I remember the title of my first book. The one that I imagined myself writing, when I was 18, and that I was discussing with this friend in spirit, under the effect of something that between us will be called the enthusiasm of youth.
Posted at 9:00 a.m.
My first book, which of course remained a dead letter at the edge of the dance floor in the Montreal night, was to be called Stop the Insanity. I copied the title of a weight loss program infomercial which seemed to me to perfectly sum up the excesses of the public debates of my contemporaries whom I watched from above, instead of throwing myself into the fray of those who were dancing. While reading Mores, from the cannibal left to the vandal right, Alain Deneault’s most recent book, this imaginary book title came to mind. Only he dances.
Everyone who is even slightly interested in the Quebec world of ideas has read his classic mediocracy, seems to me. Its publisher presents this little new one to us as its sequel.
Throughout my reading, I wondered about the title: mores of our time, fine, but is it a book on ethics? Not really, more or less, but at the same time, yes: in the call for environmentalist activism that crosses it, above all.
The book begins with something like a series of in-depth editorials on the issues that have occupied the opinion pages of newspapers in Quebec in recent years. Systemic racism, n-word, white privilege, COVID-19 and state of emergency, climate crisis. All this with the aim of showing certain drifts, on the left as on the right, without sending them back to back, rather only to understand them better and open a breath of fresh air to reasonable people, who would form the majority, if we are to believe the author, tired of the extremes that feed each other.
But the one who also wrote Politics of the Far Center does not defend a “neither… nor…” businesslike and efficient. It is rather a desire to open airy ways that animates it, where totalizing adverbs are absent, where freedom always knows that it is framed by an implacable reality.
I will refrain from summarizing the positions defended by the author on each of these themes of the time, the interest of the reading was elsewhere for me, especially in the desire to deconstruct, in the sense of dissecting them; dissect, to better understand. It’s Deneault, it stays on the left, it often cuts sharply, but always muted, there is this call for nuance, as if saying: “I’m not saying the last word, I want to discuss intelligently, that’s all. »
It’s indignant, almost frustrated at times, and this tone, which offers little room for joy, is usually rather unsympathetic to me. But that’s why you have to talk to people, and not just read them: it gave me the keystone of the book, that of soft morals.
I spent three-quarters of an hour chatting with Deneault on the phone in New Brunswick, where he teaches, and I smiled the whole time as I stared out the window. I had the impression of a privilege, precisely, to exchange with a great intellectual of our nation, open and cheerful to the discussion. Everything to please me: the exemplary erudition which does not insist too much on showing itself (at a certain moment, he stopped speaking to find the name of an author, I was charmed), the desire for dialogue renewed at each sentence and, above all, this way of answering a question by taking a long detour through the history of philosophy. Because sometimes you have to.
I thought of his presence at Everybody talks about it, which went viral, where he loped Gilbert Rozon. Deneault the beating, the impatient, the indignant not embarrassed at all with a microphone under his nose. “But outrage has always been just a spark plug for me,” he reminded me, since being outraged is not an end in itself, you have to ask yourself the question constantly why one is indignant, otherwise the feeling remains incomplete.
Deneault has his nose in his Aristotle these days. He criticizes the excesses by quoting it, as any good philosopher likes to do, to think as much as possible in terms of the happy medium. That is the meaning of its title. “Morals are complicated,” and it’s not a matter of arithmetic. Do not constantly refer to circumstances, this word that crosses Ethics in Nicomache, is always an error. But the absolute of the circumstantial: is it still one?
I detected this other feature in his book, which I submitted to him, namely whether he did not find that on the left as on the right, these days among many thinkers in Quebec, we claim to be part of a certain ideal of the Enlightenment and of reason, upstream of the triumphant feeling of romanticism which followed it, and downstream of the excesses of religion which preceded it. He made me the following characterization, of which I sketch the table summarily.
On the right, according to him, there would be a claim to Reason with a capital R, definitive and determined, almost fetishized, known and applicable, which would lead to ideas such as good governance, the managerial spirit in all things, the political will seen as being able to settle moral issues once and for all. But his own left, economic and ecological more than identity, does not adhere to such strict positions. “I’m not trying to convince anyone with this book. And I must say that by closing it, I didn’t change my mind about anything, but I learned.
He told me this story of his youth, which will follow me for a long time. “We liked to discuss, my friends and I, literature, sociology. And in our discussions, there was this idea that somewhere, without us being able to touch it, there was reason on this subject. Whether visible or not, whether even merely imaginary, the speculative North Star continues to guide spirit friends who discuss. And isn’t the feeling of friendship, according to Aristotle, close to the idea of justice?
Mores, from the cannibal left to the vandal right
Alain Deneault
Lux
312 pages