One thus labels ‘scandalous’ the fact that a scientist, Konrad Lorenz, was awarded a Nobel prize for demonstrating the innateness of the aggressive impulse. One alleges, furthermore, that since professors Jensen, Eysenck and Shockley have highlighted the differences between the average I.Q. of Blacks and that of Whites (differences whose very existence cannot be reduced to environmental factors), they must necessarily be ‘racists’. And when Doctor Georges Heuyer published a psychiatric study in which he defined schizophrenia as an organic malady, Le Monde responded by writing that ‘such an absence of openness’ sends ‘shivers down people’s spines’ (4th October, 1974).
A Henceforth ‘Total’ War
During the 1930s, one readily set out to contrast ‘pure’ literature with a literature of ‘commitment’; in order to be regarded as such, the latter had to manifest certain qualities. Back then, Drieu la Rochelle noted that ‘communising French literature evades the requirements of communism, although it would perhaps be more adequate to state that, due to its own requirement of veracity, it simply feels communist reality slipping away from it’ (in Europe Nouvelle, 22nd June, 1935). This distinction seems to have been completely overcome. Quality is experiencing a gradual loss of significance, as talent verges on becoming an aggravating circumstance. All that matters is the direction followed by the work in question. In other words, whose interests does it serve and what does one actually write about?
Everything is henceforth ‘committed’; Leftism is right in this respect. Having been driven out of the strict domain of statal affairs, politics is proliferating in all directions and invading all sectors. Objectivity is crumbling, dragging down neutrality as well (and in particular). Taking these latest developments into account, every artistic or literary work acts as a source of indirect reinforcement to a certain side or opinion group. Every thought ‘material’ relates to a certain interpretation, to some specific ‘construction’ of reality.
Insofar as it proceeds to organise the world in harmony with a certain point of view, every spectacle falls into the sphere of ideology. This has led Christian Zimmer to write: ‘Either all films are political, or none are. Or, to be more precise, it is cinema itself, when taken as a global phenomenon, that is of a political essence. Leading people to believe that a political cinema story could actually be true is but an ideological ruse, reducing the political to a genre and excluding this totalising vision, the only vision that is both true and demystifying’ (Cinéma et politique,967 op. cit.). This coincides with the opinion expressed by Mr Michel Mardore:968 ‘Apoliticism has never existed in the cinematic field. The cinematographic image, which acts as a depiction of life, is essentially as politically committed as life itself; meaning completely’ (Pour une critique-fiction,969 Cerf, 1973). In this context, the quip made by cinematographer Yves Boisset, according to whom Love Story is ‘the greatest political film to be released in the last few years’, is not entirely unfounded.
The counterweight to the current state of affairs, however, is that the perspective is experiencing a reversal. For if the Right cannot lay claim to objectivity, neither can the Left. If there is indeed no neutral domain upon which the war of ideas is waged, the latter takes on a necessarily total aspect. Mao Zedong once stated: ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’. Nowadays, it is penholders that are equipped with triggers.
During the Congress of Nice, Mr Michel Mourlet970 concluded his speech in the following manner: ‘We must henceforth fight against Marxism using the very same weapons that it resorts to in order to abolish our freedom of thought’.
***
Les intellectuels en chaise longue, an essay by Georges Suffert. Plon, 224 pages.
La pensée en France, de Sartre à Foucault,971 an essay by Jean-Luc Chalumeau. Fernand Nathan, 190 pages.
Morale et société. Semaine de la pensée marxiste 1974,972 Ed. Sociales, 319 pages.
***
In an essay published by Le Monde de l’éducation973 in February 1977, Mr Claude Sales974 defines the ‘intelligentsia’ as a ‘small artisanal society’ that is exclusively Parisian and mostly Leftist, comprising ‘people that are interviewed more than others, attract greater interest, appear more often on the small screen, and are heard more frequently on the radio’. He then goes on to add: ‘The intelligentsia village is composed of three neighbourhoods of more or less equal significance: the university, in which a major part of intellectual advancement takes place; the publishing area, responsible for distribution; and the media, whose role it is to promote’. The role of this micro-milieu, whose entire functioning is isolated from the rest of the world, is simple: it ‘shapes the intellectual opinion, which, in turn, influences the entire public opinion’.
In Germany, sociologist Helmut Schelsky has displayed great accuracy when describing the manner in which the ‘intellectual class’ tends to replace traditional ‘decision-makers’. Spiegel thus labelled his book (Die Arbeit tun die anderen. Klassenkampf und Priesterherrschaft der Intellektuellen, Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen, 1975) as the ‘bible of neo-conservatism’.
The proceedings of the 2nd International Congress for the Defence of Culture have been published by the AFDC (The French Association for the Defence of Culture, P.O. Box 395–16, 75768 Paris Cedex 16) under the heading ‘Knowledge for the Sake of Freedom’. This collection includes the communications of Jacques Médecin, Julien Freund, Achille Dauphin-Meunier, Jean Cau, Pierre Bercot, Alain de Benoist, François Chamoux, Raymond Cartier, Jacques Chastenet, Louis Leprince-Ringuet, Louis Rougier, Armin Mohler, Thomas Molnar, Louis Pauwels, Frédéric Durand, Georges Elgozy, André Cocatre-Zilgien, René Sédillot, Sigrid Hunke, Robert Aron, Michel Mourlet, Alain-Gérard Slama, Henning Eichberg, Carlo Mongardini, Piet Tommissen, and others.
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Notes
[←1 ]
TN: Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (29th May, 1880–8th May, 1936) was a German historian and philosopher of history with a profound interest in mathematics, science and art. He has achieved worldwide fame thanks to his book entitled The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), published in 1918 and 1922. Spengler’s historical model theorises that every single culture is a superorganism with a limited and predictable lifespan.
[←2 ]
TN: And a historian.
[←3 ]
TN: Darius I.
[←4 ]
TN: The lands that constitute the very façade of Asia Minor, in addition to the islands that face them.
[←5 ]
TN: Miletus was an ancient Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia (located near the modern village of Balat in Aydın Province, Turkey). Prior to the Persian invasion in the middle of the 6th century BC, Miletus was considered the greatest and richest of Greek cities.
[←6 ]
TN: Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 535–c. 475 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher and a native of the city of Ephesus, then part of the Persian Empire.
[←7 ]
TN: Nineveh was an ancient Assyrian city of Upper Mesopotamia. It is located on the outskirts of Mosul in modern-day northern Iraq.
[←8 ]
TN: Peisistratos, the son of Hippocrates, was a ruler of ancient Athens during most of the period between 561 and 527 BC.
[←9 ]
TN: Cleisthenes was an ancient Athenian lawgiver considered to have reformed the constitution of ancient Athens and introduced a democratic system in 508/7 BC.
[←10 ]
TN: Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist. Along with Plato, he is considered the ‘Father of Western Philosophy’, which inherited almost its entire lexicon from his teachings.
[←11 ]
TN: ‘unity’ would perhaps be a more adequate term.
[←12 ]
TN: Pericles (c. 495–429 BC) was a significant and influential Greek statesman, orator and general of Athens during the so-called ‘Golden Age’.
[←13 ]
TN: Along with his teacher, Socrates, and his most renowned student, Aristotle, Plato (428/427 BC–348/347 BC) laid the foundations of Western philosophy and science. His ‘Allegory of the Cave’ is among his most famous concepts.
[←14 ]
TN: Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (3rd May, 1469–21st June, 1527) was an Italian diplomat, politician, historian, philosopher, humanist, and author of the Renaissance period. The term ‘Machiavellian’ is often used in connection with political deception, deviousness, realpolitik and other forms of manipulation, in harmony with what Machiavelli described in his magnum opus entitled ‘The Prince’. It is, however, very doubtful that the author intended his work to serve as a manual for ruthless and unscrupulous rulers.
[←15 ]
TN: Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican friar and Catholic priest who also left a major impact as a philosopher, theologian, and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism.
[←16 ]
TN: Callicles (c. 484–late 5th century BC) was an ancient Athenian political philosopher best remembered for his role in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, where he ‘presents himself as a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckled, clear-headed advocate of Realpolitik’.
[←17 ]
TN: Socrates (c. 470–399 BC) was a classical Greek (Athenian) philosopher. He is regarded as one of the founders of Western philosophy and as the first moral philosopher.
[←18 ]
TN: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15th October, 1844–25th August, 1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history.
[←19 ]
TN: Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, author, and composer whose political precepts influenced not only the Enlightenment across Europe, but also many aspects of the French Revolution and the general direction of modern political and educational thought.
[←20 ]
TN: Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 15th October, 99 BC–c. 55 BC) was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is the philosophical poem De rerum natura, a didactic work centred around the precepts and philosophy of Epicureanism.
[←21 ]
TN: Antiphon of Rhamnus (480–411 BC) was the first of the ten famous Attic orators and a prominent personality in 5th-century Athenian political and intellectual life.
[←22 ]
TN: Marsilius of Padua (c. 1275–c. 1342) was an Italian scholar who was also trained in medicine. His political treatise entitled Defensor pac
is (The Defender of Peace) was an attempt to reject papalist claims to a ‘plenitude of power’ in affairs of both church and state and is considered by some to be the most revolutionary political treatise composed in the later mediaeval period.
[←23 ]
TN: Thomas Hobbes (5th April, 1588–4th December, 1679) was an English philosopher who is regarded as one of the fathers of modern political philosophy. His most famous book is Leviathan (1651), in which he proposed the social contract theory that has acted as basis for most later Western political philosophy.
[←24 ]
TN: Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre (6th May, 1758–28th July, 1794) was a French lawyer and politician, as well as one of the best known and most influential figures associated with the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. He was outspoken in his defence of the poor and his support for democratic institutions. He also campaigned for universal male suffrage in France and the abolition of slavery in the French colonies. Although he declared himself a passionate opponent of the death penalty, he did not hesitate to play a crucial part in the execution of King Louis XVI so as to establish a French Republic.
[←25 ]
TN: Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just (1767–1794) was a military and political leader during the French Revolution.
[←26 ]
TN: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (8th August, 1749–22nd March, 1832) was a German writer and statesman. His magnum opus is Faust, considered one of the greatest literary works and plays.
Systems and Debates Page 48