French social sciences are not at their best. We find, in the university “community”, levels of ideological pressure unheard of for a long time. Many are those who never stop “demonstrating” what we know in advance that they will demonstrate it since they have made it their vocation to do so. It is hard to imagine Thomas Piketty (making) doubt that the solution to all our misfortunes requires confiscatory taxation of the richest. Critical wokists – oxymoron? – do not rise en masse to list the undesirable effects of their fight and claim to weigh them before rushing forward. I pass…
No one has ever discovered much with presuppositions. Especially by striving not to abandon them under any circumstances. Think back, ten years later, to the heap of apocalyptic prophecies that we were told about “marriage for all”. How many psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists, jurists rushed to the gazettes to announce the end of Western civilization? At that time, nobody – or almost – bothered to take a good look at what was happening to children raised by homosexual couples. It was postulated that they would go mad, that reason itself would disappear from the earth; we wrapped it up in pretty paper decorated with obscure (but scholarly-looking) words and sold it as science when it wasn’t. Today, the same Philippulus no longer say anything about it. They hurried not to go and check on the vast field of investigation now available whether they had been right or not. But that didn’t bother many people.
We have the right to dream of research in the humanities and social sciences that is as disruptive, creative, unexpected, overwhelming and, to be honest, useful as its “hard” big sister, fundamental or applied – think of the dazzling progress of ‘artificial intelligence. But, seen from my window and apart from notable exceptions, I don’t see anything like this coming. Much of what one reads is stereotyped, predictable rather than politically conditioned.
General decline of the nuance
This overall sterility would not be very serious if it were not accompanied by other failings. One of the worst seems to me contained in the objective contribution of a part of the intellectual class to the general decline in nuance and, above all, in the sense of the relative. Look at what is happening with the pension reform. A freshly landed Martian would judge us on the edge of the abyss: “democratic crisis”, “dictatorship”, “scandal”, “enormous” complicity of the Constitutional Council… Not to mention the suffocation caused by the accumulation of forums in the generalist press. We no longer get out of the extremely serious, the appalling, the historic… And all that without the shadow of a decline in the magnitude of what we are talking about.
War has returned to Europe; China is showing worrying signs of aggressiveness; radical Islamism has not disappeared; almost all Western countries are drifting down the same populist slope; the “reasonable” political forces are less and less so – look at what has become of the Republican Party in the United States and almost all of the left in France –; the challenges facing the country are abysmal – in terms of energy, infrastructure, rearmament, climate, education, health, competitiveness, public spending – and require a gigantic effort of compromise in addition to of work and deliberate reflection. But it does not matter: none of this counts as much as the monstrosity – and the word is weak – consisting in having reduced to 175 hours the time of the parliamentary debate on pensions…
The drama is not due to the ridiculousness of this disproportion of the problems, but to the seriousness of those which the intellectuals aggravate when they thus make the mayonnaise rise until it covers everything. This noise, this buzz, this excessiveness, this bewilderment – overplayed or experienced – reinforces the general propensity of the French to deny reality, to conceal what bothers them, to the desire we have to look elsewhere while our homes all burn at the same time. There lies the new betrayal of the clerks whose job it is to shed light and who work to extinguish it.
*Denys de Béchillon is a constitutional expert and professor of law at the University of Pau