15. Fascism and anarchism
The question is completely current, insofar as it touches the problem of the legitimacy of the power. Careful, I say legitimacy, and not legality. Legitimacy concerns morals, legality concerns the society. Very delicate question.
The crux of legal and legitimate is in what one calls “power” or “government” or “authority”, since power, whatever it is must (or should have) legalise the legitimates, i.e. the problem of any government consists in a search of legitimacy. It is not enough to be legal, it is still necessary to be legitimate.
This requirement of legitimacy, by all the governments, since the mists of time, is required, according to the policies, either with the consecration, or with the election. In other words, one invokes either the divine right or the human right to justify the authority of the chief, But it is not because the king was crowned that he became automatically a moral man, and it is not because one elects somebody that he becomes endowed with the necessary virtues! In other words, whether it is by oiling or election, that returns, to the same thing. The election can be a measurement of the popularity of the chief (especially when it “is popularised”!), it cannot be a guarantee of its “human” value, i.e., of its authority, because no society can confer on those which direct it or reign over it, the least authority.
You will understand better, whereas this constant dialogue of legal and legitimate makes that a capacity places from there always wonders about itself, and ends up sinking in legalism. However, to what does legalism lead? Quite simply with the opposition to progress. But, the human will always resist the man, the policy resists and this resistance of the policy will lead to an antagonism more and more exacerbated of legal and the legitimate one, antagonism which will lead to a cracking of the one and other, i.e. with an insurrection of legal, one side, or with an insurrection of legitimate, the other. The insurrection of legal will be done by a radical contempt of morals: it is Fascism. The insurrection of legitimate will be done, in the name of morals, by a liberty from any law: it is anarchism. Fascism, on one side, and anarchism, on the other, are evils which are due to legalism, according to whether one is of the right side or left. But in both cases, human reality is defended against a kind of institutionalism which ends up rather putting “man at the service of the Sabbath” than the “Sabbath at the service of man”. What does that mean?
Matthew, the evangelist, was walking one Sabbath day and started to gather ears of corn. The Pharisees said that one should not touch anything the day of the Sabbath. Then Christ answers them: “The Sabbath is made for man and not man for the Sabbath. The Son of man is Master even of the Sabbath”. At that time, this was scandalous! What was condemned was to be content to obey a rite, even though this rite was empty. One can push some thing until saying it, and some said, not without reason, that the historical Christ was a true anarchist, a non-violent anarchist of course (one tends towards Malraux who claimed that Christ was the only anarchist who succeeded, which, in my opinion, is not wrong at all).
At all events, from one end to another of the Gospel, one speaks about his fight against the Pharisees who constituted the sacerdotal class (it treated them as “bleached sepulchres”, i.e. hypocrites); one accused them of only frequenting those publicans who paid their contributions to the Roman Empire; he passes for a revolutionist, etc In fact he announced the destruction of the Temple, which was the place where one practised the religion of the time (which is the equivalent of the basilica Saint Pierre of Rome!) ; there is in the history a revolt of Christ against the clericalism. In short, it broke with a certain tradition, and it goes still further: it breaks with all conventions. For the Jews, for example, it was important to know if someone were Jewish or not. However he, he accommodates Samaritans, he welcomes the Roman centurion and Zachée who was the general treasurer, he accommodates the adulteress, without making any difference. He said to you, and it is that which, from the point of view of the clergy of the time, was abominable: “The Son of man did not come to be served, he came to serve”. Here is the idea even as Christ gave in his time: it was a revolution against a certain clerical order to which the teaching was opposed, point-to-point.
Here, I would like to digress. We encounter a great difficulty from relations between /reports of morals and religion: we telescope the two fields constantly (just as we telescope moral and company). Of course a religion can have concerns regarding morals, but why in this field more than in any other? One must acknowledge that it is strange all the same, because morals are a business neither of religious doctrines, nor of churches, they are a business of the man: it is well known that there exist perfectly irreligious people, and who have great wisdom nonetheless. You see then how much it is curious that here, with the Renaissance, the thought was released from medieval theology – it is what Bacon called “natural philosophy” and that was later called “freethinking” but not ethics so that we knew the “freethinking”, “free morals”, if I dare to say, in spite of the efforts of Kant, Schopenhauer and especially of Nietzsche could not truly be born. Actually it has remained through the centuries to act as a major bond between morals and theodicy which enters thought and theology, and this bond continues, even today, scrambling everything (even in a society such as ours which carried out, at least theoretically, the separation of the Church and the State), so much so that, morals being identified for him by the religion, Freud could say that religion was a neurosis! But let us return to our sheep.
What did Christ say? That an institution, whatever it is, is made to serve man, and not man to serve the institution. In other words, a trade union is made to serve the workmen, an educational establishment to serve youth, the banking institution to serve the employees (and savers), the Church to serve the faithful ones, etc… That, naturally, seems to go from oneself. But, when a system collapses, as is the case here, then what do the institutions seek? As they are no longer used for anything, they seek to remain alive at all costs, i.e. at the price of an ashamed legalism. So that one goes from there so much so that it is the workman who are at the service of the trade union, educational establishment at the service of Professors, the priests at the service of the Church, etc… As when the institution is primary, which is the case today, we are not far from being finished, and man being what he is, it leads, more or less in the long run, to outbursts of violence.
But I will specify by saying that it is, actually, the outburst of a contra-violence. What is necessary to understand is that legalism is violence, a true legal violence. The Romans who invented the right and carried it to an absolute point of perfection, said already: “Summun juice, summa insulted”, i.e.: “Excess of justice, excess of injustice”, insofar as a too rigorous application of the law leads to iniquity. But, finally, look at the financial scandals: it is really the saver at the service of the banking institution, if not the service of swindlers, but swindlers who act in all legality!
It is thus necessary to carefully distinguish law and morals, legality and legitimacy. It is Nietzsche who best thought of the relationship between legal and legitimate. Its morals are indeed morals but “wild” morals as one says, i.e. not institutionalised morals, dissociated morals of the law, in short, morals without morality. Too often, us, the French, when we read Nietzsche and hear of his “Will for power”, we interpret this “Wille zur Macht” as an outburst of violence. However, we are actually making a terrible misinterpretation, because the true rupture which took place is a rupture with the “values” (“Werke”) with regard to society. It is, consequently absurd to speak of “morals of duty” (duty is a sociological concept), as we did, while mixing moral and society, absurd also to speak about “moral citizens”, “social justice”, etc Anyway, nietzschene morals (as those of Christ) are non-conformism. They distinguish the authority of the “Morality”, which they call “the morals of the cowards” (of the “bleached sepulchres”). However the “Morality”, is conformism. He thus opposes legitimacy to the simple moral conformism that had already been formulated in 1885 by a little known Frenchman (Jean-Marie Guyau), in his thesis: “Draft of a moral without obligation nor sanction”, a work that Nietzsche had permanently on his work table. And perhaps since I have just spoken about France, you know that Gide, in a novel which made a scandal in the middle-class areas, I am speaking about “Immoralist”, took make and cause for nietzschéenne morals. Actually, if one excludes Gide, Nietzsche was interpreted completely wrongly during a very long time, in France, because his rupture corresponded at the same time to the outburst of political violence which was produced, in Germany, after the Weimar Republic, Fascism, i.e. with the insurrection of legal against the legitimate. But when Hitler dared to try to make use of Nietzsche, that he had absolutely not understood, while trying to recover him as a like thinker of Nazism, it was an absolute contradiction. In other words, Nazism and Nietzsche jointly left the same rupture, but in one case, it was about a phenomenon of political violence (social problem), in the other, it acts, on the moral level of a statement of freedom with regard to conformism, i.e. Nietzsche is contemporary to the birth of Nazism, that does not mean to say that it is the cause. It should be understood that Nietzsche, if he had lived under Hitler would have said “Never will I be a Nazi”, just as Marx, if he had lived under the Communist regime would have said: “Never will I be a communist” and the same, still, Christ, if he returned nowadays, would say: “Never will I be a catholic”.
However, because morals merged a long time ago with respectability, in the age which preceded us, morals were conformism, which one called “decency”, “What will people say? ”. The decency is acceptability, which is “That is done” or “That is not done”. How many middle-class men, of my time, respected marriage, but spent three nights of the week in the brothel? They did not divorce. What did it arrive, since, in this stamping from legitimacy compared to legality? There was a rupture: after 68, there was an explosion of indecency, i.e. explosion of non-conformism because the young people, of whom I was one, had weighed the worth of a middle-class “morality” which was only decency and respectability, and the old men said “They sink in amorality”. Not at all, that does not have strictly have anything to do with it. I believe that indecency (with all its excesses) is not necessarily a proof of amorality, just as decency, yesterday, was not necessarily a proof of morality. There are two completely different things.
So, what to do today to avoid the outbursts of violence? Quite simply, reinvent morals, and urgently. I will leave aside the entirety of the fields concerned, for me to take hold of it with the crisis of the authority, which is a primarily moral crisis, if you have understood that there is no authority without legitimacy, and that legitimacy is a question of morals.
I will start by announcing that all the Governors have got at least one thing in common, they have had no specific training. This is very curious. There always were, of course, theories of power and authority, but you well know that it is not only with the theory that one does the job. A teacher of physics is not a physicist, but a physicist is not an engineer. In the same way, a doctor is not necessarily a great biologist, etc In other words, between the theory and the application, it does not have to have an immediate relationship, although there should be one all the same. Without theory, indeed, one does not see what one applies, but one is satisfied to give pleasure to the population which awaits ones intervention. That is not enough: still it is necessary that the theory models are questioned by the practice which allows, precisely, to place questions. However, this is hardly but part of the trainers who receive, since the Middle Ages, an adapted type of training, training which is given, today, to the pupils of the Universities: the Technical school, the Polytechnic school, the Medical school, etc
But only the governors have always escaped a formation with the exercise of the authority: there does not exist any School of the government. In other words they never learned what they do – or what they should do! The public service is the service which is represented only by ignorants in the field. It was necessary to seek a criterion to recruit them: there was nothing. No School! It would have been said that it was a trade which was not learned, if not on the job. One tried to base it a little on another thing, namely the National school of Administration. But that is a School training not governors, but administrators, i.e., principal private secretaries, who are not trained in any ground knowledge. One arrives at a situation where one has the people not trained with the government and who govern, and of the administrators who do the job, but who, themselves, do not exert government. Here is the contradiction on which, all our system rests.
All that holds so that, we appear ourselves that there does not need to learn what is authority or the way of intervening on man. The authority that governors are supposed to exert, it is as if they had the instinct of the only fact of it of having founded families with whom they were supposed to exert it. However, today, what is a family?! This manner of thinking was perhaps good in the XIX century. Because one cannot control a man like the father controls a child, since the child is yet nobody, as it has not emerged into the society, i.e. with good citizenship. It follows that the relationship of the parents to the newborn cannot be taken for the model of the relationship of controlling society. In the case of the parents, we are dealing with authority that must make it possible for the child to escape from it at some point, governing them we deal with authority (power) who must “maintain the order. You see that the phenomenon of the authority is much more complex than it is supposed. The fact of being a relative, is not the same as the fact of being the man of government. Moreover, the man of government, at least in a democracy, must answer to the requests of the legislators. But what makes the law? Under these conditions, power, executive and legislative tends to recruit its members by way of election notably all are also inefficient. Here is the problem. They are elected. To do what? They do not know anything strictly of it. Then they will shake hands on the market days, make televised “shows”, etc… But it is not like that one governs, all the same!
However, on what does the election rest? On the choice, one says. But today, the choice, everyone knows well that one makes fun about it, that there are other ways of getting an idea about it: surveys. They are carried out by opinion polls at the time of the elections, which tell you the result in advance. Then, what good does it do to move? And then the survey does not make the texts more intelligent than the subjects: see the monument of human silliness which is the text of the Maastricht treaty that the power was, a few years ago, subjected to the appreciation of the citizens! And, when one thinks of it, what is opinion? It is never a judgement: an opinion, is an immediate reaction: “I like That”, or “I don’t like that”. However, the reaction depends on the tele-visual “look” of the candidate, of the buddies whom one has, of the family tradition, the money which supplies, or not, your bank account, etc Moreover, the reactions, are very dangerous, you know: if there were a fashion of extreme right-hand side opinion at only one time, there would be the same result as in Nazi Germany. One day a mother informed me of the embarrassment which had been hers when their child asked her: “Which is the difference between Napoleon and Hitler?”. “It is very simple, I answered him: it is the vote for all” (I do not know if I convinced them!) In short, the democracy, because of the “reactionary“ on which it is currently based, became a pure illusion. The “democracy of opinion”, it is the death of the democracy, neither more, nor less (on this account, it should well be recognized that the dictatorship hangs close, by a nose). It should arrive at an autocracy (and thus at an aristocracy, such at that I defined on pages 115 and 116 of my “Introduction… ”), i.e. with the government of oneself by oneself, in other words to arrive, from the point of view of the training, at the complete man. However, if one agrees that starting from physics there are engineers, starting from biology and of physiology that there are doctors, well one cannot train the leaders without a true Anthropology, i.e. without something in the lower part which gives them the necessary training to give them competence and the right to intervene. Would you agree to entrust your body to a surgeon who ignores the anatomy completely?
In short, controlling them are not trained more than the voters! That does not prevent them from controlling and the others voting. What is astonishing in our moribund democracy, it is that whereas one needs a licence to lead, to go hunting, etc… one should not any to control… and vote! It is absolutely incredible! At the very least one would need a true National school of Government (or a true National school of Authority), exactly as one should train the parents (but it is much more difficult to train control because, once again, at least theoretically, the citizens are not children). The true crisis of power lies well in the fact that to be able men cannot exert it on themselves. So, what to do while we’re waiting?
Should one invest only those which have the authority, i.e., to speak like Montesquieu, only the virtue should be invested? But it is known well that there exist virtuous imbeciles! The authority (i.e. legitimacy) is not enough: competence is still needed. In other words, the legitimate person, if they are stupid, cannot satisfy the requirements of the functions of government, while maybe the rascal can satisfy this mission, if it is legal for him. The problem, in the case of the rascal is not to know if it is or not legitimate, but if it is, or not, malignant (it is on top that, legally, it will be judged), and if he is malignant, then he will be able at least to work for what one calls the “general interest” (and especially with its private interests), but never for the “public property”, because to work with public property, one should not only be legal, but legitimate. It is to say that, to control, it is necessary to be, at the same time, virtuous and qualified (or malignant): it is a lot to require from only one man (or only one woman), and therefore, in France, we count only a few little Pierre Mendès-France, Charles de Gaulle or Michel Rocard.
If one does not find any, then there remains a solution invented by the Athenian democracy: when the Athenians no longer knew how to name their Chief Justice’s, they drew the names from a kind of hat: one called the process the “fate” (in Greek klèros, from where comes our word from “clerk”, that which, in a notarial study, is appointed with the drawing of lots). Why not? After all it was not so stupid! But it should be known that at the end of the exercise, the Chief Justice who had grown rich through his function was punished by death (or exile).
Here are the few reflexions that I wanted to subject to you and which appear to me to be at the heart of an analysis of Fascism and anarchism: the question of the fundamental distinction to operate between legality (sociological concept) and legitimacy (moral concept) of any authority, any capacity, any government. But I would like, before I am quiet, to ask you a serious question.
It is clear that the Nazis crimes were perfectly legal, but perfectly amoral. It is completely clear, as the crimes of certain anarchistic movements are perfectly moral, but completely illegal. My question is the following one: how to judge, in front of a court, the Nazi crimes (or those of a totalitarian mode, whatever it is), and the anarchistic crimes? Nobody knows.
Then we invented the concepts of “crimes of war” “crimes against humanity” or “genocide” (in 1944). Genocide, lately renamed “ethnic purification”. But all the lawyers’ whom I asked to explain all this to me, answered me honestly: “We do not know”. However it would be fair all the same to know, don’t you think?
Let us take the case of genocide. I will initially say that there has only been one genocide, to my knowledge, that was successful in the history of humanity. That of the Neanderthal men, decimated by those of Cro-Magnon, several tens of thousands of years before our era, (some still claim that a few specimens still circulate among our fellow-citizens). What is necessary to retain of the phenomenon, it is that it is as old as man himself, even the former Egyptians, who represent a summit in the history of humanity, devoted themselves to it briskly. Why? Quite simply because man is not an animal like the others.
One starts to see a little more clearly if one understands that genocide is badly named, because it is never about the extermination of a “genos”, or people, but of the extermination of non-people. However the non-person that presents this as a private individual to the eyes of that which does not recognize it as the other, that it does not return to animalistic: the culture always resists, even with its disappearance. Here is what explains this apparent contradiction which makes the French, at the same time as they proclaimed the “Human rights”, continue for a long time (and without the least change of heart!), to continue the “black ivory” trade – i.e. black slaves (Voltaire himself, at the same time as he wrote Candide, placed much money in the famous “triangular trade”). And this then explains the apparent contradiction which makes that the Germans, while being proof of the most total indifference with regard to the Jews that they exterminated, were particularly sensitive to fated animals.
You see, therefore, that genocide has nothing of any “crime against humanity” (but no lawyer in the world has ever been known to define it correctly), it is the extermination of a legally dehumanized human, which does not make it easier to judge. In fact, all the ambiguity of the exceptional courts – whether it be at Nuremberg or The Hague – rests on the fact that each must plead part of its own legality in front of the jurisdictions. How, under these conditions, can you judge? That Milosevic was judged in The Hague than in Belgrade does not remove anything from the legal artifice. When two legalities clashed, the expeditious justice of Louis XVI, the Tsar of the Russias or Ceausescu was better than a parody of justice.
You will object to the Judeo-Christian injunction “You will not kill”. But this injunction is not that one should not spill blood, but not to make an attempt on the person, i.e. not to commit a murder. How the Commandment is implied, it is for us to respect life, but to respect the social link, i.e. neither more nor less than the law! One sees “progress” – if however this word has some direction -, in a society which tended to speak only about the “price of blood”, of retaliation or vendetta. The meaning is good: “You will not make an attempt on that with which binds you person to person”, which will take again Christian teaching: “You will love your neighbour as yourself”, formula in which the important concept is that of “neighbour”. Which is the opposite of “neighbour”? Quite simply that which is outlawed. By what one sees that to proclaim the other “outlaw” is quite simply to make it fit for slaughter because one does not allot to him – or one does not recognize him any more – as the person, and it is what explains why, in times and places, the enemy, the slave, the young of man not recognized could always be eliminated without in so far as there is murder, since they are not held, culturally, as people. One can say, in these cases, that what one kills, is “nothing” (with the etymological sense of the word “res” signifying thing. In a way we cause death without killing.
But today that we regard Life as the supreme good, one is quite constrained to legitimate the war (see that of Iraq), or capital punishment, or abortion, if not euthanasia. We are actually confronted with almost insoluble problems, quite simply because, having biologised culture, we reduced the man to meat. Actually one could not speak about “progress”: we simply changed creed, which poses a lot of new problems which leave us disarmed because, whether one is delighted or one deplores it, we do not lay out more than one cultural model – in fact, social – the human being. Admittedly, one undoubtedly should not return from there to that of the Decalogue: it is necessary for us to invent some other, which is adapted to our time. Hard task, but absolutely impossible to circumvent taking into account the urgency of the problems with which we are confronted by the major tendency of our societies to naturalize all the facts of culture.
Even if we had a social model of the human, all would not be solved for all that: the moral problem would remain indeed, and there remains anarchy. The cracking of the legal, as I said, will be done by a complete contempt of the right which will resulting the sinking of the line in the despotism (Hitler), and left, in the dictatorship (Stalin). But one understands that one and the other will have the same enemy, namely anarchy, which is a hopelessly utopian attempt to free insurrectionally the legitimacy of any law. You understand that Hitler as Stalin did not seek, to liquidate the anarchists, baptized “terrorist”, whereas themselves were devoted to a true “terrorism of State”! And you understand better now the atrocious massacres of the anarchists by the Communists, at the time of the Spanish War. Undoubtedly one understands better than between a despot and a dictator, an agreement, even partial, is possible. I want, of course to speak about the famous German-Soviet pact!