In an era of political indecision where it is more about avoiding the worst rather than striving for the best, the question seems justified to me: do we want to live in peace? Have we reached some kind of ceiling in terms of softening manners?
Raymond Aron defined democracy as « the organization of peaceful competition for the exercise of power. »1 To what extent can competition be peaceful? In politics, economics, science, education, or sports, competition underlies human relations,2 defining the rules of the game whose goal is to dominate other participants. Those who do not dominate risk being relegated to mere subsistence instead of social existence, and more specifically today, media existence. This mechanism justifies the discussion of structural domination.
Our relationship with domination has been fundamentally ambivalent since antiquity. Indeed, the domination of gods and heroes has always been perceived positively. The myths of justice-seekers, whether solitary or not, continue to populate fiction and imaginations. The enduring success of comic books and their characters, the Star Wars saga, and many action films reflect this mindset.
Another form of domination is one of the main sources of collective joy today: that of athletes, relevant during this summer period with a succession of international events, particularly the Paris Olympics this year. We live in a culture of performance, achievement, and records. These are meticulously documented, defining the ideal to be reached, which consists of breaking them. The athlete who excels in their discipline is often awarded a media title such as king/queen, innocently bringing us back, in a way distinct from chivalric romance, to the times of tyrannies we thought abolished. Competition, the backdrop of most human interactions, maintains and extends ancient times.
We lament seeing political authoritarianism flourish around the world, but imaginations continue to highlight eras when kings and emperors concentrated power: a plethora of series and films transport their audiences to a world with ancient or medieval outlines. Furthermore, many fictions strive to depict deviants or even criminals as realistically as possible. A film like Scarface has thus become a model for aspiring traffickers.
Despite the omnipresence of oppositions, isn’t there a desire for social peace? Don’t left-wing parties embody this in some way? When it comes to the two major historical trends of socialism and Marxism, one might doubt it: leftist movements, by replacing a deregulated market with more equality and wage security, have substituted one ideal for another. Moreover, the left, as much as the right, aims for economic development. Their main divergence lies in the mode of wealth creation and its distribution.
An implicit political prejudice drives policies from all sides: it is possible to conceive of the right social organization and define it before its implementation. A law aims to delineate a framework for regulating human relations. Let’s admit that piling up laws does not create sustainable solutions for peaceful coexistence. While laws and democracy have undeniably contributed to reducing conflicts and social tensions, they seem to have reached their limits.
This type of observation is not new. Plato and Aristotle formulated it in their time, responding idealistically by decreeing that there are ideas or a nature indicating how one should behave. We haven’t changed much in this regard for 2500 years. Behind contemporary political pragmatism and realism lie the convictions that motivate action. These convictions are based on ideals that lead to oppositions. For as well-intentioned as the authors of a constitution or a law may be, their conception of good differs from that of opposing parties and future generations, if only due to changes driven by technological innovations.
These political observations extend to other social domains. The problem, it seems to me, is not so much the absence of a desire for pacification as its systematic association with idealizations that stimulate oppositions. Humanity has been trapped in this kind of vicious circle since time immemorial.
To break a minimum out of it, wouldn’t it be appropriate to accept a certain degree of moral relativism? For it is precisely by fighting it that we fuel conflicts, by rigidly opposing diversity and otherness. Doesn’t accepting the differences between human beings imply acknowledging the relativity of our ethical-political conceptions?
Becoming aware of the subjectivity of values does not guarantee the weakening of oppositions: one can remain strongly attached to certain convictions while being fully aware of their relativity. It took me time to understand and even more to integrate this. In writing La question de la liberté and inserting the distinction between science and ethics,3 I had the underlying desire to contribute to a form of appeasement. In doing so, I engaged with societal issues and aspired for people to evolve towards more cooperation, at least peaceful coexistence. I linked my mindset to that of society, which proved deleterious in terms of anxiety and stress given the divergence between my conceptions and social reality.
Over the past few years, I have come to, on the one hand, accept the lack of resonance of my reflections and, on the other hand, estimate that we have reached a ceiling in terms of softening manners. The antagonistic structure of Western societies hinders the easing of human relations, while the diversification of lifestyles fuels conflict. That is why I believe that, under these conditions, the only solution to achieve a certain tranquillity, when one aspires to more social peace and does not compromise on one’s freedom of thought, is to distance oneself from the world and even to isolate oneself to some extent. We will discuss the notion of distance, neither natural nor cultural, mainly in its psychological aspects, in future publications.
Notes
1.↑ Raymond Aron, Introduction à la philosophie politique, Éditions de Fallois, 1997, p. 36.
2.↑ Cf. On the omnipresence of oppositions in human interactions.
3.↑ https://damiengimenez.fr/distinguer-lethique-de-la-science/ (not translated)