July 22, 2007

Sarkozy's new government advises the French to think less

In the NYT, Elaine Sciolino explains "New Leaders Say Pensive French Think Too Much." "Pensive" isn't the right word, since it implies the French have unexpressed thoughts, but it is pretty funny:


In proposing a tax-cut law last week, Finance Minister Christine Lagarde bluntly advised the French people to abandon their “old national habit.”

France is a country that thinks,” she told the National Assembly. “There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves.”


To graduate from college in France, you have to pass a test that consists of writing a three hour essay on a philosophical topic such as "Being or nothingness: which is more ineffable?" I may have a few details wrong about this, but the general point is that the ability to philosophize fluently off the top of one's head at great length is a status marker that shows you are a college graduate and thus important to cafe flirtation. Michael Blowhard explained:


Hard though it is for an American to believe, the French wake up in the morning and look forward to a full day's-worth of Being French. ...French philosophy is, IMHO, best understood as a cross between a hyperrefined entertainment form, and an industry for the supplying of fodder for cafe-and-flirtation chatter. Take French philosophy straight and you're likely to wind up doing something stupid like destroying a department of English, or maybe even ruining your own life. The French would never make such a mistake; after all, nothing -- not even philosophy -- can distract them from the pursuit of Being French. In fact, part of Being French is enjoying philosophical chitchat, the more fashionable the better. We may not have much patience with it, but the French love the spectacle of radical posturing. We tend to engage with the substance of a radical position. For the French, this kind of attitudinizing is enjoyed. It adds spice to life; it's sexy intellectual titillation... French philosophy? Well, it gives the French something sophisticated-seeming to say (and to gab about) as they go about the genuinely serious business of Being French.


The NYT continues:


Citing Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” she said the French should work harder, earn more and be rewarded with lower taxes if they get rich.


Ms. Lagarde knows well the Horatio Alger story of making money through hard work. She looked west to make her fortune, spending much of her career as a lawyer at the firm of Baker & McKenzie, based in the American city identified by its broad shoulders and work ethic: Chicago. She rose to become the first woman to head the firm’s executive committee and was named one of the world’s most powerful women by Forbes magazine.

So now, two years back in France, she is a natural to promote the program of Mr. Sarkozy, whose driving force is doing rather than musing, and whose mantra is “work more to earn more.”

Certainly, the new president himself has cultivated his image as a nonintellectual. “I am not a theoretician,” he told a television interviewer last month. “I am not an ideologue. Oh, I am not an intellectual! I am someone concrete!”

But the disdain for reflection may be going a bit too far. It certainly has set the French intellectual class on edge.

“How absurd to say we should think less!” said Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher, writer, professor and radio show host. “If you have the chance to consecrate your life to thinking, you work all the time, even in your sleep. Thinking requires setbacks, suffering, a lot of sweat.”


Indeed, sweat is pouring from my brow as I try to think up something smarter to say about this than "Indeed."


Bernard-Henri Lévy, the much more splashy philosopher-journalist who wrote a book retracing Tocqueville’s 19th-century travels throughout the United States, is similarly appalled by Ms. Lagarde’s comments.

“This is the sort of thing you can hear in cafe conversations from morons who drink too much,” said Mr. Lévy, who is so well-known in French that he is known simply by his initials B.H.L. “To my knowledge this is the first time in modern French history that a minister dares to utter such phrases. I’m pro-American and pro-market, so I could have voted for Nicolas Sarkozy, but this anti-intellectual tendency is one of the reasons that I did not.”

Mr. Lévy, who ultimately endorsed Mr. Sarkozy’s Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, said that Ms. Lagarde was much too selective in quoting Tocqueville and suggested that she read his complete works. In her leisure time. ...


Here's Garrison Keillor's well-known review of BHL's insufferable American Vertigo.


Indeed, the idea of admitting one’s wealth, once considered déclassé, is becoming more acceptable. A cover story in the popular weekly magazine VSD this month included revelations that just a few years ago would have been unthinkable: the 2006 income of leading French personalities ($18 million for soccer star Zinedine Zidane, $12.1 million for rock star Johnny Hallyday, $334,000 for Prime Minister François Fillon, $109,000 for Mr. Sarkozy).


Johnny Hallyday is 64 years old. How do you make $12 million per year when you are 64 as a rock star, especially one who is utterly unknown in the English-speaking world? I guess maybe the reason is that M. Hallyday is the only French rock star. Perhaps an emphasis on rationalism prevents the French from developing rock stars more often than once every 40 years?

And do you want to guess that Mr. Sarkozy lived a little better than $109,000-worth?

Still, the French devotion to Cartesian rationality has served the French fairly well. The French don't score any higher in IQ than Americans or other Europeans, but they sometimes seem to think things through better than others do, as in nuclear power or health care. Unlike the Marines, the French tend to believe that there are two ways to do anything: the wrong way and the right way, which should be the French way.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

"The French don't score any higher in IQ than Americans or other Europeans, but they sometimes seem to think things through better than others do, as in nuclear power or health care."

...Or being smart enough to stay the hell out of Iraq.

Just imagine how much better the world would be if Bush had followed France's lead and tried to bribe Saddam into becoming an ally again like we do with Jordan and Egypt instead of overthrowing him and trying to turn Iraq into North Carolina.

The French are also smart enough not to link their foreign policy to the fate of Israel.

Old Right

Anonymous said...

Steve -- nice post but there's something that should IMHO be added.

In France it's all about status/class. And Sarkozy's election represents the push-back on status/class the way Amnesty/Open borders did here.

You are quite right that faux intellectualizing (rather than a really vigorous development of theory and checking against empirical evidence) is a status marker. But the problem with France is that outside the ENArch elites there isn't much money to sustain that status marker / flirtation. Statist labor markets mean almost no new hiring outside of government. And nepotism naturally inside government.

The movie "Red Lights" had besides it's rather pointed anti-Muslim elements some significant cultural changes in France (it was a their big hit before Sarko's election). The wife is a high-powered, highly connected attorney (assumed to be an ENArch). The husband is a guy who's chronically un-employed or under-employed. But once the husband ACTS instead of standing around philosophizing, the wife has new respect and love for her husband.

[Plot summary: rich/high-powered attorney is raped by bearded convict implied to be Muslim, layabout husband kills said convict between Tours and Poitiers ... the site of Charles Martel turning back the Arab raiders and saving France. Like I said a huge hit.]

That the French would both make this movie, and make it a big success, is remarkable. It's all about Action not status-marker moralizing.

We may be seeing a gradual pushback on the elites across the West.

Anonymous said...

They may have stayed out of Iraq, but they have imported the Middle East into their suburbs...

That doesn't seem so smart to me, but maybe I just need to sit in a cafe philosophizing while "youths" torch my Renault outside, and it will all make sense.

agnostic said...

Still, the French devotion to Cartesian rationality has served the French fairly well.

I'm no Francophile, but I wonder how much Cartesian rationality pervades French society. What's kept France together for centuries, and what they are very protective of, is their system of manners and etiquette.

They don't subject everything to scrutiny and see what survives. If manners have served them well before, they will continue to do so. That's a lot of what Michael Blowhard is talking about: their fastidious devotion to life's little rules.

Burke mentions manners a lot in the *Reflections*, and was very afraid the Revolution was sweeping them away. In a letter, he said that manners matter more than laws since the former affect the aggregate behavior of a society more frequently and continually than the latter.

So, I'd say the French as a whole already do "think less," in the sense that they tend not to question everything, or experiment freely, and so on. At least in the social realm. The "let's dissect everything" philosophizing may well be just an affectation like Michael Blowhard says.

Anonymous said...

The French don't score any higher in IQ than Americans or other Europeans, but they sometimes seem to think things through better than others do, as in nuclear power or health care."

But then there is the Maginot Line, Algeria, and the suburban youths....

I'm curious as to where the French went wrong. Revolutionary France and the century afterward produced a lot of exceptional minds. Perhaps the fall into the philosophical mire started with Henri Bergson.

Anonymous said...

"The French don't score any higher in IQ than Americans or other Europeans, but they sometimes seem to think things through better than others do, as in nuclear power or health care."

Huh? Since when did the French have good health care? Contrary to what Michael Moore says, they really don't. Even the French government admits that its system is almost total merde:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3423159.stm

Anonymous said...

"The French are also smart enough not to link their foreign policy to the fate of Israel."

Before 1967, France and Israel had essentially the same relationship that the U.S. and Israel do today: France was Israel's primary source of foreign weapons, and France also built Israel's nuclear plant at Dimona. If Israel ever nukes an Arab country, the Arabs will know who to thank.

Kai Carver said...

"To graduate from college in France, you have to pass a test that consists of writing a three hour essay on a philosophical topic"

No, you need to do that to graduate from
high school.

The philosophy essay is the first in a weeks-long series of exams that all high school seniors must take to graduate at the end of the school year. The topics are often commented upon in the media.

Here's a choice of topics students were faced with in 2003, taken at random from a list of recent baccalaureate exams:

Topic 1 :
What truth is opinion capable of?

Topic 2 :
Is giving to receive the principle of all exchange?

Topic 3 :

The criminal who knows all the sequence of the circumstances does not consider, like his judge and his critic, that his act is beyond order and understanding: his sentence, however, is measured to him exactly according to the degree of astonishment which seizes them, when seeing this incomprehensible thing for them, the act of the criminal. - When the defender of a criminal knows enough about the case and his genesis, the extenuating circumstances that it will present, the ones after the others, will necessarily end up erasing all the fault. Or, to still express it more exactly: the defender will attenuate degree by degree this astonishment which wants to condemn and hand out the sentence, it will even end up removing it completely, by forcing all honest listeners to acknowledge in their heart of hearts: “It was necessary for him to act in the way in which he acted; by punishing, we would be punishing eternal necessity.” - To measure the degree of the sentence according to the degree of knowledge which one has or can have of the history of the crime, - isn't contrary to all equity?

NIETZSCHE

(Sorry, I was lazy and used a lightly-edited automatic translation for the quoted text).

Anonymous said...

"Even the French government admits that its system is almost total merde:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3423159.stm"

That's ridiculous - the article is about a govt report complaining the system is too expensive - but it's expensive because it provides insured-American levels of health care to the entire population, at considerably lest cost than the US system. I wish my country (Britain) had their problems; come here if you want to see genuinely crap socialised health care.

Anonymous said...

Johnny Hallyday is 64 years old. How do you make $12 million per year when you are 64 as a rock star ...

Mick Jagger's 61 or 62. He's still performing. So's [Blondie] Deborah Harry.

Anonymous said...

Even the French have their share of less-abstract thinkers. Steve, you remarked more than once about George W. Bush's determination to avoid being tagged as an intellectual.[1] Perhaps Sarkozy has a similar political strategy.

Or perhaps, Sarkozy is preparing to make some kind of appeal to France's "hard hats."

[1] Bush has certainly achieved his goal-- nearly everyone now thinks he is a moron or a fiend.

Anonymous said...

Isn't France periodically on the verge of anarchy? Philosphy hasn't saved them from marauding Algerian immigrants or their own children who often join these thugs.

Anonymous said...

Ummm, just to put things in perspective, 11 people got shot in one night last week in Southeast Washington, DC. That's more shootings than happened in the entire car-burning riots in France. In one night. I don't think we have anything particularly to boast about.

WIth that said, though, the French were indeed stupid to let in so many Muslim immigrants. But overall, Steve is right that over the past couple of decades rationalism has produced some big wins for their social system. In the meantime, Bush and his cohorts have done much to discredit good ol' American anti-intellectualism.

Kai Carver said...

Anonymous: "The movie "Red Lights" had ... some significant cultural changes in France (it was a their big hit before Sarko's election)."

Nope. The movie came out in 2004, over 3 years before the election.

"That the French would both make this movie, and make it a big success, is remarkable."

But it wasn't a success, except maybe among critics, those elitist intellectuals. Most French people would have zero recollection of that film.

http://www.allocine.fr/film/revuedepresse_gen_cfilm=51336.html

The movie wasn't even among the top 100 movies of 2004 in France. It comes in 164th, having made all of a million dollars, just ahead of "The Story of the Weeping Camel", whatever that is.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/intl/france/yearly/?yr=2004&sort=gross&order=DESC&pagenum=2&p=.htm

Sorry to be picky, but the BS level whenever France is mentioned is truly fantastique.

Anonymous said...

"Don't think" was the advice given to the public by government scientist Floyd Ferris in Ayn Rand's dystopian novel Atlas Shrugged.

A thinking populace is a questioning populace.

A questioning populace is a dangerous populace - dangerous to the plans of tyrants.

Beware Sarkozy.