A profound reversal of values and benchmarks is currently affecting the intellectual, educational, and social spheres. Identity ideologies are distorting historical struggles for equality, emptying them of their meaning. It is urgent to reestablish critical thinking, armed with knowledge and rigor, to stand up against this charade that is blurring the transmission of reality.
A historical look back at the notion of “moral panic”, its origins and its militant use.
Democracy, universalism, rationality, secularism and freedom of expression – all values trampled by the woke movement, by Nathalie Heinich.
Interview with Xavier-Laurent Salvador: In about ten years, wokeism, intersectionality, decolonialism, racialism and all their combinations have entered public life. What are we talking about? What are their roots?
Through various mediations, Nazi thinkers and ideologues today find heirs, whether they are claimed or not. In the case of Heidegger, they range from certain Eurasians to Shiite and Sunni Islamists to ultra-left movements.
Language and linguistic forms are a playground for all the ideologies that meet at a time when wokeism claims to shape the world through speech. But the flaw of neology at all costs is a major political fact. The failure of the proposal of the word "francocide" is an illustration of the liveliness of language that has nothing to do with the political will to shape it or to recover it, and just as the failure of inclusive writing will be explained by the resistance of speaking subjects to the imposition of standards that are not understood, so the reactivation of cultivated etymological forms is understood by the mechanics specific to the history not of words, but of language itself. And in this area, the University has things to say.
Sometimes, when I read a text, to better assess its interest, I imagine myself discussing with its author on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens. This morning, I was sitting next to the author of the column in Le Monde entitled "Why it is urgent to update our spelling". Here is an excerpt from our discussion.
For some time now, we have noticed in the media and in certain polemical works a frequent use of the notion of "moral panic": we will dare to question the precise meaning of this notion which has become fashionable.
The wokes, who claim to be the robust sherpas of frozen reason, are seasoned in the tactic of smoke and mirrors, the offspring of avoidance. They have fully integrated the tactic of dodging as a supposedly chic form of intelligence.
The Evening Visitors, a program that was supposed to enlighten us on wokeness, quickly turned into just The Visitors: "What the hell is this?!"