France:De Gaulle's Tattered Legacy(rotting core of EU)

Washington Post ^ | 03/31/05 | Jim Hoagland

[TigerLikesRooster]

De Gaulle's Tattered Legacy

By Jim Hoagland

Thursday, March 31, 2005; Page A19

Charles de Gaulle bequeathed the French two big ideas and the atomic bomb to see them through the sad national duty of surviving without him. The bomb is still there and probably always will be. The ideas may not be as resilient. They face severe challenge this spring.

One idea was to form a superbly educated, merit-based political elite to revitalize the defeated and demoralized nation that emerged from World War II. The cream of the intellectual crop would be chosen by rigorous examinations, educated in prestigious national schools and assigned important government jobs based on grades.

This meritocracy produced two working generations of talented, dedicated administrators who gradually moved to the top of France's business and political establishments. How you respond to "the French" depends in some measure on how you react to dealing with the smartest kid in the class, who cannot resist occasionally reminding you of that fact. You may not find that as invigorating as I (usually) do.

But the French elite -- and the system that produced it -- is on trial this spring in a Paris courtroom, where 47 political party activists and business executives stand accused of falsifying government contracts to provide France's main parties with secret campaign funds.

If these people did participate in a corrupt, long-standing conspiracy to parcel out hidden business payoffs to France's Gaullists, socialists, communists and others, the probability that the country's most important political leaders were not involved approaches zero. France's political class operates as the country's central nervous system.

[TigerLikesRooster]

EU is in danger because its core, French elite, is rotting. EU's biggest enemy turned out to be from within. Who knew?

[gunnedah]

The US is in the same boat!Both political parties in America do the same and the Judicial System is ruling as the elite.

[ClearCase_guy]

How you respond to "the French" depends in some measure on how you react to dealing with the smartest kid in the class, who cannot resist occasionally reminding you of that fact.

The smartest kid in the class doesn't seem to have amounted to much. Economy? Terrorism? Unemployment? Has the smartest kid got any of the right answers?

[epluribus_2]

It's kind of like when Ivy leaders are wrong (or some Big-10'ers). For them it is like the whole world suddenly does not make sense. They have been "trained" to be right all the time and to lead those who are not "trained" (or who are not trained by an expensive enough institution).

And still, inexplicably, great minds, thoughts, and discoveries come out of unwashed schools like Wayne State U., Austin, Brigham Young, etc.

[epluribus_2]

Ivy leaders == Ivy Leaguers

[Cicero]

The best leaders aren't always the smartest kids in the class. And intellect without moral foundations is usually destructive.

Consider who the "intellectuals" were in postwar France. Sartre, Camus, Gide, Derrida, Foucauld. An elite gange of Communists and nihilists.

[TigerLikesRooster]

Re #6

That is true. Intellect without moral(spiritual) direction is like a runaway high-speed train, when it comes to presiding over human affairs.

[CompSciGuy]

Looks like its time for some French introspection. That the EU will fail is a foregone conclusion (it is just a matter of time).

Cheers,

CSG

[An Old Marine]

dealing with the smartest kid in the class

The problem is that they aren't the smartest kids in the class. Of course they think they are and have told so many people that for so long that its accepted as true.

Where the French excel is in getting other people (read America) to do their heavy lifting for them for three generations. We lent them the money to rebuild France (which they have never paid back), protected them from the Soviets, and provided them with a stable world in which to ply their anti-Americanism.

This was all well and good when the French were able to play their wild card role in the delicate balance of Cold War relationships between America and the Soviets. With the fall of communism they felt safe to provide outright support to America's enemies. However France failed to realize the glaring fact that their principle bargaining chip, the Cold War balance, had now made them irrelevant. Bush had the clarity to realize that French posturing was now just noise from a militarily insignificant nation with a permanently stagnating economy that had decided to make itself America's "soft" enemy.

This is hardly an indication of someone who is the "smartest kid in the class".

[Eric in the Ozarks]

We suffered through 4 years of "smartest kid in the class", 1976-1980. He couldn't find his a** with both hands.

[TigerLikesRooster]

Re #9

LOL. France is a "soft power" who can be only a "soft enemy."

[An Old Marine]

He couldn't find his a** with both hands

And a map... American Heritage ranks Carter as one of the worst presidents in American history. Each reassesment seems to more him a bit higher in that dubious company. And they have a point. He was a disaster for the military, for foreign relations, and for the economy.

No wonder he's the darling of Leftists. Failure seems to be their goal.

[franksolich]

You know, what always got me about Jean-Paul Satre, he of the "Stockholm War Crimes Tribunal" during the Vietnam War, was that he was an active collaborator with the Germans 1940-1944, and actually prospered under them.....but once the war was over, he instantly, spontaneously, re-gained his "credentials" as a leftist "philosopher," and was never challenged on his previous behavior.

[robowombat]

I would exclude Camus from your intellectual rogues gallery. He may have been a leftist of sorts and an atheist but he never fell for the notion that politics was religion and its practitioners some sort of demigods. What he named absurdity the disconnect between the desire to live a principled life in the face of an indifferent universe and a corrupt system is strongly connected to classical themes of tragic heroism embodied by such figures as Cato. The following article does a better job than I can of capturing Camus philosophy of skeptical humanistic heroism. No wonder that wretch Satre came to hate him.

Philosopher of the Month: Albert Camus

Jonathan Walmsley

Albert Camus was born into Algerian poverty, son of an illiterate mother and father who would shortly die in the First World War. A promising boy, fond of sun, sea, writing, girls and football, his studies toward a bright academic future were cut short by tuberculosis. Incurable, Camus knew that his illness would likely kill him. The young man, who loved everything of life, now faced an arbitrary annihilation.

How, then, to live? How to reconcile the conflict of human aspiration with an indifferent world? This juxtaposition Camus labelled the “absurd” – the mismatch of what we want from the world (order, reason, answers) and what it can provide us (nothing). Aware of the human tendency to project desires onto the universe through means of ‘transcendent' religious or political myth, Camus refused to dissolve the disjunction between man and world. We should not pretend the world has intelligible meaning, nor should we kill ourselves - we must unflinchingly sustain consciousness of the absurd with no respite. Camus' essay, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), presented four exemplars – seducer, actor, conqueror, artist - who act to extract all they can from life. Free from a belief in ‘another life', they pursue their own ends relentlessly and without distraction.

So too Mersault, the protagonist of Camus' narrative L'Etranger (1942). Conscious at all times of his own existence and the joy that he derives from it, Mersault finds himself confronting and then killing an Arab through force of circumstance. He refuses to pretend he was responsible, or feel remorse, and society condemns him to death. When a chaplain comes to visit him the night before his execution, Mersault attacks the pretence of life after death and vigorously asserts the happiness he has experienced in this life alone.

The Second World War trapped Camus in Paris , where he became editor of the resistance newspaper Combat . Nazism's nihilism, not ruled out by mere consciousness of the absurdity of life, demanded principled exclusion. We must live without hope, but not without value – humanity itself, Camus held, is the end and the measure of life. A fictional chronicle of the plague's visitation on Oran , and a parable of the occupation, La Peste showed that the labour to maintain life and alleviate suffering sufficed as an end in itself. The town's inhabitants each sought their own way of adjusting to the chance slaughter of infection, but it was the resolution of the Plague fighters, who risked their own lives struggling against the disease, that illustrated Camus' view of the dignity and worth of humanity itself.

Camus codified the political aspect of his humanism in L'Homme Révolté (1951). Whilst there is no transcendence and “everything is permitted”, suicide was inconsistent with the absurd. Human life has value and murder, of any sort, is therefore anathema. Thus, even in rebellion against injustice, revolt must never lead to political totality – murder cannot be justified by future utopias. As a reasoned call for political moderation, and a detailed obliteration of totalitarian Stalinism, Camus' work was savaged by his contemporaries, Jean-Paul Sartre foremost amongst the critics. The two men, whilst once associates, could not now have been further apart. Where Camus was working class, humanist, moderate, studied, charming and attractive, Sartre was self-hating bourgeoisie, egotistical, extremist, polemical, vituperative and quite ugly. The public dispute about L'Homme Révolté separated the two men irretrievably.

Camus' political and personal sensibilities were tested to the limit by the Algerian independence movement. As a young journalist, Camus had called attention to the economic and political plight of the Algerian Arabs and was sympathetic to their desire for autonomy. However, he felt himself to be Algerian and sought a political accommodation which did not require the forcible expulsion of the colonists. When both French and Arab resorted to extra-military tactics in what was now a war of independence, Camus called for a truce against civilians from both sides. It was in this context that he inadvertently summarised his ethical position. At a rally, he was asked to choose between his mother, still living in Algiers , and justice. He chose his mother. Human feeling was more important that any abstract principle.

Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He died in a car crash 3 years later, his final incomplete novel, The First Man , thrown intact from the wreck. Though not an academic ‘philosopher', Camus has enduring resonance in our post-Christian world – his writings and actions provide the guide to living a life without hope.

[Cicero]

Certainly you can make an argument in favor of Camus. But I must say, after reading some of his work (especially The Plague) and considering some of the second-hand influence he has had on others, that the chief result of his work is to persuade people that life is complex and unknowable and that there is no solid, objective foundation on which to make moral decisions. I think that's a major part of the problem we have today.

There are Catholic theologians who think that existentialism can be sanctified and adapted to Catholic teachings. They have even argued that PJP II is a Catholic existentialist (or sometimes personalist). I have read a number of essays along these lines and frankly find them more confusing than helpful.