Twice a month, The duty challenges enthusiasts of philosophy and the history of ideas to decipher a topical issue based on the theses of a prominent thinker.
In the years following the Second World War, Europe loudly proclaimed “Never again! “. Nowhere else in the world, let alone on the European continent. A few decades later, with the dismantling of the former Yugoslavia, the continent again experienced war, not to mention the other conflicts on the planet, starting with the current drama of the war in Ukraine. Would war therefore be part of our human heritage, resurfacing recurrently in the history of the world?
Renowned neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik, the sole survivor of his Holocaust lineage, argues that human beings are not destined to experience lasting peace. In the light of his personal experience, but also of his impressive work, the humanist doctor thinks that we are incapable of giving meaning to our life from happiness. We need individual or collective doses of unhappiness intermittently, so that we can subsequently tend with our whole being towards ataraxia, that appeasement of the soul that the Greeks called happiness. According to Cyrulnik, since the Second World War, the Western world has experienced its “longest” period of calm, ie 75 years without major tragedy inside the democratic and liberal world, which obviously excludes all wars outside our borders. Since we are not accustomed to so much tranquility (to be understood here out of boredom), this relatively “quiet” and “long” period of the “civilized” world will inevitably have to come to an end one day.
But on what proof, apart from his staggering and frontal encounter with evil, does Cyrulnik base his thesis? Just ask the question of historians, who note that there is not a single country that was built without violence. The history of humanity is therefore a series of violence. And the individual, in all this? His free will and his subjective and intimate experience of life? There too, thinks Cyrulnik, it is clear that, even at a more psychological level, everything suggests that we are incapable of giving meaning to our lives through happiness. “The only happiness we experience is to fight against unhappiness, so we need unhappiness”, he testifies with the writer Boualem Sansal in The impossible peace in the Mediterranean (2017). The happiness that lasts, that of this relatively long period of peace since the Second World War, ended up causing general nonsense on the collective and individual levels. This is no doubt the reason why overconsumption and excessive depletion of material resources have become an unconscious way of generating the unhappiness on which we fuel. This black hole, this malaise at the center of our being, materializes every day in the form of a tragedy that is at our doorstep, caused this time by the war we have declared on the planet. “There will have been millions of deaths and generations of suffering, since the wars of belief (the belief in infinite progress is a kind of declared war on Nature) will not stop…”
Civilization malaise
Cyrulnik diligently read Sigmund Freud, with whom he shares the idea of an organic death drive. The father of psychoanalysis shone the light on the fact that there exists within us a reservoir of psychic energy which is a priori unknown to us (the unconscious) and in which the perpetual battle between two instincts is played out. antagonists, life drive and death drive. The socialization and normalization of our relationships have largely stifled our desires and our vital impulses, giving way to the death instinct which fuels frustrations. In other words, the more our vital impulses have been stifled by the norms, codes and rules of common life, the more this repression has turned into the release of our destructive instincts. “The crucial question for the human race seems to me to be whether and to what extent the evolution of its civilization will succeed in overcoming the disturbances of collective life by the aggressiveness of men and their drive for self-destruction”, writes Sigmund Freud in Civilization malaise (1930). “In this respect, perhaps precisely the present epoch deserves special interest. Men have now arrived at such a degree of mastery over the forces of nature that with their help it is easy for them to exterminate each other to the very last. They know it, hence a good part of their current anxiety, of their unhappiness, of their anguish. It is therefore to be hoped that the other of the two “heavenly powers”, the eternal Eros, will make an effort to prevail in the fight against its no less immortal adversary. But who can predict the success and the outcome? If he were among us today to see how our destructive impulses threaten the very survival of our species, Freud would no doubt also say that we are incapable of living beyond good and evil, namely that we need a binary vision to define ourselves as a species.
War and Prosperity
Are we constantly moving from a life drive (peace) to a death drive (war)? Why have we established between these two extremes a type of relationship that we call the “truce”? Because, the pessimists will say, any peace is dangerous because it goes against “human nature”. Peace retains in hiding and in silence the repression of all our resentments, our hatreds, our greeds and our rivalries, which are just waiting for the right moment to rise up in order to die for “victory”. Since the beginning of the world, fragile peaces have been constantly attacked by “barbarian invasions”. This is why any well-kept peace must always be within the walls erected towards the stars (at present there are approximately 40,000 km of walls which men have erected against each other in various places on the globe, i.e. the size of its circumference!).
Peace is therefore fragile and it must be “surrounded” in order to protect its space against the perpetual attacks of the invaders. The Roman Empire spent its time defending itself from the barbarian hordes coming from the North. Today, the peace of our democracies seems threatened by migrants from the South (soon their official status will change to that of climate refugees). The archives of history point to the same observation: war and peace form an indissoluble couple. In light of this fact, the leitmotif of the Roman emperors “If you want peace, prepare for war” becomes clearer, especially since peace goes hand in hand with prosperity. We must therefore not forget this unbearable paradox: that the most prosperous periods of humanity have always been preceded by great destruction. The reason for this is simple: you have to destroy in order to rebuild.
Barbarism and us
But if we look closely at the history of humanity, is it true that peace is not a long-term part of our mental and socio-cultural horizons? If everything has always been a question of conflict (from the beginning, all the great epics and founding stories of our species do indeed point to this immense original fight between the forces of good and evil), it is legitimate to ask the following questions : what is the longest period that humanity has known without deadly conflict, and why? Let us look closely at what were the conditions of peace, when it arose behind the perimeters blocked by war? For example, the successor of Emperor Hadrian, the very little known Antoninus Pius (peace brings no fame), reigned over the immense territory of the Roman Empire without any “warlike brilliance”. During the 23 years of his reign, no wars, revolts or uprisings have been noted by historians. In such an extensive empire, stretching from Scotland to Transjordan, this period of peace was marked by great open-mindedness and religious tolerance. “Of all the emperors, he was the only one who, as far as it could depend on him, lived without shedding either the blood of citizens or that of enemies”, according to theaugust storythis collection dating from the IVe century.
For Antoninus, as for the Roman Empire in general, everything seems to go wrong with the edict of the Emperor Theodosius which suppressed religious tolerance and forced all the subjects of his vast and motley empire to become “Christians”. The conflict would therefore essentially come from those who want to impose their vision of the Good on others. It then turns out that barbarism is nothing other than the denial of full humanity to the other. This is why all those who, like Boris Cyrulnik, have had close experience of totalitarianism will say that “the temptation of Good is much more dangerous than that of Evil”. As soon as it tends to impose its unilateral vision which wants to be absolute, then the intolerance, the decadence and the cleavage which it causes announce the end of the truce and the resumption of the conflicts. It therefore goes without saying, to paraphrase the psychiatrist, that the question is no longer “Why the war?” », but rather « How peace? “. It remains to be seen, now that the battle for our survival is being played out, insofar as we have declared war on the planet, what truce we could sign and, above all, with whom, after the apocalypse.
Suggestions ? Write to Robert Dutrisac: [email protected].