The Art of Avoiding the Obvious

Qui est Charlie? Sociologie d’une crise religieuse
by Emmanuel Todd
Éditions de Seuil, 2015, 252 pages, €18

On hearing of the massacre of eleven journalists at Charlie Hebdo, I thought of Karl Kraus’s magnificently laconic words: “When it comes to Hitler, I can’t think of anything to say.”

Kraus, who wrote thousands of pages and was as articulate as any man who ever lived, thus expressed a disgust that lay too deep for words, that was quite literally fathomless. To write or say something about Hitler was to accord him more dignity than he and his so-called ideas merited. As Kraus’s great admirer Wittgenstein might have put it, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

But silence is not of this world, at least not for long; and we live in a time when the unspoken has no meaning for most people. The demonstrations in France that followed the massacre filled me with unease, though I find it difficult to put my finger on exactly what was wrong with them. I think I must have been sensitised to such demonstrations by the mass outpouring of ersatz feeling that followed the death of Princess Diana, also in Paris: though of course her death in a banal drunken accident was of trivial significance by comparison with those of the journalists. Nevertheless, the responses to the two events had something in common: their emotional kitsch. The slogan Je suis Charlie was worthy of Anthony Blair’s coinage, the product of his perfect ear for the meretricious and shallow, the People’s Princess. Slogans such as these exert a kind of pressure on people, coercing them into a binary division of the world. Either you are Charlie or you are a sympathiser with or apologist for the killers; if you do not mourn for the People’s Princess beyond the slight sorrow appropriate for any stranger killed in an accident you are an Enemy of the People, a snob and an elitist (it is astonishing how attitude to the death of a young woman of almost unimaginably privileged upbringing and daily existence, thanks to the alchemical action of public relations, should have been made the touchstone of democratic, or at least of demotic, sentiment).

I am not Charlie; its humour often strikes me as puerile, that of the eternal adolescent determined to shock the grown-ups (in a letter to Le Monde, a reader drew attention to the “eternally adolescent expression” of one of the cartoonists, eternal adolescence being for the writer an admirable quality); I don’t like its political stance, its anarchic patina that covers a hard core of self-righteousness, that of the ageing, privileged radical. Nor would I wish to claim, by asserting my identity with Charlie, any portion of the courage, not often equalled (and certainly not by me) of the people who worked for it. For that reason I found the slogan almost obscene, an attempt at attaining virtue by riskless contagion.

My like or dislike of Charlie Hebdo is hardly the point, however. It would be a false friend of freedom who defended only that of those of whom he wholeheartedly approved or with whom he completely agreed. No one desires the suppression of his own beliefs or attitudes, except perhaps as a paradoxical means of spreading them. It is the freedom of others that is the true test of attachment to freedom as a political ideal, a test that is not often passed.

My reservations about the demonstrations four days after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo would have inclined me in favour of Emmanuel Todd’s best-selling book Qui est Charlie? which takes a sceptical and detached look at the manifestation of French national unity that they supposedly represented. But I soon found myself almost repelled by the book, notwithstanding the undoubtedly religious overtones of the demonstrations to which its subtitle correctly draws attention. (I find it odd that the first thing that irreligious people do after the death in dramatic circumstances of someone famous or dear to them is to light candles, a gesture of unmistakably religious inspiration. In a book by a militant secularist about the demonstrations in the wake of the killings, the author referred to them as “a national communion”, an expression with clear religious overtones. She spoke also of the day when “four million French were united with the victims of the attacks”. Suffice it to say that this is not the language of purely materialist rationalism. Another reader of Le Monde wrote in even more exalted terms: “He [one of the cartoonists] is now in the land of the Immortals, that of the stars that, whatever may happen, will shine eternally above us, on the vault of humanity.” I couldn’t help but think of that ghastly phrase that one hears so often nowadays, “I’m spiritual, but not religious.”)

Every intellectual secretly believes that he has special insight into the hidden motions of the world, but most try to keep their arrogance under control, or at least hidden from too obvious view. Todd does not. His tone is aggressively de haut en bas, as if the four million demonstrators did not really know what they were doing or why they were doing it, but that the real, the true reasons would now be revealed to the world by the sociological historian, demographer and ethnologist Emmanuel Todd:

The demonstrations and their motives lay hid in night.

God said let Todd be, and all was light.

Todd is a brilliant man; his 1976 book La chute finale (The Final Fall) predicted with great precision the collapse of the Soviet Union, at a time when the great majority of commentators believe that the Soviet Union was a permanent fact of geopolitical life. And no one would be wise to ignore the reasons given in his Après l’empire of 2002 for predicting the decline of American hegemony in the world.

But in Qui est Charlie? he seems to me to miss the obvious with that infallible lack of aim from which all intellectuals, no matter how brilliant, sometimes suffer. He starts well enough:

The logo “Je suis Charlie”, in white letters on a black ground, had invaded screens, streets, menus. Children returned from secondary school with the letter C written on their hand. Children of seven or eight were interviewed on leaving primary school for them to comment on the horror of the events and on the importance of the freedom to caricature. The government decreed punishments. A refusal by a secondary pupil to observe the minute’s silence was decreed by the government as an implicit apology for terrorism and a refusal to join the national community. Towards the end of January, we learned that certain adults had come to adopt stupefying repressive behaviour: children of eight or nine years were interviewed by the police. A glimpse of totalitarianism.

It was not so much a case of la pensée unique as of l’émotion unique (as for totalitarianism, Todd knows whereof he speaks: he was for two years in his youth a member of the French Communist Party). But this was an example not so much of totalitarianism in any lasting sense as of what might be called the Dianafication of public life, the elevation of intense but shallow emotion as the manifestation of political virtue, with its faint but discernible whiff of intimidation. Feel likewise or be damned.

Todd starts his disquisition from the observation that not all the French went out on the streets on January 11, 2015: indeed approximately 94 per cent of them did not. Therefore, by enumerating the socio-economic characteristics of those who did demonstrate by comparison with those who did not, Todd hopes, and claims, to uncover the real motivations of the demonstrations. He acts like a demographic psychoanalyst, or a Durkheim of demonstrations rather than of suicide, uncovering the real causes of the descent into the street. He thereby relegates the precipitating cause of the demonstrations throughout France, the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish supermarket, almost to the status of epiphenomenon, as if they might have taken place anyway, spontaneously and without it.

His method of proceeding is scientifically illegitimate, though he makes much of being a dispassionate researcher:

What a researcher can usefully bring to public debate is not a purer morality and an ideology of a better quality, but an objective interpretation of the facts which have escaped the notice of the actors themselves, carried away by emotion, moved by preferences that are often obscure or frankly unconscious.

Alas, the same could be said of him (as of most of us at some time or other), and the method he uses in the book is a sovereign way to disguise prejudice as scientific objectivity. Over and over again he mistakes statistical association for causation, or at least writes as if he does so. When, for example, he finds that three factors—relative economic inequality, the relative persistence of Catholicism, and the relative absence of manual or industrial workers—account for a reasonable percentage of the variance between the rates of attendance at the demonstrations in different parts of France, he assumes he has found some important element of the real, and not the merely epiphenomenal, causation of the demonstrations.

The trouble with this reasoning is that if one examines a sufficient number of factors—for example, differences in diet such as consumption of fish or vegetables—one is statistically bound to find associations, sometimes of great strength. In my work as a doctor in a British prison, I noted (what has been noted at least since the times of Lombroso) that at least 90 per cent of imprisoned criminals with white skins were tattooed, and furthermore that 99 per cent of such criminals smoked. These proportions were grossly in excess of those in the general population, but this did not mean that the real cause of crime was tattooing and tobacco (though when I suggested satirically in print that it was, I received serious, and sometimes outraged, attempts at refutation).

Even if Todd had proceeded properly—that is to say, first formed a clear hypothesis and then tested it by statistical means—he would not have found a causative relationship, unless there were a provable causative link between the variables. When a strong statistical link was first discovered between smoking and lung cancer, there was a plausible biological explanation as to why it should occur, an explanation that was confirmed by experimental evidence. Nothing like this exists in Todd’s book, and much of what he finds (he clearly dislikes the demonstrations and the demonstrators) reads as disguised vituperation.

For example, he thinks that something that he calls zombie Catholicism—a relative, albeit faint, residue of Catholicism—was an important factor in inspiring people to demonstrate after the events in Paris, and such zombie Catholicism is in areas that were comparatively supportive of the Vichy regime. Voilà! Those who demonstrated, including the President of the Republic, were Pétainistes or Vichyites under the skin. They were, perhaps without knowing it, objectively as it were, racists and xenophobes. This is to the Maoism of the Cultural Revolution what skimmed milk is to double cream.

Todd sows his book with notions that are dubious, to put it kindly. We read, for example:

Must we consider it as accidental that the following sequence has been initiated: more militant atheism leads to more Islamophobia which leads in turn to more anti-Semitism [of the Muslims in France]?

To which, obviously, he wants us to answer “No”. In other words, Muslims hate Jews because atheists have become more vociferous. This will come as news to the Jews, and even to the Christians, of the Middle East; it would even have come as news to the Jewish tribes whom Mohammed drove out of Medina or killed. And if Todd’s sequence were in fact correct, it would be unflattering to the powers of logic of French Muslims.

In his reflections on the geopolitical aspects of the affair, Todd speaks of Russia in general and Putin in particular as being in favour of the equality of nations big and small, in contrast to the West’s desire for absolute hegemony. I am sure that, notwithstanding the errors and crimes of Western policy, this will come as news to the inhabitants of Poland, say, or of the Baltic states; nor does Mr Putin seem particularly well qualified for the role of Little Father of the Peoples, to coin a phrase. It seems to me astonishing that Todd can make so much of alleged zombie Catholicism, a ghost of several generations ago, without stopping to notice the possibility of Putin’s zombie Sovietism, in view of the fact that Putin was a career KGB officer, that he avowed that once one enters the KGB one never leaves it, and that he considers that the break-up of the Soviet Union to have been a disaster. So much for Todd’s objectivity.

Todd obviously has a tin ear for literature. For example, he characterises Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, Soumission, as straightforwardly Islamophobe, by which he means that it partakes of an unthinking, uninformed, prejudiced, malicious and xenophobic dislike of Islam. It is true that Houellebecq is on record as saying that of all the religions Islam is the most stupid; but in Soumission, in which he imagines a Muslim president of France in the year 2022, it is clear that Houllebecq is drawing attention to the spiritual and, if you like, metaphysical vacuum of modern French (and by extension, Western) life, a vacuum that renders it vulnerable to those with a conviction, however fatuous it might appear to intellectuals. In other words, Houllebecq is at one with Todd that France (and other Western countries) is undergoing a religious or metaphysical crisis that secularism is not able to solve; but he disagrees with him that Islam could be part of the solution, as Todd suggests at the end of his book. Here I am wholly with Houellebecq. There is no contemporary problem to which Islam is the solution. I hesitate to quote Slavoj Žižek, the superstar Marxist philosopher who hopes to bring about revolution by wearing T-shirts over a torso to which they are not suited, but he is surely right when he says:

How fragile the faith of a Muslim must be to feel threatened by a miserable caricature in a satirical weekly! Fundamentalist Islamic terrorism is not based on the terrorists’ sense of superiority, nor on their desire to protect their cultural identity from global consumerist civilisation. The fundamentalists’ problem is not that we judge them inferior to us but rather that they secretly judge themselves inferior.  

That is why, says Žižek, insincere genuflexions in the direction of their religion will never assuage them.

Worse even that Todd’s (wilful?) misunderstanding of Houellebecq is his treatment of Voltaire, because it is ridiculous in theory and wrong in fact. This is what he says:

Voltaire has often been invoked by Charlie as a doctrinal authority, much as he was, rightly, invoked by the revolutionaries of 1789 and by the supporters of the separation of Church and State [in France] in 1905. But if we turn to his Philosophical Dictionary, we find in it that there is above all excellent mockery of Catholicism, the religion of his ancestors, and of Judaism, the source of that religion. It contains entries on Abraham, David, Jesus, Joseph, Julian, Moses, Paul, Peter and Solomon, but none on Mohammed, Luther or Calvin. Voltaire, by contrast with Charlie, did not attack the religion of others. He blasphemed against his own and that from which it stemmed.

But the idea that Voltaire would respect modern multicultural pieties is intrinsically absurd, and if Todd really thinks that he did so I would suggest that he mount a production of Voltaire’s play Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophète (Fanaticism, or Mohammed the Prophet) and try to take out life insurance at the same time.

In this play, Voltaire presents Mohammed as a power-hungry, sexually predatory, treacherously murderous psychopathic fraud, by comparison with which the criticisms of Charlie (allegedly of Islamism alone) are mild and unfocused indeed. In attacking Mohammed, of course, Voltaire is attacking the very fundament of Islam. The most sympathetic character in the play is Mohammed’s opponent, the Sherif of Mecca, Zopire, who says to Mohammed’s deputy, Omar, among many other unflattering things:

The talents of your master like you I know;

If he were but virtuous might be a hero:

But this hero, Omar, is a traitor most cruel,

And of tyrants the worst, the most criminal.

Corrupter of morals, imposter, terror of humanity, the criticisms go on and on, and since there is nothing in the portrayal of Mohammed himself in the play to contradict them, we must assume that Voltaire endorsed these criticisms, and they are not merely insults but considered opinions. Voltaire puts the following words into Mohammed’s mouth:

The sword of the Koran, in my bloody hands,

Imposes a silence on the rest of the lands …

To which Zopire replies, or comments (inter alia):

You desire, by bringing carnage and fear,

Your thought and no other for ever to bear …

Mohammed says to Omar at the end of the following scene:

Religion to which all is submitted;

Necessity, to which all is permitted.

Daech could not agree more, but I doubt that they would appreciate hearing the sentiment expressed on the stage in this manner.

Worst of all, perhaps, is Mohammed’s confession to Omar:

In the burning sands, on the desert rocks,

I put up, like you, with the heat that shocks;

Only love consoles me; it’s my recompense,

The object of my work, of my life the sense,

The god of Mohammed …

It would be hard to think of words more blasphemous or offensive to believing Muslims than these. Voltaire’s view of Mohammed is precisely that of Salman Rushdie a quarter of a millennium later, albeit expressed with talent, verve and vigour, and without the fig-leaf of magical realism.

Todd denies the reality of the category of French Muslims: “French Muslims do not exist.” This is because they are very various: some are practising, others not; some are educated, others not; some are of Moroccan descent, others of Pakistani or Algerian. But this is absurd. Of course words should not be given more weight or signification than they can bear, but Todd’s semantic Puritanism would make practically all thought impossible. Men do not exist because they are various; Frenchmen do not exist because they are various; bus-drivers or stamp-collectors do not exist because they are various.

The consequences are serious for Todd himself because he is keen on the idea of objectivity in the Stalinist sense: he says that the French Socialist Party is objectively Islamophobe because its policies lead to the unemployment of Muslims (whose identity is presumably purely individual). This means that any economic egalitarian like him, at least in Britain, France, Australia or the United States, is objectively anti-Semitic because Jews, being on average richer than others, would stand to lose more or benefit less than others by egalitarian policies. And Todd is objectively a Holocaust-denier because Jews, not existing as a category, could not be killed as a category. The Holocaust, then, was only a mass-murder carried out at random, and not a genocide; if it is argued that people were killed only according to an ascribed identity, either that ascription was random or it was on the basis of some characteristic. If the characteristic was imaginary, because Jews do not exist, there was no genocide. Objectively, therefore, Todd ought to be tried under French Holocaust-denial laws.

Todd is at pains to deny that the Charlie Hebdo massacre had anything much to do with Islamic ideology. Explaining why he did not react in print at once to the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the demonstrations, he says:

How to suggest in the heat of the moment that François Hollande, in deciding on a mass demonstration, had risked glorifying the Kouachi brothers, of conferring an ideological meaning on an act which ought to have been devalued by a psychiatric interpretation?

In other words, the attack on the church in Charleston, South Carolina, by Dylann Roof, had nothing whatever to do with his racist ideas, but was only a reflection or expression of his psychiatric state (after all, most people with racist ideas would never dream of attacking a church in that way, as proved by the statistics).

This is ridiculous, of course. It is hardly as if the attack on Charlie Hebdo were the first attempt to silence critics of Islam and Islamism. Ibn Warraq, for example, whose work no one could claim is vulgar in the Charlie Hebdo sense, feels constrained to live under an assumed name in semi-hiding. He is far from alone in this. Here it is worth remembering the Rushdie affair. Shortly after the Ayatollah’s infamous fatwah, a British Muslim of Pakistani origin called Shabbir Akhtar, who went to Cambridge and subsequently received a doctorate in religious philosophy at the University of Calgary in Canada, write a book titled Be Careful with Muhammad!, a title clearly intended in itself to convey menace. Akhtar was a young man at the time, and perhaps he would disavow his earlier opinions; but that is not the point. Fanaticism that motivates violence usually is a young man’s game (though not always).

Akhtar, who may be presumed to know a lot more about Islam than either Todd or I, says that Islam has always preferred conquest to conversion. This is not an Islamophobe speaking, but an Islamophile. He does not condemn Khomeini’s fatwah, and even suggests that it was beneficial to Rushdie himself, in so far as it led to strong police protection which prevented him from being killed by an individual Muslim not under the Ayatollah’s orders. He regards Rushdie’s book as a serious incitement to violence, but not the slogan “Kill Rushdie!” shouted by many Muslims in a demonstration in London. Here is how compares he Rushdie with Khomeini:

There is ample evidence in Islamic history for the view that Muslims hold their Prophet in great esteem. At any rate, Rushdie’s literary terrorism has been answered by Khomeini’s threat of physical terrorism.

Is it so very difficult to see a connection between this kind of thought—not that of an illiterate peasant, incidentally, or that of a resentful drug-dealing banlieuesard, but of an alumnus of one of the best universities in the world—in which writing a book and killing the author are morally equivalent, and what the Kouachi brothers did?

How is it that a brilliant man such as Todd cannot see it? Here I turn psychoanalyst myself and say that it is because he does not want to see it. His whole book is an elaborate attempt to avoid (a) the obvious interpretation of the demonstrations, namely that millions of French men and women were appalled enough at the events and the threat they represented to want to do something, and this is so even if it was of not practical effect and their slogan was in bad taste; and (b) the fact that freedom is significantly threatened by a dogmatic religious ideology, and this is so even if no Western country is wholly consistent in its attachment to freedom.

And why does Todd not want to see it? First, because every intellectual wants to see further, or deeper, than others, and to see the obvious is to see only what everyone else sees. Second, though, the events threaten Todd’s mental imperialism, his entire world outlook. For Todd, humanity is divided into those who act and those who, at best, only react. The latter, in his view, are the immense majority, that is to say the downtrodden and oppressed, the 99 per cent, not the 1 per cent who act. The 99 per cent, therefore, are not even sufficiently human to rise to the capacity to commit true evil, because they only react, and Todd forgives them, for they know not what they do (unlike the 1 per cent). They, the 99 per cent, are animate beings who, in the Marxist sense, have yet to become truly human. But when the world is just, according to Todd’s lights, all this will pass, the lion will lie down with the lamb, the Islamist with the secularist, Caroline Fourest with Tariq Ramadan.