Tribune published on May 6 in Le Figaro.
Last Tuesday, a daily newspaper published an op-ed signed by two hundred academics, entitled: "No, anti-wokeism does not serve democracy." The unforgivable sin attributed to the "anti-wokes" is to have organized and then published a conference, After deconstruction (Odile Jacob, March 2023), who criticizes the excesses of currents inspired by Anglo-Saxon cultural studies, and for having advertised the book via a video on the Figaro website. In the absence of an argument, the authors are content to shout about the return of the brown or black shirts and the hatred of foreigners, a dilapidated scarecrow in which they are the only ones to believe or which they wave to serve their interests. We understand, therefore, why it was essential to gather such a number of signatories: only quantity could compensate for the mediocrity of a text in which one searches in vain for a draft of an argument, and which consists of putting on trial a word that has not been spoken and a book that they have not read. When reason disappears, force is the only recourse and gregariousness takes the place of virtue.
The fact that two hundred academics, responsible for educating our youth, could sign such a simplistic and caricatured text is enough to worry and confirm the diagnosis of cretinarchy made in the incriminated video. Just like the term patriarchy, whose abusive use it mocks, this neologism does not target people – even if some apparently recognized themselves in it – but a systemic principle: that of emancipation erected as an absolute, which perceives reason as a straitjacket and substitutes for it the obsessive logic of domination. Often, the explanation developed is reduced to a word, such as heteropatriarchy, with scholarly connotations, a true epistemological mantra, which would have, like Molière's lung, the magical virtue of explaining most of society's ills and which, moreover, provides so many ready-made problems to students whose legitimate aspiration for a fairer world is exploited.
Wokeism is indeed progress
because it is similar to a new right:
the right to transgress reason.
For these minds formatted to emancipate themselves, it would be urgent to denounce the "reactionary turn" and the threat of new "dictatorships" brought by "anti-wokeism". Pretending to be frightened by the risk of a far-right cancel culture, the authors only cite American examples, and for good reason, because they would be hard pressed to find a single one in France. Strangely, because everyone knows their impartiality, they do not cite any of the numerous "cancellations" for non-conformity with the right-thinking doxa: who cancels Caroline Eliacheff and Céline Masson's conferences? Who prevents Nathalie Heinich or Sylviane Agacinski from speaking? Who, at Sciences Po, cancels courses on Darwin? Who, at Paris I, cancels a philosophy seminar because it is called "the transsexual enigma"?
The implicit justification for these boasts is the strange certainty of their authors or sympathizers that they embody Progress, that they obey the Sense of History. The 11th century and its procession of atrocities should have put an end to this naive belief, but the progressive myth remains: constantly reactivated – and therefore literally reactionary – it survives like a duck continues to run after it has lost its head. It survives because it is not questioned. To believe it without thinking, it had to be simplified to the extreme: progress is an addition of rights. From this point of view, “wokism” is indeed progress because it is similar to a new right: the right to transgress reason. On France Culture, a professor of comparative literature in favor of cancel culture can thus assert learnedly: “changing words is not rewriting.” There is no more right to unreason than there is to reason because reason is a requirement, even an asceticism: only the means of exercising it or making it happen can be the object of a right, such as that to the "free communication of thoughts and opinions" defined by Article XNUMX of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. This is why, in this respect, it is appropriate to ensure that opposition to "wokism" only uses the weapons of reason and does not become, through mimicry, a Manichean populism, exacerbated by the secession of globalized elites.
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two and two make four. Grant it, and the rest will follow,” wrote Orwell in 1984. Indeed, the novel’s hero, Winston, is tortured until he agrees to write that two and two make five. As Orwell puts it, “eventually the Party will announce that two and two make five, and it will have to be accepted. What its philosophy tacitly denies is not only the validity of experience but the very existence of external reality.” This prophecy takes on a singular relevance at a time when some claim that “2+2=4 reeks of white patriarchal supremacy” (Laurie Rubel, Brooklyn College) and that “there is no objectivity in scientific knowledge” (Rachele Borghi, Sorbonne University).
On April 30, twenty-nine eminent scientists from the most prestigious American, German and French universities published an article entitled "In Defense of Merit in Science" (Journal of Controversial Ideas). They are alarmed by the risk that identity ideologies now pose to the progress of science, for example by leading many patients to refuse anti-cancer treatments deemed colonialist. These ideologies of "Social Justice" affirm that science is racist, patriarchal and colonial, and reject the idea of an objective truth in favor of alternative narratives, products of each cultural context. These scientists remind us loud and clear: "Science knows neither race, nor gender, nor religion. […] There is no queer chemistry, Jewish physics, white mathematics, nor feminist astronomy." After the precedents of proletarian science and Aryan science, what amnesia has struck us that there is a need to recall it?
Defending democracy is not about stirring up rearguard terrors, but about saving the debate of ideas from the violent methods of inept and gregarious censors. Putting rationality on trial as a colonialist value linked to white supremacy, insulting and “cancelling” the unsavoury, promoting an immature vision of a black and white world, where evil should be eradicated by all means, including the most disloyal, because evil is found only in the other and in society, never in oneself: is this not the real threat weighing on democracy, and on our very humanity?
Emmanuelle Hénin, Xavier-Laurent Salvador, Pierre-Henri Tavoillot and the Observatory of Identity Ideologies and Decolonialism
