[lit-ideas] Chantal Delsol on the European condition
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 16:23:13 -0800
On page 32 of Menace in Europe, why the Continent?s Crisis is America?s Too,
Claire Berlinski writes, ?? The fall of ideologies now casts a deadly shadow
over every ideal,? writes French philosopher Chantal Delsol, a professor at
the University of Marne-La-Vallee and a shrewd observer of modern Europe.
Utopian ideologies, she remarks, were in their capacity to awe and inspire
like cathedrals, and Europe has watched the collapse of one cathedral after
another. Delsol likens experiments in utopianism, particularly in its
communist and fascist expressions, to Icarus?s attempts to soar to the sun,
and remarks that the failure of these experiments has left modern man as she
imagines the fallen Icarus, humbled and paralyzed by self-doubt. (Modern
European man, I should interject: Americans neither conducted these
experiments nor do they live with their consequences.) Modern Europeans
have come, as a consequence, to condemn zeal and faith in all their forms,
theist or atheist, in preference for bureaucracy, weak solutions of moral
relativism, and quiet despair. Delsol is not unsympathetic to this
ideological uncertainty and lack of moral self-confidence: Rigid orthodoxy,
after all, did give rise to both the Inquisition and the Holocaust, she
reflects, or at least were associated with both. Europe, in other words,
has lost its mojo for good reason.
?Lacking any sense of purpose, Delsol observes, and fearful of taking a
stand ? about anything, even the essentials of self-preservation ? Europeans
instead enshroud themselves in technological and physical comfort, leading
mediocre lives, avoiding risk at all cost, and mouthing vapid, unexamined
clichés. She calls these clichés ?the clandestine ideology of our time? ?
clandestine because no overt, passionate adherence to ideology is now
socially permissible. Delsol correctly observes, however that the
banishment of the economy of ideology has encouraged a black market to
flourish in its place, an underground moral code steeped in sentimentality
but untempered by reason and serving no larger, coherent principles.
?The code she describes is a close cousin to what is termed, in America,
political correctness, but whereas political correctness in the United
States is confined for the most part to the universities and the coastal
cities, it is the unspoken foundation of the modern European welfare state ?
a society predicated on an ever-expanding sense of entitlement.
Increasingly, Delsol observes, that to which men feel entitled is described
as a right or, for special emphasis, a human right: ?Anything contemporary
man needs or envies, anything that seems desirable to him without
reflection, becomes the object of a demanded right. Human rights are
invoked as a reason for refusing to show identification, for becoming
indignant against the deportation of delinquent foreigners, for forcing the
state to take illegal aliens under its wing, for justifying squatting by
homeless people, for questioning the active hunt for terrorists.?
?A leading principle of this code is the estimation of ?tolerance? above all
other virtues. The idea of tolerance, originally defined as the absence of
state prohibition against certain ideas and behaviors, has come, she notes,
to be conflated with legitimization ? the general social acceptance of those
ideas and behaviors, to the point of encouraging them with legal and
material aid from the state, ultimately to the detriment of the entire
commonwealth. This in turn gives rise to an ambient culture of moral
quasi-relativism ? ?quasi? because, as Delsol rightly observes, its
adherents unquestionably accept moral absolutes (?one must be tolerant?),
yet tend simply to affirm that they indignantly reject moral absolutism.
Delsol finds this pernicious, of course, and rightly so: One need only to
look at the Netherlands to see exactly where it leads.?
The Delsol book Berlinski references is Icarus Fallen, the Search for
Meaning in an Uncertain World:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/193223604X/qid=1142208818/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs
_b_2_1/102-3043122-3183312?s=books
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/193223604X/qid=1142208818/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bb
s_b_2_1/102-3043122-3183312?s=books&v=glance&n=283155> &v=glance&n=283155
Lawrence
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