Last April, I had the pleasure of speaking with the philosopher Chantal Jaquet. This dialogue took place in the pages of Philosophy magazine, and our discussion revolved in particular around the question of merit. I was a cautious defender of it, while she found the notion problematic. She brought up some interesting developments, but one of her arguments disconcerted me: “That one of the first measures taken by the far-right government in Italy was the establishment of a Ministry of Education and Merit ‘, she said, should resonate with you.” This part of our exchange seems to me symptomatic of an unnoticed effect of the clumsy desire to isolate the extreme right. In this case, it must be remembered that if meritocracy can inspire a certain distrust, the situation is different with merit, which remains a cardinal value in our society. And therefore, on the pretext that Giorgia Meloni sees a narrative opportunity in Italy, it would be advisable to establish, around this notion, a sort of cordon santé.
But don’t we see that this amounts to abandoning a part of the population, who thinks that individuals should be able to be rewarded for their efforts and talents? The Fratelli d’Italia party is thus given incredible power: to transform everything it touches into undesirable matter. We could see it as a gift symmetrical to that of Midas, the king of Phrygia who transformed what he touched into gold. We could also see the expression of what in ethnology is called a “taboo”, a term taken from the Polynesian word tapu which, in many cultures, indicates negative forms of the sacred. These, whether they are incarnated in objects or people, cannot be touched or used under penalty of being cursed. Those who risk this transgression are blacklisted, because to frequent them is to be contaminated.
Even the street…
The power to transmute any idea into a taboo – with a negative and contagious value – is a considerable asset for conquering public space. Thus, there are numerous themes which have been marked with the stigma of dishonor by thematic association. The French flag and The Marseillaise have long been suspects and were the first victims of this process. Wearing the tricolor was a sign of fascism, since the far right did it too.
But things go much further than that. Denying, for example, that sexual identity is Also a biological reality risks making you appear as someone who is politically out of touch. The consequence is that, as it becomes taboo to treat the subject from this angle, we leave the intellectual space to a host of profiles on social networks or channels on video platforms who will take up it. They carry a reactionary ideology on other themes, but, on these subjects, they unfold their rational arguments while pretending to have no political ulterior motives in order to grab a little oxygen from those who want to breathe reality rather than ideological stupidity. It has become just as suspect to question certain excesses of Wokism. Proof that this is objectively doubtful? The RN has launched an association of elected officials to fight against “the poison of wokism”, of course! But that’s not all, an author like Donna Haraway, famous professor in the human sciences department at the University of California, affirms that any form of knowledge claiming universalism often conceals a masculine, white and heterosexual discourse. For feminist philosopher Sally Haslanger, a theory based on reason or rationality must be repudiated, because it is also an element of the culture of domination. She offers her analysis in an essay with the title that could not be more explicit: Resist reality. Rather than fighting to protect these essential values: merit, secularism, universalism, rationality, we are abandoning them little by little by offering the most beautiful gift to far-right Gramscism, which has clearly understood the profit it could derive from it. .
And so one day in November, when the number of anti-Semitic acts exploded in France, we refused to participate in a demonstration because the RN would be present. Will the street itself become taboo because the far right also breathes there? Where to live, then?
Gérald Bronner is a sociologist and professor at La Sorbonne University.