“Ideologies,” writes Hannah Arendt, “always admit the postulate that a single idea suffices to explain everything in the development from the premise, and that no experience can teach anything, because everything is included in this coherent progression of logical deduction. The danger of exchanging the necessary insecurity, in which philosophical thought stands, for the total explanation offered by an ideology […] is not so much the risk of getting caught up in some generally vulgar and always precritical postulate as of exchanging the freedom inherent in the human faculty of thought for the straightjacket of logic, with which man can constrain himself almost as violently as he is constrained by a force external to him. »
In their time, the Nazi and communist ideologies held thus for truths not having to be demonstrated that the history of humanity could be explained by a war between the races or between the classes. Once this “single idea” was affirmed, all the rest followed and few steps were necessary for, encircled by their “straitjackets of logic”, human beings, otherwise normally constituted, deem it normal to destroy who a whole people, who a whole class.
I see today that these straitjackets have been put on again, so that we accept as self-evident, even as morally desirable, practices that are unjustifiable in justice as in reason, even if they are for the instant much less serious, of course, than those mentioned above. Academics now think it is perfectly normal to refuse dialogue with some of their opponents, to call for the withdrawal of invitations to speakers or the banning of texts, without even having heard or read them, or even to condemn, here again without hearing her, a young professor with a precarious status because she pronounced a certain word “in full”.
So what is this “postulate” that blindly fuels a significant number of academics? Essentially this, that any standard never aims for anything other than to divide humanity between those who decree it and those whom it excludes. It is this “single idea” of Foucauldian inspiration that henceforth opens the door to all questioning, from the most fruitful to the most wacky, as well as to all anathemas.
The operation is simple: take any norm and, rather than trying to understand what may well have motivated its existence, see in it only a means of exclusion aiming at domination. Michel Foucault opened the ball with his history of madness. According to him, the only distinction between the sane man and the madman is that the former produced the standard decreeing who is sane and who is mad, with the sole purpose of oppressing those it excludes. Since that time, Foucault’s emulators have continued to attack all existing norms.
Noting that obesity is a problem in our sedentary societies, inculcating healthy eating habits in young people and encouraging physical exercise, are these not the expressions of principles which are self-evident when one wishes to promote health and the well-being of the population? Well, no, not for supporters of fat studies, who only see it as a norm, and therefore a tool of oppression. All the work of these “theoreticians” therefore aims to “deconstruct” this necessarily oppressive norm, to celebrate obesity and to give a voice to those who suffer from the negative view that we have of them, etc.
A researcher has moreover recently “shown” in his work that the norm according to which suicide is judged negatively must be combated. It would only exist to make it possible to stigmatize those who have suicidal thoughts, to impose authoritatively the desire to live as the norm and exclude those who do not experience such a desire.
No longer seeing in each standard anything other than oppression naturally leads to wanting to reject them all. This reflex has penetrated people’s minds to such an extent, at least within universities, that as soon as a standard is challenged in the name of a supposed oppression, administrators, professors, like many students, feel a kind of existential obligation to place oneself immediately on the side of the alleged victim (of the norm).
It is in this way that, on the basis of these dubious principles, we today cheerfully call into question, without reflecting on the consequences, principles as fundamental as academic freedom, freedom of expression, the objectivity of the process of obtaining subsidies, or even meritocracy – yet a republican principle which aimed precisely to get out of the age of privileges of the nobility, today derided because it would be a norm masking so-called “privileges”. In short, anything goes.
Well, not exactly everything. Because in this vast questioning, no one has so far “shown” that all these critical theories are themselves, according to their own parameters, producers of norms and therefore, they too produce “dominant” who profit (particularly in terms of careers or subsidies) of these said standards.
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