When I was a child and there was bickering in the alley, I would come home and open a book, waiting for it to pass. My mother, who thought it was a very funny attitude, keeps reminding me of it.
I avoid conflicts, not because I’m afraid of them, but because they bore me deeply. I like debating, but I get tired quickly, because I always end up seeing myself fidgeting, saying things with a seriousness that I didn’t have an hour before, when deep down, I’d rather be somewhere else. In the countryside, for example, where I clumsily aspire to the middle way of the Tao.
Speaking of debates, I find these days that the posture of moral superiority is no longer on the side of the left, which has never stopped being criticized anyway. She lives rather in the “center”, where I always tried to hide (with a good book), while waiting for it to pass. Everyone calls themselves center today and condemns extremes, it has become a strange collective passion, as if we were becoming proud to be beige, while waiting for brown shirts. The philosopher Alain Deneault even speaks of the extreme center in one of his books.
“There are good people on both sides,” Trump said, when a neo-Nazi crackpot drove his tank into anti-racism activists in Charlottesville, resulting in injuries and the death of a protester. The share of responsibility of these activists in this mess? Protesting against white supremacists who had come together to protect Confederate symbols. A kind of prelude to the assault on the Capitol, fueled among others by Fox News, which must now pay 787.5 million dollars for its lies, in order to avoid a trial. While we were learning this, Elon Musk wanted to put in the same basket on Twitter the public media and the media under the thumb of authoritarian regimes.
What shocked at the time was that the president put supremacists on an equal footing with those who fought them. Because since when did neo-Nazism become an “opinion like the others” and since when does it risk being worse if we don’t let it express itself? I haven’t spent my life reading about the Holocaust and fascism to accept this argument. We do not dialogue with fascism, we fight it, there have been millions of deaths for us to become aware of that.
And there, I come across an Instagram video of a guy demolishing a beer counter in a grocery store because a brand did business in its advertising with a transgender woman. In another video, a man firmly believes that there are students who are so brainwashed by woke that they now identify as cats and want litter boxes in the toilets, fake news that has circulated recently.
To say that we have not even seen the ravages of artificial intelligence yet.
We try to pass intolerant ideas for “opinions” and prejudices for “points of view”. Why should a black person agree to go and debate with a white man who denies the existence of racism, when we are starting to talk about it?
Personally, I would refuse to talk to someone who believes that women do not have the right to decide for their bodies in matters of procreation, for fear of putting my fist to his face before he even open the hatch.
Not only would that give him airtime, but it would also make him a victim. There are things on which we must not make any concessions if we care at all for the rights that we have collectively established.
I was also reassured to see all the parties in the National Assembly supporting a motion to denounce the intimidation to which drag queens have been subjected. That’s the beauty of democracy: no one is forcing children to listen to drag stories being read, but no one has the right to harass those who do either.
It is the mark of troubled times, when even those who believe themselves neutral lose their bearings enough to defend the indefensible.
So I walk away a little, and I open a book: Americaa collection of chronicles by Joan Didion, which quotes the poet Yeats as an epigraph:
“Whirling and spinning in its ever-widening circle
The falcon does not hear the falconer;
Everything falls apart; the center no longer holds;
Pure and simple anarchy is sweeping the world,
The darkened wave of blood surges, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence drowns;
The best lose all conviction, and the worst
Are filled with the ardor of passion. »
I remember “everything falls apart; the center no longer holds” which freezes my blood. This is exactly the feeling that inhabits me at times: we will no longer be able to hide in a center that is breaking up under pressure, we will have to choose sides, and that will be decided in our ability to respect human dignity or not.
Everyone has their center, a personal and inner solidity that gives the strength to get up in the morning. I want to ask you: what prevents you from falling apart in times that run too fast?