Читать книгу Interventions 2020 - Мишель Уэльбек - Страница 12

Politically, opposition to globalist economic liberalism had actually started long before; it became apparent in France in 1992, with the campaign for the ‘No’ vote to the Maastricht referendum. This campaign drew its strength less from reference to a national identity or to republican patriotism – both of which disappeared in the slaughter of Verdun in 1916–1917 – than from a genuine widespread weariness, from a feeling of outright rejection. Like all historicisms before it, liberalism threw its weight around by presenting itself as an inescapable historical change. Like all historicisms before it, liberalism posed itself as the assumption and transcendence of simple ethical sentiment in the name of a long-term vision of the historical future of humanity. Like all historicisms before it, liberalism promised effort and suffering for the present, relegating the arrival of the general good to a generation or two away. This kind of argument had already caused enough damage, throughout the twentieth century.

The perversion of the concept of progress regularly wrought by various forms of historicism unfortunately favoured the emergence of comical philosophies, typical of times of disarray. Often inspired by Heraclitus or Nietzsche, well suited to middle and high incomes, with a sometimes amusing aesthetic, they seemed to find their confirmation in the proliferation, among the less privileged layers of the population, of many unpredictable and violent assertions of identity. Certain advances in the mathematical theory of turbulence led, more and more frequently, to human history being depicted as a chaotic system in which futurologists and media thinkers strove to detect one or more ‘strange attractors’. Though it was devoid of any methodological basis, this analogy was to gain ground among educated and semi-educated strata, thus durably preventing the constitution of a new ontology.