other gods. […] In fact, we observe in the history of ‘religions’, or rather of rituals and Mediterranean systems of behavior and belief, a drift dictated by the intolerant.”

Of course, the ability of the minority choice to prevail depends on the degree of neutrality of the majority. “In the United Kingdom,” recalls Taleb, “where the (practicing) Muslim population is only 3 to 4%, a very large part of the meat found is halal. Nearly 70% of lamb imports from New Zealand are halal. Nearly 10% of Subway stores offer only halal meat (i.e. no pork), despite the high cost of losing customers, who, like me, eat Ham. […] But, in the UK and other nominally Christian countries, halal is not neutral enough to achieve a high standard, as people may rebel against being required to respect sacred values ​​other than their own. “

This mechanism, a sort of “tyranny of the minority” (not to be confused with the “tyranny of the majority”, highlighted by Tocqueville, who was worried about the exorbitant power of the State) makes it possible to analyze community demands. at work at school. If some are accepted, tolerated or discussed, it is because they are the work of an inflexible minority facing a majority ready to compromise. This is why appealing to the tolerance of the majority ultimately amounts to condoning, even if this was not the primary intention, that no course addresses angry subjects, that the veil is spread and even, one day, may halal become the norm.

This is obviously not what happens in our schools due to the historical conception of secularism. This, initially, was not only aimed at religious neutrality but represented a fundamentally anticlerical attack. “We must repress the enemy, clericalism,” Gambetta proclaimed in 1878, “and bring the secularist, the citizen, the scholar, the French into our educational establishments, build schools for them, create teachers, masters […].” The goal was not so much to allow believers and non-believers to live peacefully together but to extirpate the Catholic religion from the State in general and from education in particular.

There are still fragments of this conception in our country, but it is being undermined by the Western propensity to respect each person’s choices as so many individual freedoms. The mayor of L’Haÿ-les-Roses (Val-de-Marne), Vincent Jeanbrun, recounts that, in one of the colleges in his town, Muslim students had refused, during Ramadan, to sing in class. music. Instead of contesting this decision, the non-Muslim students showed solidarity with their classmates and defended them in the name of their individual freedom from being forced to practice an activity that contravened their religious precepts. The affair went up some bureaucratic layers and, like so many others, resulted in inaction and passivity. The intransigent minority had won.

In France, concretely, this dynamic only exists in neighborhoods where conservative Muslims are numerous enough to oppose the majority cultural model. It nonetheless has serious effects since it terrorizes certain teachers and students, further undermines confidence in our model every day and provokes, in response, the rise of xenophobic parties. This is why a society like ours, which has rightly chosen to be generally tolerant, has no other choice but to be intolerant of intolerance. In practice, this means rediscovering an offensive concept of secularism which translates into actions and not empty words. In a way, a “training in intolerance”.