In Metropolia and Peripheria Who appears in Flammarion, the famous geographer swaps the essay for the fable, to “get out of the language of false complexity”. In a great interview with L’Express, he returns to the lessons he has learned from recent decades, testifies to what he has himself seen or endure in academic and media circles-the “paralyzing radius” that is to say “the use of five magical letters, ‘fach-o’, which stops the arguments of the debateur”-, unchecks his arrows towards the “progressive bourgeoisie” A surprising message of hope.
L’Express: In your fable, you describe a meeting of the “metropolist party” where, to exalt urban values and lifestyle, the room chants in chorus “We are with us!” In your opinion, the metropolises are therefore not populated byAnyWhere (people everywhere) that the Briton David Goodhart describes as opposed to somewoere (people somewhere)?
Christophe Guilluy: Goodhart’s reading grid is interesting, but there is something that bothers me with this categorization is that it gives an almost poetic, ethereal idea of the “progressive” bourgeoisie of metropolises. As if we were dealing with detached people. However, they are not detached from their heritage or their lifestyle. Like the Rougon-Macquart yesterday, they do not laugh at all with the course of the square meter, nor with soft mobility. There is indeed a “we are with us” which emanates from the great metropolises today; A “We are here” which consists in defending Mordicus the model which benefits their inhabitants, and to reject any compromise which would take into account the interests and aspirations of the “rest of society”. The ZFE [NDLR : zone à faibles émissions] This is the perfect illustration: this measure does not fall from the sky. It is part of a secession mechanics, initiated in the 1980s which saw the elites, then this new bourgeoisie, to citadelize. Today, out of fear and out of radicality, we lock before asking, tomorrow, independence, you will see … The ZFE is the “we are with us” of the so -called progressive bourgeoisie.
However, these large metropolises define themselves as “inclusive cities”, models of “open society” … What is this new semantics the symptom?
Everything that linked the bourgeoisie from yesterday to reality – and the real was also the classes’ conflict – gradually evaporated from the 1980s. The tertiarization of the economy and the geographical partition by the price of real estate which arose of it deprived it of almost all contact with the average and popular classes. “Metropolia”, as I call it in the book, turned my back on what it thinks today of being only a segment of the population – peripheral France – but which actually covers the majority of society. Accompanying this disconnection, a new semantics was born. The “progressive” bourgeoisie does not assume its social assessment (it only calculates its “carbon assessment”) and gargles with slogans of the “open society”, “multicultural city”, or “policy of the outstretched hand”, which are well with the managerial language in which it bathes.
The second part of your book is more personal. You describe in particular how those who yesterday praise you started to find you “sulfurous” while your speech and your diagnosis had not changed. How do you explain it?
As long as I did not have too much notoriety, that I was confined to the little “scratch hair” of the public conversation, I remained acceptable [Rires]. I understood quickly enough that what caused my ostracization in this small environment was not my analysis of society, but the place that I was likely to take in an environment that only seeks two things: notoriety and money. I took market share (conferences, missions for communities, etc.) in the small world of research, where we eliminate by moral or political discredit. And then there was also a reaction of “self -defense” of the world that I questioned, and which did not bear that an independent researcher could have proposed a representation which lifts the veil on the social and cultural fractures which make the West tip over. The France that I describe is ultimately proof that the model that the political class has chosen for forty years dysfunction. Somewhere, I tell them: “Do you see what you have done? To workers, popular French, small towns, medium -sized cities, rural areas …” And that is unbearable. Just as it is unbearable to all those who defend beak and nails a model that serves them, claiming that there are no others, or that it is the best “rationally”.
“Sometimes, when they had to face individuals who tried to oppose them some arguments to bring them back to reality, they used a paralyzing department: the use of five magical letters, ‘fach-o’, stopped the opponent’s attacks,” write yourself. It smells experienced …
It’s an always effective weapon! Whoever uses it benefits from a position of moral superiority in advance. Whether just or unfair, true, false, that’s not the question. This biased value system works, because it is validated in a vacuum by the various opinion prescribers. The “progressive journalist” will make his opinion validated by a “progressive researcher”, commonly called “great researcher”, and all this goes around in circles, by pretending to be the very objectivity … All these people who welcome each day to love “the other” in reality have a real aversion for what is foreign to their self -defined values as a moral or intellectually superior. The “other” is not the one who comes from afar; He is the one who does not have his social condition, or who does not think like oneself. Is the progressive bourgeoisie capable of converse with him? The answer by facho is no. It ends the debate.
In the third and last part of your book, you make the Peripheria representative say: “You know, life is simple. It is you who make it impossible and unnecessarily complicated.” Is it to try to express this simplicity that you chose another format than the test?
What are past centuries left? Stories, fables, theater, literature … and almost no figure. Today, I am leaving from an observation: in recent decades have been erected a “dome of figures”, where more and more statistics and data are piling up. Politicians are covered with relationships and yet, they are more and more blind to reality. In truth, things are simple: today we pay half a century of sidelining ordinary majority, which constitutes the sap of society and civilization. We don’t insist enough on this point. The ordinary majority is not an aggregate of segments-“rural areas”, “France of sub-prefectures”, etc. In worldly conversations, we pride ourselves to refer (without having read it) at the Grand Tocqueville and his “tyranny of the majority” to, ultimately, discredit democracy when she gives birth to something that does not please. The majority ostracization, promotion of minorities: this is the rule. This Tocquevillian incise gives me the opportunity to specify, however, that if there is no tyranny of the majority as the “progressive bubble” is to make it believe, I also do not believe in the “tyranny of minorities” as the (smaller) conservative bubble claims …
You said that the ordinary majority feed civilization. Can you develop?
A civilization only exists if its values, its way of life, its culture, its principles are carried on a daily basis by the multitude. For me, the primary cause of the Western rocking is the sidelining of what I call “peripheria”. By saying that ordinary people are deplorable, it is said, basically, that the West is a mediocre civilization, only capable of producing hatred. This ban of those who carry the values and the common good of the West mechanically leaves room for barbarism.
In the book, you use the word “mystery” several times. You say: “We have neglected the mystery of society and those who wear it.” What do you mean by that?
I believe in an “ordinary dialectic”, that is to say in a daily metaphysics, which helps to consider that all our gestures, our words count. The latter explains that, on many subjects, ordinary people are much more subtle than the representations of “above”. For example: between “living together” fantasized by progressives (who exempt themselves from them) and the “civil war” predicted by the conservatives, people are looking for nuanced, pragmatic solutions. Besides, an individual can be crossed in the same day of contradictory feelings: prejudices in the morning, fraternity in the afternoon, etc. Yes, I think there is a step of thought and humanity by raw exchange, in the sense that there is a crude art. And if I had to define myself, I would gladly say that I am a “raw intellectual” [Rires].
You also quote this Kant formula, which speaks of “starry sky above me, [et de] Morality in me. “What meaning do you draw from it?
He opposes, in a way, the morale overlooking morality in us. And I really believe in the question of what is in us. Quite simple and obsolete things like love, friendship, honesty, confidence, not lying … We can say that there is a Christian mysticism in there. But it seems to me that it is almost anterior. This is simply what makes men living together since the dawn of time; that you cannot be permanently in a logic of confrontation, because otherwise, you leave your skin there. Some will call me naive but, yes, I believe in terms of, in exchange, the mystery of humanity. This is why I felt the need to leave the language of technostructure, of false “complexity”. I saw how much it could serve as a smoking alibi. “It’s more complicated than that” is a sentence that I heard so much! No: sometimes things are simple.
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