In the interval of eight days, I think I have encountered and to a degree studied several of the political and cultural extremes of this city and country. First, I met M-L, my neighbor downstairs, a cultivated and independent-minded artist who lived in the US before returning to her native Paris to devote her life to her art. Two things surprise me about M-L: she lives more modestly than I can possibly imagine for her American (or German or Austrian) counterparts. Our street in Montmartre has the look of a picturesque slum. Lots of uncollected garbage and down-and-out types among the tourists and lower class bonvivants. M-L maintains her dignity and self-respect amid the ambient squalor. The second surprise is her cultural politics. She is an adamant royalist who believes that monarchy is the most natural form of government and wishes the Bourbon successors would launch a comeback. She is a fervent Catholic fascinated by the account of a 20th-century ascetic visionary, one of the ones who live by supposedly ingesting nothing more than the Communion. This visionary saint prophesied that France would become an Islamic country for an interval of twenty years before reverting to the true Catholic faith. That touches off the alarm signals for me.
With M-L, I talk about Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot. She has painted and exhibited scenes from the novel. Veneration of this novel of modern sainthood is shared by others in her Catholic circle. They are oblivious to the author’s intense anti-Catholicism, equal to his more notorious antisemitism. It would be unjust, however, to depict M-L in the colors we apply to our political opponents in the US. She recounts with genuine indignation the disrespectful treatment experienced by a visiting American trans-gender friend. I don’t believe that her personal inclinations would differ significantly from those of her liberal American counterparts, at least not in matters of race, sex, and gender which are now a shibboleth for the American Left. On all sides of our political divisions, opposition to injustice is often a form of self-congratulation and self-confirmation. It’s self-gratifying passion without reflection or self-criticism.
I experienced the opposite extreme two nights ago at a conference held at the Sorbonne. The theme of the symposium was “Marx and Religion.” I was attracted to it for complex reasons. First, I wanted to embrace the linguistic challenge of understanding talks and asking questions in my modest French about a subject to which I had devoted some thought and study. (See my blog entry “Thoughts on Socialism in Time of Plague.”) From the online bio of the speaker, I anticipated that the audience was likely to consist of old comrades, PCF, people my age but who had maintained a devotion to the causes many of us embraced a half century ago. In fact, the public consisted almost exclusively of septuagenarians or near-septuagenarians. It held up a shocking mirror to my person. The speaker gave a hackneyed sermon for the unwaveringly faithful congregation. Before I could ask my question, palsied hands shot up, but not with questions: the old comrades were all eager to deliver their own mini sermons on the evils of religion and the deep paradox by which believers could nonetheless at times behave decently. The one participant who fell out of line by suggesting that the church in France was not powerful enough to merit this indignation set off a storm of contradiction. I almost expected duels fought with canes and walkers. The anticlerical sentiment of the old communists was as intense as the Catholic royalism of my artist neighbor.
If either extreme encountered its opponents in person, it would maintain the prevailing courtesy and civility of the French. I can imagine that my downstairs neighbor would embrace or reject others on the basis of their fastidiousness in disposing of their garbage, which is a more pressing factor in maintaining the decency and respectability of our street than any political or religious conviction. However, the convictions are intense and real. They constitute the identity, imagined history, and phantom world of those who entertain the convictions. We’re all caught up in the gears and saw wheels of a digital mass society which aims to retrofit every culture and individuality to the same algorithms. Identity is how we cling to our humanity. But another human being is better for the purpose. Best would be solidarity with all our fellow workers and fellow sufferers.
I want to add an account of a brief experience I had yesterday evening because it confirmed my sense that Existentialism is an antidote to the moral masturbation of leftist identity politics of the kind that seems to have eclipsed the humanity and solidarity of the early 60s. I wanted to get out, so I decided to go first to a bookstore and then to the Halle St Jean for hot chocolate. It was so damp and chilly that I didn’t want to go out of my way to my good bookstore and instead reluctantly went to the obnoxious and touristy one next to the Place des Abbesses where the annoying shopkeeper was behind the counter. When I asked for Bailly’s, Le Depayesment, a well known title, she made a big deal to the French customers that she couldn’t understand me. They told her what I wanted and I think left in disgust with her behavior. When she went over to get my book she carped at me that my backpack would knock display books off their shelf. That was too much so without thinking it over I said loud enough so everyone could hear, “Un peu plus gentil, si vous plait. J’achète souvent des livres ici.” (“Be a little nicer please. I buy books here often.”) She became totally flustered and ran out of the shop claiming that the two young women who had explained what book I wanted had left without paying. They were obviously not book thieves, so she was even more humiliated and was of course super friendly toward me. I was glad that I managed to get my point across in French but I realized that she was actually simply, as they say in German, “überfordert.” That is, her work was too much for her. I also realized that a true gentleman would not have “put this little woman in her place,” so to speak. She was having a bad day. We all have our bad days.
Now there were two ways of reading this situation. The first was the essentialist reading which American tourists love and which happens to coincide with the identity-centered self-righteousness of our current Leftism. Here was a typical snooty Parisian being mean to a poor American. The Left doesn’t normally focus on tourists so exchange that with any of our preferred victim categories and get right at the moral masturbation. The second recognizes that not only were the other customers, presumably Parisians, on my side; the annoying shopkeeper was obviously struggling to get through her shift. Her bitchiness was a desperate effort to maintaining control of her situation which was perhaps precarious for all sorts of reasons. Not only do everyday situations require interpretation; they can be read in more ways than one. Identity politics forces a reading on us the opposite of that of worker solidarity.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 