Abstract
Contemporary French literature has expressed accurately the sense of alienation from the values of Western modernity. Out of contemporary French novels arises a sense of despair over cultural relativism, the poor quality of education and the decline of religious values. Nevertheless, such a critique should not serve as an excuse for individuals and groups to turn inward. Instead, a reassertion of Western identity and a revitalising of public democratic space can lead to a re-energising of modern society as the arena for the fulfilment of individual and collective goals.
The ‘decline of the West’ is, at first sight, a topic to be discussed more by essayists than by novelists. Indeed, Nicolas Baverez, a historian, lawyer and economist, has been a steady analyst of Western decline, starting with a detailed study of his own country's sharp decline in his famous book, La France qui tombe [2]. Not only did it rapidly become a surprise best-seller, it was also considered by many as the key source of inspiration for Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 presidential campaign. According to Baverez, the decline of France can be attributed to obsolete institutions, an inadequate political class, the strength of anti-liberalism and the loss of the work ethic that used to characterise the middle class. According to his more recent work [3], some of these same features account for the relative decline of America: an inconsistency between ambitions and resources within the political class, a lack of innovation and the decline of the middle class and its values.
Writing from an economic perspective, Jacques Attali [1], in his assessment of the recent financial and monetary crisis, also points out the inconsistency of the present political elites, who have accepted an unsustainable level of public debt because they were not ready to challenge the historical developments leading to the sovereign state as the provider of almost all social services and a sponsor of almost every activity. The present level of debt is such that all Westerners can be considered as potentially bankrupt in ten years. A complete, but unlikely, reorganisation of responsibilities among individuals, communities, states and international entities could potentially take place. Unless such a reorganisation occurs, economic and social decline, as well as the loss of the West's influence in world affairs, may continue. And such a lasting crisis will affect democracy itself. Fifteen years ago, another influential intellectual, Alain Minc, pleaded for a similar rethinking of the role of nation states and international bodies following the end of the Cold War [23]. At that time, the outlook was more optimistic, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. If a central explanation of history had been lost forever, and together with it one of the last collective utopias born in the West, room for political innovation and the re-creation of the world by less imperial structures than those of the Cold War had been created: companies, intellectual groupings, new political or social forces appeared to have, as in the Middle Ages, the potential to reinvent a new world freed from the heavy burden of imperial domination. Today, the general assumption is that very little of that potential for political innovation was used in the 1990 s and 2000 s: states, international institutions and their roles and relations have, to a large extent, remained the same, with Western nations increasingly seen as unable to deliver on their political promises of security, democracy and rule of law. The failure of the West to reform both itself and the global order is fuelling criticism from other parts of the world which now stress the relative demographic and economic decline of the West in order to legitimise their demands for increased influence in world affairs.
Other essayists such as Akim El Karoui [12] have also pointed out how much the present stage of globalisation is not, for the first time in centuries, led by the West, but rather by other cultures and nations. These have their own forms of organisation, such as family capitalism, political clientelism and strong religious influence in society, a situation that challenges our ethnocentrism while, at the same time, reviving the need for social justice and equality among human beings and nations.
Among novelists themselves, large social and political issues are apparently less attractive than in previous periods or in other media such as cinema, which has seen the return of socially conscious movies describing ‘real life’ as it unfolds in schools, small businesses, on the Internet or in settings of poverty. A large number of recent best-selling novels focus, more or less exclusively, on the individual, the couple, the family at large and the immediate neighbourhood.
Nonetheless, the issue of identity, both French and Western, has been a common theme for French writers with a foreign background, such as Andrei Makine [18] and Francois Cheng [7–9]. They have emphasised the presently fragile nature of core and lasting elements of the French cultural legacy to Western culture. These include:
French literature itself, and the status of the writer within it as a producer of a specific kind of truth, no less important than that of science;
the French attempt to define and defend universal values;
• a very specific, and almost ethical, relationship with beauty.
In the present situation, all these elements are under attack. The search for an almost scientific precision in literature and the attempt to provide a complex psychology for fictional characters is now being challenged by the universal recipes of American story-telling.
Universalism, especially secular universalism based on human dignity and human rights, appears to be an ideal that is much too abstract, too formal and unable to mirror the diversity of human experience. Relativism affects the notion of beauty at least as much as it has challenged the existence of anything called truth in the past. The decline of literature in society, the rise of cultural relativism against humanistic universalism, the questioning of the ideal of beauty, all elements dear to French intellectuals, fuels for many of them the idea of a certain kind of decline in Western culture as a whole.
One of the most controversial recent literary authors is Richard Millet [20,21], a French writer partly brought up in Lebanon. Millet goes beyond the points discussed so far and identifies the decline of the West with the decline of the Christian faith, along with the decline of the collective identity that such a faith, whether accepted or criticised, had created. The loss of faith, together with its language and traditions, creates a cultural vacuum and feelings of self-alienation in the Western mind. Home has become a foreign place, first because one misses one's own culture and does not understand one's own language, but then also because the home has been invaded, at least in big cities, by poverty and by the cultures and languages of poverty developed by new settlers from other places. Millet argues against modern ‘nomadism’ in favour of local roots. A little village can be a microcosm where the present modern human condition—with all the forms of social transition, sexual liberation and nostalgia—can be found and experienced. No need to travel the world and destroy one's own identity by pretending to accommodate, with no restriction or criticism, all cultures, faiths, traditions—or, more accurately, the vague and empty shadows of those traditions as they reach us [22].
Maurice G. Dantec, famous for his breathtaking thrillers, is very clear in his literary diary [11]; the West is heading towards widespread violence and direct confrontation with Islam. It should not accommodate so easily social anarchy, new forms of reproduction and families or the present aggressive form of Islam that clearly targets Western values and organisation. In Babylon Babies, a novel set in 2013, Dantec describes the task of a mercenary whose mission is to escort a young woman with schizophrenia on a dangerous trip from Siberia to Quebec on behalf of a sect. The young woman is the surrogate mother of twins, representing the next stage of human evolution [10]. Such an environment of violence, reproductive innovations and Islamist pressure is close to that depicted by the comic book creator Enki Bilal, who describes, for instance, in one of his latest books, a huge super-mosque competing with the Sacré Coeur Basilica to top the Paris skyline [4]. The mosque is said to be ‘for Salafists only’. According to Dantec, the remains of Western culture on which to build a resistance movement are to be found in technological culture and the Catholic tradition.
Another popular writer, éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, also reinvestigates the Christian tradition in his Évangile selon Pilate [24], from an almost secular position. For him, the Roman governor Pilate stands as a figure of the modern, Western, rational man facing the mystery of the Resurrection in a critical yet responsible and respectful way. He develops a personal sense of what may have happened as his inquiry into the disappearance of Christ's body goes on. At least, Pilate does not refuse to engage in the investigation and the debate as something that would not be of his concern. Pilate washed his hands over the death of Christ but does not—at least in Schmitt's book—do so over his Resurrection. At the end of the book, Pilate is on the edge of faith and exemplifies the alliance between rationality and faith, described by Pope Benedict XVI in his famous Regensburg lecture as a core element of Christianity. Unfortunately, Pilate is a figure of the Western past more than of the Western present.
Most of the Western characters encountered by the hero of Schmitt's Ulysse from Bagdad [25], neo-Westerners in a way, are very different from the Roman Pilate. They simply do not care about principles and situations. They do not care very much about faith either. Most of them completely miss the complexity of real-life situations. They do not feel the human dimension in them. They do try to understand or investigate. They behave as disillusioned, dehumanised figures, following rules they do not understand or even support. They become violent monsters—like the one-eyed Cyclops of the past. They constitute a permanent threat along the way of the young Iraqi Ulysses’ return to the home country of his liberal father's values: England. Because of rules and procedures, his pro-US father is killed by a US soldier; because of rules and procedures, Ulysses’ entry as a legitimate asylum seeker into the European Union becomes of a series of picaresque adventures. On his way, Ulysses is able to meet a few Western people with passion and compassion, but none with principles or intellectual discipline.
For the more radical best-selling author Michel Houellebecq [13–15], principles and values, rationality and even feelings have been completely replaced both in people's minds and in the social sphere by material greed, sexual stress, fears over the future and sectarian thinking. Any common order or rules have been abolished by relativism and fierce competition between individuals for resources, safety and pleasure. Manipulation dominates in a world of isolation and complete uncertainty, in which individuals become almost fluid. In that context, people wonder how they can, at least for a while, cooperate or love. Is there such an island where love would be possible? Where is the territory where cooperation between people can be re-established, and what are the directions to that place?
Whatever their background, whatever their faith, all these authors point in the same direction: the decline of the West has to do with the decline of culture, not only because of declining quality of education and religious amnesia, but also because culture has been invaded by a profound relativism that destroys the sense of self, the sense of truth, the sense of beauty and the capacity for action.
The free will becomes unable to decide, to choose or gamble, to act and cooperate in a universe where everything has become uncertain and precarious. The soft tyranny of complete uncertainty in one's mind, as well as in society as a whole, has replaced the hard tyranny of totalitarianism and economic anxieties. Feelings lead individuals; hyper-subjectivism becomes the rule. The ongoing procession of feelings usually ends in paralysis. Men and women lose their substance and dimension. And at every moment, one is convinced that anything may happen.
To understand how much the idea of the West has changed, one can contrast these recent works with the classic vision of the West as developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In French literature, the idea of the West and its potential decline has been elaborated in quite a different way than in the writings of Kipling or Spengler. One good example is the work of André Malraux at the end of the colonial age and before the Cold War. His cultural vision of the West bears some strong commonalities with Catholic writers of the time such as Paul Claudel and Georges Bernanos. In The Temptation of the West (La tentation de l'Occident [19], an early novel written at the age of 22, Malraux, who later became De Gaulle's Minister of Culture, tried to understand how Europe and Western civilisation would be perceived by and appeal to the (rather critical) Chinese mind of the Active Mr Ling. To him (and to Malraux, disguised as a Chinese intellectual), the West represented:
a place of never-ending creation and innovation, driven by action;
a place of action, with precise goals set the one after the other, discipline and the expectation of admiration and conquest; with ancient Rome as the model;
a place where women are entitled to have autonomy and individuality;
a place of individual pains, sorrow, sacrifice.
Nonetheless, Mr Ling acknowledges at the end that the New Europe is a place where the mind becomes increasingly invaded and disordered by feelings of equal intensity.
That modern invasion of the mind by disordered feelings, fragments of thought, memories, images of the past, coming and going in complex repetition was the central theme in the nouveau roman of the 1950 s, exemplified by Michel Butor's Modification [6]. The nouveau roman pretended to be a revolution in style, a new attempt to describe the routines of life and the rather repetitive, cyclical and structural nature of the human mind. These writers did not directly address the values and the mindset of the very minimal characters that they were staging. More recently, biologists have made their way into literature by describing the chemistry of the human mind, its passions, its changing ‘climates’ and moods. Nothing is less stable than the self [26–28].
The most radical contemporary French novelists go far beyond this point, describing and denouncing a new type of nihilism that ends in almost reversing Malraux's (Ling's) picture of the West. The West becomes the place where:
creation becomes completely subjective, meaningless and driven by personal feelings, frustration and conformism;
action becomes almost impossible because of the general unpredictability of the self, others and the environment; in this context, people vacillate between rebellion and purposeless alienation to take up sects or addictions; the legacy of history becomes almost impossible to understand; culture is mute and becomes, at best, an act of decorum;
women become almost inaccessible to most men because of a fierce competition between them for pleasure; they too lose a part of their individual character in the process to become part of a ‘target group’;
the individuation process itself, not to mention cooperation between individuals, becomes problematic even if personal suffering is not abolished.
Because of their explicit criticism of radical modern Western nihilism, some contemporary novelists, such as Dantec and Houellebecq, have been accused of being nouveaux réactionnaires whose goal is to destroy the intellectual and moral legacy of May 1968 in order to promote a return to the past [16].
What type of ideological response to the new nihilism can the centre-right offer if it wishes to escape the same ‘neo-reactionary’ label?
According to the sociologist and philosopher Michel Maffesoli [17], political forces should accommodate postmodernity. The time of a larger society in which one size fits all is over. Messianic expectations that political elites can bring about change in life are disappearing. Political forces should rather acknowledge the new reality: people regrouping in small ‘tribes’ according to common tastes, values and projects; pleasure in work, life and family becoming a central value of society; ethics of diverse types. Instead of pretending to change life or re-establish order, policymakers should aim at providing a common and acceptable framework for an extremely diverse society in which the initiatives of groups and individuals (many with positive economic consequences), and the resulting solidarity among committed individuals, are encouraged.
This vision is not completely different from the libertarian claim that is partly rooted in the neo-evangelical groups in the US: the only thing they really expect is to be left alone, with fiscal and educational autonomy from a federal state that appears to be defending the wrong values and attitudes. The return to a society of communities is the only way to defend one's own values. In France, where the nation state plays a very central role in society, the return to communities is seen by most French intellectuals as a threat. The recent trend by the French centre-right has instead been to reinforce the central state, its authority and its role in the economy.
Recalling, as the traditionalists would do, the values of the past and reasserting so-called Western identity is another option. But how would that appeal to the many who have lost sight of their heritage for good? In France, such an option is complicated by the issue of laïïcité and the growing number of French citizens with no family roots in the West. Although most intellectuals would accept that the core values of Western society have roots in the Christian tradition, they are not ready to accept a return of faith or faith-based initiatives in politics. The newly elected French president tried to open the door to a new type of secularism, a laïcité positive, that would be more open and positive about religion and its contribution to society as a whole. He garnered more criticism than support for that move. Another attempt was made to launch an open debate on the French national identity. It ended with no significant political input.
A more institutional approach is found among more classical thinkers such as Raymond Boudon [5], who advocates for the values of democratic faith: in a democratic society, such thinkers say, people are able to step back from their own narrow interests and cultural background in order to vote as rational observers for the solutions and the people that seem to offer the best chance of success. The public space of democracy is the place where collective rationality and collective discipline may be reintroduced, along with related values of respect for the other, dignity, consistency between past and present. Recalling that pacta sunt servanda, that promises will be kept and laws implemented, and that the idea of human dignity, as inherited from the Judeo-Christian European tradition, should in any case and for all matters remain the backbone of any legislation may be the narrow path along which to bring back some minimal stability and sense of commitment in the West.
Footnotes