“Everything we hear is an opinion,
and not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, and not the truth.”
(Marcus Aurelius)
I’ve waited until the anger of the ones that became
“Charlie” boiled down, in the sight of the shock produced by the absurd death
of the comic journalists and the contagious public reaction, which was a
mimetic reflex. It’s been a few weeks since the political ritual took place in
Paris, where marching leaders were constantly looking at upper-floor windows
from where someone could be shooting. In the meantime, timidly, the new current
of the skeptics came to life “Je ne suis pas Charlie”, the society was no
longer in a trance and the debate was about to start. Although the debate
wasn’t taken too far, we could still come to understand among propagandistic
statements that for Europe, a continent that failed as an identity, as a cultural,
constitutional project and even as a market, the event grounded on unity in
front a common enemy, which is terrorism, gave a breathing time, a mouthful of
oxygen. But the problem still remains and refers to lucidity and rationality
and is related to the construction of the collective sense and is to take into
consideration a common project.
It was difficult to launch a realistic debate on the
limits of liberty or group security because the assassination of some
journalists in the city of lights is a fact that blocks with cruelty and
relevance any means of searching for the truth. For sure, in the face of death
and of the absurd and barbaric killing of the journalists, we cannot find
justifications. We must reflect, although we cannot justify or explain the
extreme violence gesture. We cannot find excuses for the killers, for anything
that is absurd cannot be explained or substantiated, still, reflection is
necessary because the pain, experienced individually or collectively, must be
followed by lucid reflection or by corrections regarding the existent normative
and institutional structure because we very well know that social order doesn’t
occur spontaneously.
The need to
invent the enemy
“It’s important to have an enemy not only to be able
to define our identity, but also to find an obstacle that can help us evaluate
our system of values and display the value by facing the enemy. That is why,
when the enemy doesn’t exist, one has to invent it”, states Umberto Eco in Inventing the Enemy (Polirom, 2013, p.
10). Knowing the enemy is the essential element of identity and a cohesion
principle. Pascal Bruckner, in Democratic
Melancholia. How to live without enemies?, observed that democracies are
dependent upon enemies, “we deeply mourn the disappearance of a sole enemy which was replaced
by a multitude of threats, because the scarier they become, the harder it is to
identify them” [p. 5], an enemy that disappeared together with the fall of the
Berlin Wall, suggests the French philosopher quoting Grigori Arbatov, the Director of the Institute of USA and
Canada of the Russian Academy of Sciences
(ISKRAN) that supposedly told some American journalists: “We
are about to harm you, that is to deprive you of an enemy” (quote from Andre
Fontaine in Le Monde, May 27 1988).
The demonstration is edifying and the West succeeded in constantly following
this path, whether unconsciously or pragmatically, in politics, intellectual
culture or in the public space. “An enemy, notes Pascal Bruckner, is a
provision for the future, the way a group ensures its cohesion and establishes
its opponent; and the best way to reform itself, is by continuously correcting
the angular image offered by others. In the end it is the lasting certitude, by
crossing the hostility of the others which, paradoxically, enriches our
well-being, by contesting us. When not certain of the love ensured by friends,
one can rest quietly on the hate of the enemies” (p. 44).
Whether it was anti-Semitism, or the Maghrebian
immigrants, or Muslims or the gypsy, they all turned out to be interesting
benchmarks for projecting the collective identity in relation with the internal
or external enemy that pollutes the civilization and its values. The mass media
participates to this spectacle in which the enemy is reinvented, strengthening
the stereotypes and giving facile explanations to complex and profound social
phenomena: unemployment, inequalities, economic crisis, violence in society and
the general social competition.
Are we not
capable to live without enemies?
Europe is the owner of a more tolerant form of
narcissism and exceptionalism, especially France during the past few years, and
consequently delivers a performance on intolerance which becomes more
aggressive by the day. Several French anthropologists and sociologists have
spoken lately about the way France shifted from Arabophobia, which characterized
the National Front to Islamophobia, as a cultural and intellectual current.
Emanuel Todd explained how Islamophobia seized the upper classes and was hard
to control and it resulted in cultural turbulence, an effect of a religious
void, of the difficulty to live without God. The opinion polls show an increase
regarding the adversity towards Islam in France. An IFOP poll from 2012, run by
Le Figaro, shows that 43% of the French believe that the Isalm is a threat to
France, 63% oppose the construction of mosques, 67% believe the Muslims don’t
want to be integrated into the French society. A 2013 Harris Interactive poll
shares the information according to which 73% of the French have a bad opinion
about Muslims.
Islamophobia is still a western pathology, criminogenic
or not, but one of the pathologies of the public spirit. The beheadings and the
cruelties of the jihadists or of the IRI create a wonderful box of resonance
for such forms of emotionality, together with indignation, rejection,
abomination, which are all politically capitalized.
The clash of civilizations?
No, it is rather the clash of liberties
Many western specialists in Islam tell us to see the
killing of the Charlie Hebdo journalists as a horrible murder, respectively not
as a sign of the clash between civilizations, but rather as a social fact, as
stated by Durkheim. It has become a political event not because of the
proportion of the murder, but because it transforms an intellectual debate into
a quasi-existential debate: can we live with Muslims in Europe or in the world.
To speak about the clash between civilizations is exaggerated from several
standpoints. First, beyond the jihadist terrorism, the massacre in France is an
“internal” French business, the authors being French citizens.
Security versus
Liberty
There have been discussions regarding the opposition
between security and liberty or on the need to give up freedom to some extent in
order to gain more security. The theme has been present for a while and was
considered an either/or type of dilemma. Nothing can be more wrong or false. I
believe that this dilemma is the result of the schematic approach regarding the
two terms. First, liberty should not be confused with absolute freedom of
expression or with absolute liberty of action, or the result of free will,
which seeks the limits or the extremes. At the same time, security does not
make reference solely to cutting the degree of liberty, security means the
feeling of safety and the plenary assertion conditions in the society and the
possibility to foresee the future development and trust in reciprocity or the
respect for collectively shared values. The game between liberty and security
is not a game with a null sum. As stated by Spinoza, the security is the main
function of any society and any state. Spinoza also said that the function of
the state is to free the individual from terror, fear, so that he can exert his
natural right to exist and act, the purpose of the state being freedom. We can
conclude: liberty is a desideratum, a purpose, and security is a means of
achieving it.
A choice
between liberty and security?
YouGov ran an internet survey between the 8th
and the 9th of January 2015, showing that the French believe that
freedom of expression must be defended regardless of the price (89%), but, at
the same time, 51% declared that they agreed with applying restrictions to
individual liberties (and 36% were against). In another survey, 89% of the
French accepted the restriction of liberty on internet for the jihadists (in a
context in which it is hard to differentiate among ideas of the Muslims in
general, and over 60% of the French recognized that they don’t know much about
this religion).
Benjamin Franklin stated in a well-known phrase that
“people that agree to sacrifice a bit of their freedom for a bit of security
don’t deserve any of the two and will end up losing both”. The interpretation
is still complicated, beyond its aphoristic force.
Today we confuse freedom with freedom of expression
and security with control measures of the citizen. Do not follow the lead of
the politicians. This is not the case of a civilization being attacked by
another civilization. We address here another matter, the gap of contemporary
civilization: the enclavisation of the Western Muslim culture and the support offered
to authoritarian leaders by the West, because the West is been wanting to use
the resources offered by the Arab world during the past decades. Are we to
sacrifice the state in order to increase individual freedom?
The different types of events and the cinematic way in
which they are presented lead to exaggerations by reducing things to social
apocalyptical representations of great expressivity. The Orwellian image of Big
Brother is already a strong cultural stereotype, a representation that
exaggerates the control of the individual and the manipulation of conscience.
Still, it is a rather beautiful Science Fiction story that was ideologically
and politically employed during the cold war, and, in general, in the fight
with communism. But let’s see the other extreme, another dystopia, less
capitalized by propaganda and ideology: the Mad
Max film by George Miller. In Miller’s movie there is a world of
violence and lack of order, in which any trace of humanity disappears. In the
dystopian society placed in desert framework rules no longer function, the
nations rebel, and the gangs of delinquents make the rules. By representing
violence, the author suggests the destruction of civilization. The gangs of
bikers induce a feeling of violence which sets the rhythm of life, sets the pulse,
and cyclically returns. The urban-rural distinction is a kind of distinction
between peace and violence, but slowly, the rural is invaded by violence and
the very utopia of the withdrawal from the world, of the search for a secluded
place, without violence, disappears. Max, the main character, experiences a
change from heroism to insanity, ending in murder, which reveals the change of
the human being and the complete destruction of all the moral reflexes or of
the idea of order, in general.
Must we choose between these two apocalyptical
scripts, between Big Brother and Mad Max? I’m sure that some might rush with an
answer, choosing one of these two options. But we can overcome this dilemma,
its solution being the acceptance that there is a need for a rational way of
thinking in the future, because fear is the worst adviser, and emotion is a
poison that clouds our mind and sends us on false paths. After all, the
absolute security is unimaginable as well as freedom without limits, and the
price of excess needs to be paid.
The solution: a
reconstruction of the community
Zygmunt Bauman, in his work Community. Seeking
Safety in an Insecure World (Antet, 2001), is in search of a solution to the
mentioned dilemma and writes “…security without freedom means slavery, and
freedom without security means being lost and abandoned. These circumstances
give philosophers headaches that have no treatment. Moreover, they dwell with a
conflict generator, because the security sacrificed in the name of freedom
tends to become the security of others, and freedom sacrificed in the name of
security tends to become the freedom of others” (p. 16). Even if the
sociologist doesn’t believe that we can have security and freedom at the same
time, the cited work outlines a solution: together try to come up with an
inventory of future risks and reconstruct communities according to new
demographic compositions or new frameworks and challenges.
People that live today in urban agglomerations are
faced with risks that cannot be managed because nobody wants to help them
understand these risks. The ethnic communities, especially the ones that
migrated to other mother societies, as well as several underprivileged or poor
categories, live in an atomized way with a feeling of rejection. During the
electoral campaigns they also experience the intolerance of others. This is how
the silent war starts and from time to time it ignites violence. There is a
lack of solidarity and common control of the worries, as well as of the
possibility to gain a collective structure in front of threats and anguish.
Community translates into collective responsibility, support for the ones that
are in difficulty, finding a place for everyone in the collective structure. We
shouldn’t have to chose between Big Brother and the insane world of the
individuals and of the decomposed society portrayed in Mad Max, but we owe our
world the effort to reason, a new project of the society in a world in crisis,
in which everybody is trying to avoid saying the one thing that is more and
more obvious: the inequalities, the discrimination and the social polarization
are the true risks of a prospective civilization.
We cannot defend ourselves with walls, the disease is
within our society, although we invent enemies and we entertain the phobia of a
foreign invasion. Security becomes a means serving the achievement of freedom,
but it is also a project more complicated than the defense in front of the
absurdity of terrorist violence, it is a project that needs to restore the
tissue of collective solidarity for the final purpose which is gaining freedom
for as many people as possible. For now, freedom is just the attribute of the
very few, and the war that started is not a war of the civilizations, but a
crisis generated by the collapse of the communities and of the need to co-opt
everyone in the project that envisions building new solidarities.
