First, We Kill All the Intellectuals

Leadership problems in the West are more than political, they are intellectual. And nowhere is that more glaring than in the Western intellectual academic. Beset by uncertainty, forced into skepticism by the modern tradition, they are always at work building concepts that current dogma demands be foundationless.
 

There is a new book out, Who is Charlie? Xenophobia and the New Middle Class by Emmanuel Todd, translated by Andrew Brown and reviewed in the "London Review of Books" by Jeremy Harding. It is an assessment of the cultural, religious and national feelings that contributed to the anger and outrage over the Hebdo murders. Apparently the reaction was unreasonable, driven by a lot of very complex factors the author is more than happy to create and list. There are two big general factors: Racism and inequality. Inequality is going to be difficult to fix because the French no longer have their own currency to abuse and the racism will go away with interbreeding.

Some nuggets:
-In Todd’s view, France must face up to the reality of a post-Republican era and admit that its leaders have sold its Revolutionary birthright for a mess of EU pottage: budgetary rules in Brussels and monetary policy in Frankfurt have made it impossible to promote equality or intervene when it is under threat. (The Revolutionary birthright has been abridged by the EU? It sounds as if the birthright is a mess of humanist pottage.)
-For two hundred years after the Revolution, egalitarian godlessness and conservative Catholicism lived in mutual suspicion and enmity, but the result was also a useful complicity, especially for the godless, whose humanism might have crumbled into decadent self-regard ‘without the support of its Catholic contradiction’. ‘The image that springs to mind,’ Todd writes, is that of ‘a revolutionary nave stabilized by Catholic flying buttresses.’ (France is dependent upon a shrinking minority that provides the moral guideposts that the majority have purposely rejected?)
-Todd argues France lost sight of the fact that ‘the right to blaspheme against your own religion’ is not the same as blaspheming ‘against someone else’s’...France was in the grip of a ‘religious crisis’, even though it no longer believed in God. ‘We need to take religion seriously,’ he says, ‘especially when it starts to disappear.’ And so to the demography: a virtuoso exposition of France’s past and present as a nation with two traditions – egalitarian unbelievers on the one hand and authoritarian believers on the other – but fully functional and reconciled, for the most part, under the banner of Republican values. (It is quite astonishing that anyone could think this. France is dependent upon religion? We must take religion seriously--especially when it is vanishing? And rejected?)
-In an earlier book Todd and Hervé Le Bras, an INED colleague, came up with the name ‘zombie Catholics’ for this large segment of the French population that still carries the moral and sociological baggage of devout Christianity even though it is no longer practicing. Zombie Catholics prefer authoritarian values to egalitarian ones, and they are in search of a universalizing, transcendent faith to replace the one they have abandoned. They are the new reactionary force shaping the cultural politics of France in the 21st century. (The Catholic power doesn't really believe it? They prefer any spiritual structure, even an immoral one?)
-The two big crises pointed up in Who is Charlie? – racism and inequality – would be solved mechanically by a slow, inexorable sociological change; but this, too, is a long way off, and attitudes will have to change now. Islam, Todd writes, must be ‘legitimated as a component of the nation, just as the Church was … We need to grant to Islam what was granted to Catholicism, in the era of triumphant secularism.’ (This is apparently a one way street. The secularist need have no fear of the evangelical theists.)

There is something almost laughable about this very modern problem. Our freedom from tradition, the skepticism we have substituted for faith, our isolated independence that requires each of us to create man in his own image has undermined  liberty, equality, and fraternity; we have loosed our pre-Enlightenment bonds and now are unmoored.
But the Moors are not. It is whimsical to think that the West, befuddled and indifferent to virtually everything, will meet, as equal partners in the future, people of certainty, passion and ambition.