When the university, place by definition of the public sharing of intellectual research, yields to the intimidation of the “watchdogs” of public opinion, there is cause for concern. Our columnist Louis Daufresne deciphers the maneuvers of the new inquisitors to ward off those resisting the ethics of dissolution.
Would the university be inquisitorial? The question may surprise you, but a coincidence leaves you wondering. A pope and a date answer it: Gregory IX in 1231. The Roman sovereign confirms the statutes of the University of Paris and, the same year, entrusts to the Dominicans the “care” of fighting against heresies! Knowledge and power: the two go hand in hand, of course. No one learns or teaches innocently. One learns to dominate, and even to conquer, as they say at Saint-Cyr.
The new clerics
The university is a forge where a legion of Hephaestus pours molten metal into the still gelatinous brains of youth. Concepts are invented, sharpened, conditioned in order to colonize the thought of others. And this is also regulated, whether the society is secular or religious. Before, it was the Church, which ruled on the good and the bad, the permitted and the forbidden. In its extreme forms, the Inquisition sent the apostles of error to the stake. Today, heretics are burned in a different way.
But it is not because ecclesial influence is repressed in the private sphere that society can do without this type of arbitration. The clerical function remains. The question is: who does it? Justice ? The law is contingent and judges intervene only in procedures. If their zeal can give the impression that they exercise a government, their influence is specific, operational. They do not represent a moral authority.
So where to turn? Public opinion looks at what it believes to be the real power, the media, a kind of factory to drain the “system”. Thanks to their dissemination, they make and break careers and reputations. Sometimes it’s for good reasons, as in the Ehpad Orpea scandal. Sometimes their attitude is more questionable, especially when under the influence of the extreme left, they accuse anyone of being fascist.
make infrequent
The media recently zoomed in on the micro-event represented by the authorized micro-demonstrations of the extreme right. The fact that it is a very small, rather marginal environment should encourage parsimonious use of this infamous label. However, we are witnessing an unbridled use that is never questioned. This use is the fact of a camp; it corresponds to the obsessions and the strategy of intimidation of the opposite extreme. The goal is to make people infrequent, to precipitate the accused into the Gehenna of social death. This would be justified for violent and dangerous individuals, as we do with terrorists. This qualification alone is enough to give the police the power to neutralize them.
But what serious criteria do we mobilize to confer on someone the cursed identity of the extreme right? Once again, there is a minority of fanatics, but no one believes that they threaten the social order or even harm it as much as the far left whose militancy, driven by hatred of institutions , leads its most resolute members to vandalize public space. Its depredations have a cost and it will be affected to the community which is therefore punished twice: by the deterioration of the property and the fact of having to repair it.
Ultimately, we realize that the more the inquisitors refuse the real, the more it becomes the mark of heresy.
This attitude should be worth to the extreme left to be reviled, symbolically discredited. However, it is always its opposite which serves as a guillotine, which cuts wide and in a not very precise manner. If someone says that marriage unites a man and a woman, are they from the extreme right? Probably yes. We are there. At the rate we are going, millions of people will rot in the low pits of mainstream thought.
Ultimately, we realize that the more the inquisitors refuse the real, the more it becomes the mark of heresy. Which is absurd since the characteristic of error, therefore of heresy, is to twist reality. If we make an equivalence between reality and heresy, the world goes crazy. And the extreme right, the name given to heretics, leaves its marginal position to acquire a singular and unhealthy centrality in the public debate.
An ethics of dissolution
Why unhealthy? Because instead of limiting this extremism to references recycling the totalitarian or sectarian past, in order to limit its influence, we refer to it a whole common fund of evidence which extends its intellectual surface. This weight offered to the extreme right is of course a scarecrow tactic, which is just as unhealthy. This is used to control access to power and to rule out profiles deemed incompatible with the concepts that are shared at the top. These concepts are anti-values that all relate, more or less, to an ethic of the dissolution of traditional frameworks. To continue to impose them on society, the inquisition works to marginalize the resistance fighters in the course of things. The extreme right is thus to intellectual balance of power what the LBD is to the maintenance of order.
These concepts are anti-values that all relate, more or less, to an ethic of the dissolution of traditional frameworks.
Not all media are capable of launching this projectile. You have to be a “watchdog”, in the words of Serge Halimi. The stakes are lit in the pages of Freedof Mediapartof World or chained duck. The Savonarola who officiate there belong to the neoclergy, the left, and in particular, to its high clergy, the intellectual left. It alone, in the Republic, has the power to separate the wheat from the chaff. It alone regulates the world of ideas and holds mass structures: school, media, culture. The university is one of them. It is one of its territories.
Give in to bullying
Let us not deplore that the Sorbonne is the scene of passes of arms, as attested by the two forums published in The world And Le Figaro, one defending wokism, the other denouncing it. What we can regret is that these debates are so rare. Let us observe that they are not held in the newspapers quick to accommodate the otherness of the points of view but that the camps respond to each other from a distance by interposed titles, without touching each other.
As for the case involving Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, the anthropologist threatened with death for her book on Brotherhood (Le Brotherhood and its Networks, Odile Jacob), it also gives food for thought, as we see the hand of censorship there. Let us remain cautious, however, in defense of the Faculty of Letters. The conference at the Sorbonne was not formally cancelled. The dean did not want to take the risk of scheduling it two days before the start of the exams, judging that this risked creating trouble. But this point is already problematic.
Why give in to the intimidation of student unions? Twenty-four hours later, she announced that the CNRS researcher could speak on June 2. So much the better because, let’s remember, the law gives university professors freedom of expression related to the work they must be able to share publicly. May higher education remain faithful to this achievement of constitutional value.
Reversed Clandestinity
In the meantime, the Minister of the Interior will receive Ms. Bergeaud-Blackler on May 23, she who is placed under police protection. This case recalls other distressing episodes, already old, like the fatwa which had caused Robert Redeker, another academic, to have to hide, despite the continual presence of a bodyguard. AT The Midi Dispatchhe testified in 2010:
“I live in a sort of semi-clandestine state, but it’s all weird. Because clandestinity, usually, is someone who hides from the authorities. In my case, I am hiding from a part of society with the help of the authorities. It’s paradoxical and it’s like an inverted clandestinity. »
This is reassuring and worrying: reassuring because the Republic knows how, when it wants to, to contain the inquisitorial impulses coming from the left or from Islamism. Worrying because we think that part of society would be ready to decapitate, to rekindle the stakes. Intellectually, she accepts the idea. It is up to the politicians of the national representation to take their responsibilities and set an example, which is not easy when an extremist culture makes you say that all shots are allowed.
