Yesterday I had a long day from the rue Tholozé to my door. Everyone there and here was swimming against the opaque heaviness of this time of fear and alienation. My student friend Cody picked me up at Chicago O’Hare and the drive down to Bloomington-Normal went fast because of our good conversation about working-class politics. But the opaque heaviness struck me when I arrived home.
On the flight, I sat next to a francophone woman from Versailles who, unusually, did not speak or understand a word of English. I helped her through customs, got her to the airline office for rechecking her luggage for Milwaukee, and found a couple that she could follow to Terminal One. At the passport control, I joked that she should smile at the official and I gave her a thumbs up when she made it through. As we stood in the long winding line waiting to get our passports checked, I learned that she was from Warsaw, a trained engineer who had emigrated to France with her husband and son. They had gone to America years ago. They were supposed to come back but never did, leaving her alone in France, earning her living with menial jobs. Her name is Anya, and I wish I had exchanged contact information with her because ironically I often feel humanly closer to strangers like her with whom I face such transitions and challenges of survival. If you are not bound by ties of transaction, country, or blood relation, your connection, even if it is tenuous, is nothing more and nothing less than purely human. Perhaps our future depends on our ability to forge and maintain these ties based on human solidarity rather than all the exclusionary boundaries of nationality or kinship.
Looking back at France, I wonder whether human solidarity or national exclusion is more likely to predominate. The French Left is discarding the only supranational identity available to it: the European identity. As Emmanuel Todd put it: “If a man thinks that he is a woman, I have to take it seriously in my capacity as an anthropologist, because women exist; but if a man thinks that he is a European, I do not, because no such category exists.” The French Left has retained nothing of its old internationalism beyond hollow phrases, while the Right has appropriated French universalism as the property of a French nation, weaponizing secularism, laïcité, against the immigrant population. The Giftzwerg or poison dwarf Zemmour probably cannot win but he can effect a Zemmourized Macron government.
I tell my young friends that as a student I saw such developments as cataclysmic, apocalyptic, when in fact they were and are wave patterns caused by deeper, stronger forces below the surface yet in plain sight. We can’t resist these waves by building sandcastles in the shape of past parties and revolutions. We would have to build with institutions, with rocks that redirect those currents in the long run. This is why institutional innovations such as l’Ecole des Actes interest me now. We can’t encourage solidarity with idle dreams. Work, learning, and collectively facing the challenges of modern life are more likely to save us.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 