The Somme tout / Le Devoir editions are publishing these days Write against the grain, by professor and essayist Patrick Moreau, a work which brings together around fifty texts published in Duty under the heading “Point of view”. Here is an extract from his introduction which explains his approach.
[…] I have a very clear penchant for confronting ideas, for debate, for controversy; I like to discuss, exchange opinions, argue, defend, if necessary with vigor, the point of view that I have made my own. If an idea, a thesis, an argument does not seem valid to me, I must look for ways to contradict them, to expose their weaknesses, if I consider that they have any.
In short, I have what you could call a polemical spirit. This explains why most of the texts that I have published over the years in the pages of the Duty were written against the grain; By this I mean that I reacted to opinions previously presented, by contradicting them, by providing contrary arguments; in short, by tracing the course of the argument they presented and by polemicizing with their authors.
This polemical spirit does not always have very good press. When we today describe remarks as “controversial” or “controversial”, we want to suggest by means of these trapped words that these are ideas which are not at all consensual, partisan, biased, non-objective, even violent. As if our current consensuses (equality between women and men, the refusal of all racial discrimination, universal suffrage itself, etc.) had not been, at one time or another, in the past close or more distant, ideas which were also controversial and which were controversial!
The confrontation of ideas, the clash and interweaving of arguments and counter-arguments as well as debate constitute the most peaceful confrontation there is. As Ernst Jünger writes in his Parisian newspaperthe intellectual joust is fought with swords “which cut matter without pain and without difficulty”. Although it sometimes offends, and even if their exchange risks leading to arguments and ego clashes, we never die from a contradiction or a counter-argument. It even happens that we benefit from them: ideally, they can lead us to modify our opinion, or even – although the thing is, in fact, rather rare – to change our ideas. More commonly, they push us to refine our argument, which is also progress.
However, in the increasingly polarized world in which we live, the contradiction becomes more and more intolerable. The Manichaeism of “You are with me or against me” triumphs and seems to impose itself more and more on people’s minds. We therefore tolerate disagreements less and less, because the slightest contrary opinion appears as a personal attack, intolerable verbal violence, and is sometimes even confused with hate speech. Here you are accused of racism for opposing the absurd ban on pronouncing a word “in its entirety”. Or, you will be accused of being anti-feminist if you dare to criticize the attempted censorship of a short story or so-called “inclusive” writing.
Trials of intent thus multiply, as if, between white and black, there no longer existed any shade of gray. As soon as we express an idea likely to displease someone, that is to say as soon as we express an idea, the chorus of ventriloquists immediately breaks loose – I call ventriloquists those who, instead of stick to what you write, believe they know what you think better than you and shamelessly abuse the most twisted amalgams. […]
To write against the tide is therefore also to refuse to be carried away by the flow of a so-called contemporary progressivism which confuses any novelty, even the most insane, with supposed progress. It means not giving up, despite this ridiculous demonization, exercising one’s judgment about fashionable phenomena or new theories regularly launched on the market of ideas. And to possibly be critical of it. An attitude of this kind allows, I believe, to accommodate a certain complexity, which is sometimes cumbersome, but which is nevertheless necessary if we want to overcome an ideological simplism which seems triumphant to me today.
How else can we consider, for example, this false wisdom which would like us to prohibit offensive remarks, without thinking of the consequences that this would entail, or that we could introduce into the French language, by the wave of a magic wand, a third grammatical gender and a whole new pronominal system?
Reintroducing into our public debates a minimum of nuance and therefore complexity, a minimum of decency as well, would certainly allow us, instead of seeing everything in black and white, to mark out our disagreements and stop classifying our fellow citizens exclusively in boxes. “allies” or “enemies”. On most subjects, there are not, as some would like to believe, two positions that are completely mutually exclusive, but a multitude of nuances that appear on the spectrum of opinions without any break in continuity.