Born on American university campuses, inseminated in the 1970s by French philosophers associated with the French Theory – in particular Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida -, the wave ” woke Is it sweeping over the West?
This is what Brice Couturier believes, who wanted to sign with OK millennials! a sort of antidote to this “dangerous virus attacking republican values”. The subtitle of his essay sets the tone: Puritanism, victimization, identity, censorship… A baby boomer investigates the myths of the “woke” generation.
A book that starts from an indignation. “I am far too present on social networks, I waste a lot of time there, but each time I have seen myself answer ‘OK boomer’ to an argument, my blood has only taken a turn”, says Brice Couturier, reached in Paris by telephone.
The author worked at France Culture for twenty years, where he notably produced, until last June, a daily column on the life of ideas abroad. An observation post that allowed him, he explains, to see the wave coming woke, born on American college campuses.
Describing himself as a follower of “ideological demining,” the essayist cannot help but see a contradiction between denouncing any form of discrimination based on gender, skin color, religion – which is what is rather than what one says – and to want to silence opponents because of their age. This ageism, he said, revolted him.
A bit provocative, he is aware of having gone too far by associating all millennials, “this generation too brood, narcissistic, fearful and vindictive” – members of Generation Y, born between the early 1980s and the end of the 1980s. 1990s – in mind woke, 2.0 form of political correctness. “Even in the United States, we are far from this devastation, but I took this bias because I said to myself that I had to defend my generation, that of the baby boomers. “
Lending a worried ear to “this little music which rises”, Brice Couturier does not always go hand in hand. And if eras and ideologies follow one another (from Moscow, Berlin or Peking), he believes, he writes, that “it is always the same dead wood that is set ablaze: an intelligentsia of semi-scholars, grumbling a pathetic, Manichean and intolerant catechism ”.
Corn OK millennials! is not just a rant. Without claiming a “scientific” objectivity, Brice Couturier tries to go back to the origins of ideology ” woke », Born on some American campuses. This is one of the most interesting aspects of the book, where any curious reader will be able to find his account.
From books to press articles, the journalist leads his investigation, often skimming on the right, as at the British Douglas Murray (The great unreason. Race, gender, identity), to give us a “psychosocial portrait” of this new generation of “social justice fighters”.
Former activist of the Socialist Party, author of a book “to the glory of Macron”, a hagiographic exercise that he has been criticized for, he says (Macron, a philosopher president, L’Observatoire, 2017), Brice Couturier defines himself today as center-left. “I am rather secular, republican, and I have always fought the extreme right, racism and xenophobia. Basically, I define myself as a social democrat. “
“For me, the left is citizenship, it’s the common, the general interest. It should not be a coalition of minorities, which, in reality, have little to do with each other and who very often quickly enter into a competition of memories. The left, in his eyes, should rather defend causes of general interest.
“It’s an extreme right-wing trick,” he continues, “to make ethnic or cultural identities the support of a political orientation. It’s not for nothing that Zemmour is on it. It’s the far right that has always told us that, and I’m shocked to see that the left has straddled that horse. “
With the ” wokism “, Brice Couturier believes that we are facing a form of cultural revolution. And if his book seeks resistance, he admits having also wanted to warn his left-wing friends about this “tsunami”, which is likely to leave its mark on the entire democratic West.
“It’s scary to think that a generation is telling us that skin color implies culture and political positioning. I find that appalling. The idea that you are determined by your skin color, I have fought against that all my life as an anti-racist activist. And to see that come back to the side where I least expected it, that is to say from a kind of radical left, that strikes me as an absolutely extravagant and scandalous step back. “
Censorship and culture of cancellation, refusal of dialogue, mistrust of institutions, polarization of society: Brice Couturier, worried about the future, believes that this is a betrayal of the ideals of the generation of the 1960s , cemented by the anti-totalitarian ideology. “We were spontaneously liberal, we tried to put down any form of censorship. It was believed that if all the ideas came out, somewhere the good ideas were going to win in an honest competition. “
“Maybe we were wrong? They want to prevent this competition between ideas, to prohibit what they dislike, they want to censor. It’s scary for people of my generation. But when it’s people who tell you that they are doing this because they are on the left, then we tear our hair out. “