post-dogma

 

Commentaire, the French magazine (a thick journal, to use the Russian phrase), was founded on the idea that communism in France, and more generally Marxism, required gravediggers. The last phrase of the Cold War was, intellectually, a mop up operation, destroying the utopias of the postwar years in the “West” – as the loose coalition of nation states, from Germany to Australia, were called by the Cold Warriors. The name and concept was wrested out of a conservative historiography that had left its sad mark in Germany. The “West” of course called for an “East” – and in due time a South and a North.

I’ve been reading its back pages, and came upon Jacques Revel’s introduction to a rather obscure French philosophe of the early 19^th century, Theodor Jouffroy (1796-1842), whose essay, How Dogmas Finish, had a little cult following of rather disparate figures since it was published in The Globe on May 24, 1825:  Sainte-Breuve, Louis Aragon, and a communist clique that included Andre Thirion.  Jouffroy’s essay is an attempt, after the restauration, to sort out the good and the bad from the French revolution and, in general, the modernisation of the 18^th century. It is a project that attracted the great Liberals of the 19^th century, with Jouffroy’s essay striking notes that one hears, as well, in John Stuart Mill’s much more famous essay on Coleridge. For Revel, of course, the “dogma” in Jouffroy’s title – an obvious reference to the Church – was applicable to communism in the 20^th century. As Communism, according to the Cold War liberals, was the heir of the negative side of the French revolution, one wanted a history to show how it went so wildly bad – how it became the God that failed. The mopping up operation in the 1980s, when the failure of communism, embodied in the Soviet Union, was pretty much a given on all sides, required some larger historiographic framework. Of course, the framework at hand, totalitarianism versus authoritarianism (the latter justifying putting Pinochet’s Chile, the junta’s Argentina, the death squads of El Salvador and the dictatorship in South Korea and Taiwan in the “Free world” camp), was being given a good workout by the Americans. Yet it did not accord enough energy to classical liberalism.

Theodore Jouffroy is recognizably a contemporary of Stendhal – his French has that malleable structure, like, famously, Napoleon’s letters to the troops. The thesis Jouffroy pursues is about the “post-truth” era of a systematic belief system begins the process of the system’s loss of power – its hold on the masses. This elevates the intellectual to a high place, one in which the discovery of truth, for instance, about the facts of the Christian religion, leads from desire for truth itself to a strategic power position in a society whose rulers want those facts obscured.

“… if the beliefs by which power lives and reigns are destroyed, power will fall with them, and with power those who held it; the power will pass to new doctrines; it will be exercised by their partisans; in a word, the revolution of ideas will bring in its train a complete revolution in interests; everything that is will find itself threatened by everything that will be.”

Jouffroy accords a strong place, in his schema, to ridicule and mockery. Here I think his essay still has a certain pertinence. In the era of media penetration of all spheres of private life, mockery and ridicule have a political potency that has not been properly theorized. John Stuart Mill was too English to go here. In French culture, however, ridicule has a strong place in the mix of reasons to hold a belief. To welcome ridicule is the move of either a saint or a fool. Ridicule arisesas a consequence of the subtle detachment of passion from belief. To belief passionately becomes ridiculous. This is the trap set by the philosophe for the devout. It is a dangerous trap, however, since it can catch the philosophe as well – after all, why be so passionate about the truth as to set about discovering it? “Thus the people despair of the truth. They only see tricksters around them. They become defiant towards all, and think that in this world the unique business is to be as little miserable as possible; and that it is crazy to lend an ear to the beautiful discourse and big words of the truth, of justice, of human dignity; that religion and morality are only means to catch them and to make them serve projects that hardly touch them. They become skeptical about everything, save their own interest; and passing from indifference for every dogma and for every party, that value as best only that which costs them least.”

The social costs of enlightenment – a theme that we are riding down in our own era of dying dogmas.

Jouffroy's essay was translated in the 1840s by George Ripley. His Ethics was translated by Emerson's friend, William Channing. I'm sure that Emerson comments in his Journals about Jouffroy somewhere.