March 11, 2003

Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote that, "Hell is other people." When viewed through his lens of mauvaise foi--bad faith--I gain some small insight into issues of my past, which I wrote about yesterday. I feared the all-seeing eyes of other people, and their images of me held in memory became a kind of voodoo-doll collection that, for some time, held a certain power over me. Their recollection and judgement, even if never shared with me or anyone else, was a source of anxiety. This condemnation by "the other" is part of Sartre's hell.

One way in which we escape that hell is through the mechanisms of bad faith. Any time you hear someone explain away past a transgression by saying, "I was a different person then," you are hearing bad faith. These are lies we tell ourselves, to lessen our neurotic anxiety by pretending that we are not utterly, dreadfully free and thus totally responsible for ourselves and our actions. I was never a "different person." I am the same person now as I was then, with the addition of experience, the accumulation of memory, and a smattering of new knowledge. So, when I forgive my past self for certain behaviors, and tell myself that they don't "have much to do with who you are now," I must be careful that this absolution does not constitute a lifting of responsibility. By that I mean, the fact that I know better today doesn't mean that I wasn't a fool then, and doesn't make me into something more than a fool now.

It is this sort of freedom and responsibility that is denied by the elite worshippers of language, and all those who would have us believe that the only knowledge we can claim to grasp is that which is allowed us by the power-classes. Such theoreticians, of course, exist outside of this power structure: only they can see clearly enough to tell us the truth. Their truth is truth, not some manufactured terminology designed to maintain their hold on power, and intended to keep us ignorant enough to allow them to do so.

This theoretical structure has no place for the individual mind. It thinks in terms of collectives, groups, and social structures...unwieldy, blocky constructs that lurch about the human environment like bulls with rings through their noses, led about by the will of the empowered.

It is more than a little ironic that Sartre was a Frenchman. Over the weekend, I kept hearing a "Voices In The News" snippet on NPR's Weekend Edition. The audio montage was bookended by President George Bush and French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin. The President's Voice said:

If the Iraqi regime were disarming, we would know it, because we would see it. Iraq's weapons would be presented to inspectors, and the world would witness their destruction. Instead, with the world demanding disarmament, and more than 200,000 troops positioned near his country, Saddam Hussein's response is to produce a few weapons for show, while he hides the rest and builds even more.

The Voice of the French Foreign Minister's translator said:

There may be some who believe that these problems can be resolved by force, thereby creating a new order. But this is not what France believes. On the contrary, we believe that the use of force can arouse resentment and hatred, fuel a clash of identities, and of cultures, something that our generation has a prime responsibility to avoid.

Driving in the car early Sunday morning, these words roused me from my too-sleepy-to-be-driving torpor. I thought about what was wrapped up in that phlegm-like bolus of theoretical spew, uttered by a man supposedly serious about his place on the world stage, a man who is supposed to represent the sovereign nation of France.

To begin with, "resentment and hatred" are to be avoided at all costs. This is a perfect expression of fear of the Sartrean hell: we simply cannot have other people thinking ill of us. It is our responsibility to ensure that no one holds a malformed voodoo-doll simulacrum of us in their minds, the mere thought of which makes us get the Big Big Angst. This is followed up, in the same sentence, by the elevation of academic theoretical abstraction to the level of national foreign policy: a clash of "identities" is to be avoided at all costs. Not "bloodshed," or "violence," or even "killing little children with expensive precision-guided munitions." No, what we must avoid at all costs is causing a culture to question the ephemeral beliefs which make it a culture. For--all cultures being equal, of course--it is most forbidden to disturb the precious growth of such a thing...as though, in this day and age, cultures bloom in splendid isolation, each safe within the bounds of its own sociological petri dish.

Mr. de Villepin's language is that of a college sophomore seeking a pat on the head from his professor. It is not the language of someone who is seriously engaged with the problems of the real world, or concerned with the conditions of individual lives. What is of supreme importance to him is not the human being, but the idea; not the actual resolution of real problems, but the maintenance of theoretical structures; not the freedom of the individual, but the preservation of an abstract collective identity. I'm fairly certain that Mr. de Villepin is not especially concerned with the consequences to American identity and culture should the battle begin, and so I can safely assume that it is the Islamic culture--which has been doing so well lately--that requires such delicate care.

Set against the background of the theoretician/politician class that is ever-more-firmly enthroned in Brussels, such academic rhetoric is entirely unsurprising. But what underlies it are the same values that underlie true totalitarianism and true oppression: ideology over individuality, theory over fact, and anxiety-soothing mauvaise foi over the dread responsibility of freedom.