You surely know this phenomenon which, as if by the whim of a mischievous imp, puts you in your hands without having looked for it, a book which seemed to be sleeping in the pile (a little balanced) of books “to be read soon”, a book which then urgently needs to be read! This is what happened to me recently with La Faute et le festin, by Driss Jaydane, subtitled La diversité culturelle au risque de la culture, which dates from 2016 (Ed. La Croisée des Chemins, Coll. Essais sur fond blanc. 126p).
The starting point is the history of the creation of a “non-profit association” a few years ago, with friends grouped around Ahmed Ghayet; the objective, fundamentally anti-racist, was to highlight the cultural particularity of Morocco, unique and multiple at the same time, and unique precisely because of its plurality. In seeking to name this association, the name “Cultural Diversity” had then imposed itself on their young enthusiasm. It expressed “the simple and beautiful project of a humanity that, among the peoples that make it up, makes dialogue between all cultures. And this in a harmonic of respect, beauty and transcendence.”
A few years later, however, we had to face up to the fact that this notion of “cultural diversity”, which was widespread everywhere, did not correspond to the initial dream and even betrayed the commitment of the members of the group. D. Jaydane opposes it from the very introduction to another notion, that of Culture, in the singular, which “is situated at such a height, beauty, essence, that the idea of Cultural Diversity will never reach them”. Worse still, this Cultural Diversity is in fact a “cynical device of the most total perversion”.
This surprising assertion, which may seem excessive to say the least, the author tries to justify it by showing first of all how easily the notion of Cultural Diversity has spread to all countries, and is expressed in spectacular and academic events, bringing together protagonists that everything should oppose, politically and ideologically, under the aegis of the Good of all and under the spotlight. Cultural Diversity aims at bringing people together, happy to suddenly discover their own diversity, with endless congratulations and celebrations… Consensus is all the easier to achieve when the expression itself is an evidence, a pleonasm: cultures are necessarily diverse, is it necessary to affirm it? It is “an ideal of the already there”, nothing needs to be constructed, the notion is elusive, it does not cover any ideal, any moral value that could be of any existential utility.
The notion of Cultural Diversity would also have a “birth certificate, that of the Creation of Unesco: 16 November 1945”. Under the aegis of the brand new United Nations, about twenty States, very different from each other, proclaimed the Charter of a new order, a better humanity, in an ideal of peace and prosperity, wiping the slate clean: “Worrying strangeness of this artificial birth, fertilized by oblivion”. The author warns: “Thus we must fear like the plague […] these laws of exception voted by a few speaking for all”.
It is from this little sentence that links, at first blurred, will appear in my mind with the year 2020… In the last chapters especially, they will really appear to me with prophetic relevance…
But, says D. Jaydane, this is only the beginning, but not the Origin of this Cultural Diversity. For the Origin, according to him, is to be sought a little earlier in History. It is to be sought in the greatest murder in the history of mankind, which is called ” the Final Solution “, elaborated consciously, methodically, by the Nazis, with hierarchical tasks accepted as a sacred duty by all those whose morals had been replaced by blind fidelity to the Führer, with the clearly declared aim of wiping the Jewish people from the face of the earth, a people considered undesirable and inferior. This “trial of social engineering” was made possible only “by Modernity and it alone”. In the country of Kant, the philosopher of pure Reason, for whom every man possesses within himself the authority “which allows him to make the difference between Good and Evil”, in that same country, “Reason has definitively failed, […] totally off-center, contaminated, or contaminating”. Thus, since then, the author asserts, it is no longer possible to philosophize, neither after the Concentration Camps, nor after the Colonies. And finally, what remains “of that great and beautiful ideal, conceived and desired for the world”, which had been elaborated in the Enlightenment of Reason of the preceding centuries? Worse still, “what remains of a West whose dream is nothing more than what has turned out to be the nightmare of so many millions of others, who were considered – with measurements and studies to prove it – so much less human than the Man of the Enlightenment”.
In the end, it is the very word of Modernity, this dream “which has become the equivalent of what made possible the emergence of Radical Evil” which is now banished, with the consequence of “the death of Progress”: and this is “probably the heaviest mourning the West has had to bear”. The indictment is terrible, everything points to the unforgivable culprit, this so-called Enlightenment West, which built its power on the exploitation of the peoples it claimed to civilize, but which it assassinated, even though it had drafted the Human Rights!
Now, in a masterful sleight of hand, it is precisely “in this moment of mourning that the possibility of a form of redemption […] will be glimpsed […] for which the West, guilty and strong, will draw up the contract and set the terms. This contract, this program, but also this necessity will combine, will merge, to bear the name of Postmodern.” The guilty party has therefore dismissed the case after conducting his own trial!
Then the notion of Universalism, too difficult to honour from now on, is gone. Postmodernism redefines the rules in all fields, including the cultural, and establishes “a new era, that of the specific. …] Thus, through the specific, all cultures are, de facto and de jure, cultures in their own right”, escaping the old criterion of Reason, this obsolete pillar of Modernity. The latter, guilty therefore of all the evils of History since the 15th century, is condemned to exhume all its bones and bring to light all the archives of past horrors, in tearful contrition.
But quickly, the page is turned, the corpses are put away, forgetfulness is invoked.
For now, in these so-called glorious decades, the time has come to rejoice: “Those of all these cultures, at last out of oblivion, who are only too eager to rebuild a world without death. To share a beautiful, perfect world”, a true Best of Worlds! The time has come for a new concept: that of Aesthetic Pluralism, “this new religiosity of equivalence, which liberal ideology will be able to transform into a fruitful management of otherness”. Fructuous, in fact, the trade of otherness, the consumable exoticism in a thousand monetizable forms, music, cuisine, folklore, in the apology of the Difference. The time has come for the Feast, in “a formidable moral and mercantile fusion” as liberalism has the secret!
Thus, “from the horrible marriage of Fault and Feast” is born a monstrous child, a scion of Evil, which is none other than the famous Cultural Diversity.
Fragile “Pax Differencia”, that the social and economic hazards and disenchantments of the years of crisis quickly come to shake! Far from the fake understanding of diverse cultures, here is the reality of daily life that changes the falsely benevolent, especially curious, always superficial glances at the Other, who has never really been understood nor loved for what he is. Suddenly, the presence of the Other, of another skin colour, of another religion, this Other who has come to try his chance to scrape a bit of Western abundance by escaping the misery of his country (maintained by the same world elites who decorate their luxurious interiors with African masks…! ), this Other thus becomes cumbersome, even unbearable, and is charged with the evils he did not cause. “The demon of racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and violent rejection” falls on these foreigners whose beautiful Cultural Diversity had been celebrated because “they had always been only too different”. “Difference and Hate. An inseparable and cursed couple from dark times”, which expresses itself all the better as “TechnologyWorld” opens all the doors of virtual expression to it. These old demons awakened there blossom with impunity, fascism, nazism, nihilism triumphant.
A glaring failure of Cultural Diversity! In the end, by over-essentializing cultures, it will have distanced them from each other without looking for what, on the contrary, could bind them together. This is why D. Jaydane resolutely decided to replace it with “the only thing that can create a link, meaning and life. It is called Culture.”
To understand what Culture is, we must start from the “first scene of the human condition”, that is, Separation. Myths tell us: we are not of this World! So, in order to overcome this essential strangeness, it is necessary to always produce meaning, “through a creative work that is the work of Man”. A crisis of meaning is equivalent to a cultural and ontological crisis, to “a loss of Humanity”. Conversely, every work aims at “filling the void between the World and oneself, […] making of Him, of Us, of Me, this unique Being, probably singular and sacred because he experiences Life and says so, knows how to share his condition, succeeds in transforming his ordeal. For Him, with others”.
Definition of a total humanism, this Culture alone allows us to answer the questions of the Beginning and the End. “In this respect, we will say here that Religion, Philosophy and Art must be considered as the first matrices for the production of meaning”. It goes without saying that the author takes a critical view of any production that is not underpinned by the authentic search for meaning.
Is Culture, the human genius of Perduration. Through Culture, man never ceases to ward off his Vulnerability and Mortality, inherent to his condition. From then on, every gesture, every word, aiming at the preservation of the Human being in his precious singularity, is Culture. In other words, Culture is the gesture and word of Life in the pursuit of Meaning. And this is what fundamentally binds people together in their common condition of vulnerability and mortality. Culture therefore necessarily rests on these “two living pillars” that are Meaning and Life. This Culture goes beyond temporal and geographical notions, the human being being being confronted with the same quest at all times and in all places. Plural cultures, in their infinite diversity, are only fascinating variants of these same fundamentals, whose great book would remain to be written, if it were still possible.
So, as it despises and denies Life, as it voluntarily deprives it of Meaning, as it makes a mockery of suffering and death, Transcendental Nihilism is thus the ontological enemy of Culture, Absolute Evil. No culture can be built on its very negation! Nihilism is eminently cunning!
Here, I will stop summarizing D. Jaydane’s thought, because I found myself suddenly brought back to the current events facing the whole world in the year 2020. I will simply highlight a few passages that struck me as being particularly relevant to what we are experiencing, putting our daily lives in a new light:
-The obvious, and widely visible, vulnerability of millions of Humans caught in the hell of a new geopolitics of disaster [that of the “great dehumanizing systems”] that literally throws millions of Humans out of life. Either in death or in the most unbearable precariousness. (94)
-Vulnerable, too, the Human being, in the face of what could be called […] not the humiliating Institutions, but … (94)
-We Men are the only ones who bury our dead. Thus it can be said […] that Culture, in a way, is also born when Man invents the grave. (96)
-Elders…especially Fathers and Mothers, require respect and honour. For what they have given and bequeathed. (103)
-A century that is basically “diabolical”, in the sense that the Devil is the one who sows confusion, excels in the mixing of genres; […] that has made so many discourses possible, that has allowed them to be double or triple. (118)
-…a kind of Media Reason […], a cynical Reason which, inventing a purely informative way of counting the dead without ever naming them, allows them never to have faces, treats them en masse, in bulk… (120)
-Thus a master of existence no longer governs the City except the erratic flock itself, a cloud of lost spirits no longer knowing to which truth to devote themselves, unable to direct themselves… (120)
-To refuse that we are forbidden an Ethics of the World, of Man, to refuse the treatment made by the media, accomplices of this Nihilism, this trivialization of Death, relevant to calculations. (123)
-Opposing the false but so useful reasons it gives, this Nihilism, the true and only “science of the human condition” that Culture could well be! (123)
-And so, dedicated to go towards one another, seeking a meaning in this world… Is it not for this unique purpose that we have invented Language, Art, made Traditions, Religions… (124)
Is it necessary to comment on these quotes? Did we not see the ruse of Nihilism triumphing at its apogee, when it prescribed, in the very name of the preservation of the human being and supposedly to counter his precariousness, a whole arsenal of laws, each one more liberating than the other? Did we not see, contrary to all the rules of Life in society, everyone, healthy or sick, locked up under surveillance and under threat? In the name of an epidemic (far inferior in mortality to a plague epidemic or other past epidemics) that the “great dehumanizing” – and humiliating – systems have seized with a single voice, have we not seen the anonymous deaths counted, like an interminable refrain distilled daily by the Media accomplices? Have we not heard a thousand speeches and their opposite, which have sown confusion, even panic and chaos in people’s minds?
Were the elders not left to die in solitude, without care, and were the families not deprived of paying their last respects, the most basic act of civilization? Have we not ceased to suppress contacts and signs of humanity such as smiles, handshakes and social ties? By forcing everyone to hide, without even proving the real medical usefulness of this gesture, have we not muzzled them both concretely and symbolically? And what will be the consequences for the children who have been kept away from each other, who have been deprived of the socialization of school and games? Have we not also provoked mistrust, separation and hostility between those who wear masks and those who do not?
Have not places of worship, places where Art in all its forms is manifested, places of conviviality in general, all been closed, so formidable is Culture to our Masters? And how can we express ourselves when everything is done to prohibit true exchanges and limit them to Internet platforms, which are controlled by censorship?
Are not the long-term psychological, even psychiatric, but also economic, consequences of prolonged isolation and generalised confinement far more serious than the epidemic itself? Are we not already seeing, as a result of this well-orchestrated “new geopolitics of disaster”, masses thrown into precariousness, which the leaders can then dispose of as they wish with the characteristic cynicism of victorious Nihilism? I will stop there, but it would be easy to continue…
So, more than ever, let us fight, so that the beautiful, the true Culture does not die, the one that makes sense and unites us in our humanity, and that celebrates Life in spite of everything.
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