Maurice Druon responds to this by saying: ‘Art is, above all else, a language that allows one to speak of God. It does not seem appropriate to deprive men of a place that would belong to all (whether a temple or a sanctuary), where, thanks to all that one can behold and enrich one’s own soul with, even the poorest amongst us would feel wealthy, infinitely wealthy, during the entire time that they spend there. I gladly acknowledge that there is a pagan aspect to it all. Not only that: it is, I dare say, our greatest pagan inheritance; for it is art that makes life more honourable, and therefore more bearable’.
A Factor of Social Cohesion
At a time when he proceeded to pen Le chant des partisans468 in cooperation with his uncle (Joseph Kessel), Maurice Druon took quite a few steps alongside the communists. The experience left him with some memories, in addition to a few friendships. Since then, however, he has broken with this past. The greatest reproach with which he targets Marxism is that it failed to acknowledge spiritual reality. ‘The irreligious man is ever a lost one’, he says.
Nevertheless, he does draw a distinction between spirituality, mystique, faith and sacredness. The sense of the sacred reaches far back, into the most distant origins of European civilisation. In the Greek city, religion served to forge ties between all citizens, including ‘unbelievers’. This is why the society of gods reflected that of men. The diversity and inequality of the gods mirrored the diversity and inequality found among people. Due to its communitarian nature, religion was a factor of social cohesion: the notion of a ‘single’ belief, of a ‘universal’ form of worship, would have been considered, and not without reason, both absurd and impious.
Nowadays, religion seems to have, once again, become a dissolving factor, just as it was at the time when Christianity first saw the light of day. And yet, our sense of the sacred has subsisted. Spiritually, man needs to be part of a greater scheme, one that transcends his person, motivates him and impacts his imagination, regardless of whether it is of a religious nature or not. Marxism, by contrast, strived to cast it all into oblivion, an endeavour which resulted in failure. According to the official statistics of the USSR, the rate of believers totals 23% among all citizens.
Mr Druon was well aware of the fact that he would be accused of ‘conservatism’. He does not, however, allow this fact to trouble him. ‘Well, then, it seems that there are some things that are to be conserved’, he exclaims; beginning with the ‘attribute of the soul’ and the personal, irreplaceable relationship that it establishes between man and the universe.
‘Even if I were to suffer further vices in this liberal society of ours, I did not rise from the amoeba to humanhood to end up plummeting into a society of insects. I refuse to become a full-fledged welfare recipient, and thus a complete slave to an egalitarian society which, incidentally, is not guaranteed to be any less depraved or vitiated than mine currently is, since it would still be governed by men — by a handful of them, in fact’.
Druon was as much of a polemist as he was a stoic.
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Une église qui se trompe,469 an essay by Maurice Druon. Plon, 270 pages.
The Modern World
The Consumerist Society
A financial inspector and a former socialist militant, fifty-two-year-old Jean Saint-Geours is a black-eyed and classily-dressed Bordeaux man who was once appointed head of mission in Pierre Mendès-France’s presidential Cabinet (1954–55), before taking charge of the Forecasting Directorate at the Ministry of Finance (1966–67). From there, he went on to become the general manager of Crédit Lyonnais, a professor of political science and a novelist. He is credited with writing a book whose title is ‘scandalous’: Vive la société de consommation.470
Drafting an analysis of the views advocated by Marcuse471 and Henri Lefebvre,472 he makes the following remark: ‘How strange: the more some of Marx’s major objectives are fulfilled, the more they are denied by their own disciples’.
These words merit an explanation.
Exploiting the ‘Added Value of Leisure’
In the eyes of orthodox Marxists, ‘the fundamental relations in every society are those of production’ (Henri Lefebvre, Le marxisme,473 PUF, 1948). The (relative) quenching of material needs, however, has not resolved everything. The new generation is beginning to realise, albeit with a slight delay, that man cannot live solely on bread.
Mr Saint-Geours writes: ‘What Marx seems to have failed to grasp is that the more man outsteps his producer status, the greater the freedom he enjoys’.
If Marcuse is to be believed, the alienation of work tends to be replaced by the alienation of freedom. Exploitation now affects the ‘added value of leisure’. However, the mere fact that one can reflect upon people’s lifestyles proves that primary needs and basic material requirements are, in most cases, beginning to be appeased.
The conclusion that Mr Saint-Geours draws from this is that the ‘consumption’ phenomenon is neutral and lacks any and all ‘political essence’. A doubtful claim by any means. Admittedly, the comparison between capitalism and Marxism is still distorted. Marxism is a complete system. It includes a general philosophy, a moral dimension, a conception of both politics and the state, etc. On the other hand, capitalism remains an economic doctrine, leaving the eternal questions unanswered. It bestows upon people certain means of existence but does not offer them any reason to live. Nevertheless, economy is not of a neutral nature; for economic existence has a body and soul of its own. And the latter only acquire meaning in connection to values that remain separate from the production means and the repartition of goods.
One must also be able to reach a consensus with regard to the objectives that society is to strive for. Those set by the author are moderately pleasant: jubilant consumption and ‘practical fraternity’.
Mr Saint-Geours has ‘embraced his era most passionately’. In a display of juvenile lyricism, he describes the aesthetical pleasure one feels when faced with supersonic planes, complex road interchanges, smooth sofas, and portable televisions. He indulges in a long celebration of the various ways in which modernity can be put to good use, which tells us nothing of the reasons why its misuse is so widespread.
In the eyes of the former head of the Forecasting Directorate, the consumerist society is but a line of passage towards ‘mass civilisation’ (This is where one quickly recognises the views advocated by Mr Bloch-Laîné and the entire Jean-Moulin club). Our current world’s major imperfection is considered to be the fact that one ‘allows inequalities to subsist among men’ and still attaches some importance to the theory of elites. The integration of the Third World (by what means, I wonder) into the consumer society would thus lead to general happiness and spontaneous flourishing.
This vision, a hazy one at the very least, resurfaces with insistence. Mr Saint-Geours wonders whether the primary obstacle to the advent of ‘new fraternal horizons’ does not relate to ‘economic forces with a monopolistic propensity that openly or secretly control power’.
He adds that one can hope ‘that in time, an authentic, personal and active sensibility will emerge within a larger number of people — or their children — thanks to an initial “humus” that is both artificial and acquired’.
This theory regarding the ‘sociological inheritance’ of acquired characteristics is rather perplexing. The democratisation of culture has been in motion for quite a while already but has not affected the inequality of merits and talents in any way. Not only that: by removing the inequalities that stem from the environment, it has brought natural inequalities to light even more than before. Has there not been enough talk of the Mozarts474 and Breughels475 whose socio-familial surroundings are said to have ‘murdered’ their abilities? Up until now, we have not witnessed any proliferation of Goethes and Shakespeares.476 Except for a handful of rare and pleasant exceptions, all that one has reaped from the sowing of ‘potential genius’ is, above all, some Arrabal477 and a major amount of cacophony.
Mediatic Totali
tarianism
Does the consumerist society lead to an ‘active friendship with things’, or can it rather be summarised using the words ‘commute-work-sleep’? The fact that such contradictory interpretations can actually exist side by side is an answer in and of itself.
In actual fact, it is the very same society that ‘frees’ some while ‘imprisoning’ others. While abolishing certain forms of servitude, it overwhelms those whose inner void it reveals. It fosters the growth of those that have something to develop and drives towards despair and revolt those that it forces to exist on their own level of incompetence. If everyone is indeed ‘alienated’, there are still some that are predisposed to being so.
Having said this, one cannot afford to ignore the presence of a certain dissatisfaction that remains, for the most part, blind to its real causes, just as one cannot neglect the most blatantly negative aspects of mercantile societies: the total and simultaneous consumption of the future (the credit phenomenon) and the past (one ‘consumes’ all that has been bequeathed by the previous generations, without ever bothering to pass things on further); the creation of excessive artificial needs and the system of incorporated deterioration (planned obsolescence); and the actual totalitarianism characterising the media.
The deterioration that is now afflicting the use value of a large number of products is systematically caused by the reduction of resistance, meaning by their shorter durability. While fostering a certain diversity in available supplies, this accelerated merchandise renewal generates the illusion of having a greater spending power, thus favouring neophilia. From an economic perspective, it contrasts with the TRPF478 in particular.
The ‘totalitarianism’ of the media stems, among other causes, from the fact that informational excess (information whose meaning and relative importance can no longer be known) leads to the very same result as a complete absence of information.
Having left the USSR, Solzhenitsyn drew a bitter comparison between the communist system, where one was banned from saying anything at all, and the capitalistic one, where one is allowed to say anything they please, but all that is uttered is ultimately useless.
In La décolonisation de l’Europe,479 published by Plon in 1964, the former host of ‘Patrie et Progrès’,480 Mr Jacques Gagliardi, writes: ‘When economic, administrative and military techniques become more and more intricate, all political choices rooted in one’s mastery of these techniques become simultaneously global and simple. Any man looking at the small screen will never contradict the simplification presented by those who have taken the necessary steps for him to entrust them with power’.
In the end, ‘consumption’ only seems despicable to many because it has been erected into a dominant value, and because the sphere of economic activity has imposed itself upon all others, taking full advantage of the weakening of the sovereign function (i.e of political power), a weakening that it actually helped to bring about.
In terms of social tripartition, one can say that, within our current society, the third function has invaded everything, which represents the most certain symptom of both a decadent situation and an inversion of values.
It is all an issue of authority. Since the strength of a nation depends on the existence of an autonomous authority in relation to the factions that are created through human diversity (and the resulting diverse aspirations), it inevitably weakens and disintegrates whenever the state is held in check by powers that have grown alongside it and then, in a most fatal development, turned against it. The state thus finds itself unable to play its traditional role of mediating any disputes between these different factions. It no longer has the power (and, soon enough, the desire and intention) to counter both the predominance of activities that had previously been kept within certain limits or spheres and the values that the latter convey.
The Economic Caste Has Enslaved the State
Historically speaking, as observed by Mr Thierry Maulnier481 forty years ago, ‘liberalism is nothing but the fact of demanding that the new forms of power surfacing around the state and the men that control them are granted freedom’ (La société nationale et la lutte des classes,482 Les Cahiers de combat,483 1937).
For the past 200 years, the evolution of societies has, on the one hand, primarily consisted in the bourgeoisie’s rise to power and the collapse of aristocratic values, and, correlatively, in the gradual weakening of the state’s autonomous power, all to the advantage of the social power enjoyed by those who control the economy and the media.
What follows is an important point: it is not a mere class substitution that one has witnessed at the head of the state. Thierry Maulnier writes that the economic caste ‘has enslaved the state through its ability to maintain the centres of power out of the statal sphere. Instead of being absorbed by the state, it has taken in the latter’s very substance. And although, historically speaking, dominant castes have always been the ones to be gradually absorbed by the national state, we have been treated to the sight of the national state being absorbed into the economic caste, bit by bit’.
What all those who contest the situation confusedly perceive but are unable to provide a clear explanation for is the fact that one constraint has replaced another and that the consumerist society has bestowed freedom upon people in domains where it has not always been necessary, only to abolish liberties elsewhere, where the latter have always been indispensable.
‘In the eyes of the majority, the liberal and democratic forms of government that have established themselves in contemporary Europe seem to have replaced the oppression and inequality that once prevailed with freedom and equality. No one understood that they had, in actual fact, restricted their actions to allowing economic oppression and inequality to supersede the various non-economic constraints and hierarchies that had just vanished. […] In the name of political freedom, liberal democracy thus offered the individual so-called guarantees against oppression, only to immediately rob him of them in the name of economic freedom’, specifies Mr Maulnier.
It is this new sort of domination that seems unbearable, even more so than the previous, because the sphere where potential compensations for the submission of the governed to their rulers are offered is not, or perhaps no longer, the one that reflects the essence of human aspirations once basic needs have been met.
In parallel to this, the reduction of the political to the economic leads to the transformation of the rentability criterion into that of all activity, or rather to the limiting of rentability to its economic aspects, especially the immediate ones; which, in turn, results in the underestimation of the marginal costs of non-market goods.
The very notion of ‘rentability’ is, incidentally, a highly specious one. As noted by Julius Evola (in Men Among the Ruins, Sept couleurs, 1972), ‘when defined according to the precepts of utilitarian sociology, the useful is considered to be the positive foundation of all politico-social organisation. However, no concept is as relative as that of usefulness. Useful in relation to what, exactly? And for what purpose?’
One does not sufficiently ponder the conception of the world involved in the construction of the great monuments of the past, and especially the fact that all these constructions were only possible (during historical periods that were infinitely poorer than ours) because of the relative predominance of a set of aesthetical values back then. Had immediate economic or social rentability been given more consideration than anything else, the Coliseum, Versailles and Schoenbrunn would never have been built.
It is not the intrinsic value of a given economic system that is primarily at stake in this ‘consumption’ phenomenon, but, indeed, the position occupied by the economy within society itself.
In La guerre en question484 (Gallimard, 1951), Mr Jules Monnerot485 remarks that ‘Marxism is the ideology of a period of mercantile hegemony. Marx’s Capital was drafted at the time of the great rise of capitalism, in a country where the latter prospered more than anywhere else and had the greatest impact upon the state’s policy (exce
pt for the USA). A Marxism that denounces capitalism is as if the latter’s shadow, striving for its destruction but unable to exist without it’.
Currently, the major issue (supposing that it could ever be resolved) is, on the one hand, that of achieving a synthesis of positive aspirations and, on the other, that of overcoming this period of ‘mercantile hegemony’ in which capitalism and Marxism act as diastole and systole and ‘economy acts as the embodiment of destiny’, whatever side one is on.
In his Arcadie486 (SEDEIS, 1969), Mr Bertrand de Jouvenel487 criticised the ‘domination enjoyed by the notion of quantity over any other value’. And therein lies the real divide. Massification in opulence is not preferable to massification in austerity. On the contrary.
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Vive la société de consommation, an essay by Jean Saint-Geours, Hachette, 254 pages.
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Technology and Society
Specialists do not have all the answers. Mr Brzezinski expresses his dissatisfaction: ‘I could never be satisfied with a fragmentary and rather microscopic sort of comprehension. I am driven by the need to attain a broader vision of things’, he writes.
Mr Zbigniew Brzezinski, a forty-eight-year-old native of Warsaw, runs the American Research Institute on Communist Affairs and teaches political science at the University of Columbia (New York). Having previously collaborated with Newsweek magazine, he acted as the political advisor to Mr Hubert H. Humphrey, who campaigned for Presidency in the presidential elections of 1968. He is nowadays part of Mr ‘Jimmy’ Carter’s entourage.
His ‘view’ of our contemporary world is founded upon an analysis of cutting-edge sectors and what he has termed ‘technetronic’: a combination of electronics and technology.
Systems and Debates Page 24