A Philosophy for Really Terrible Times. Part 2

But maybe we don't want to be free.

Last week, we left Existentialism at a high point after the Second World War, and its First Couple newly famous. What happened afterwards, and why did Existentialism fade away? And why do I think we might like to have it back again, but probably couldn’t use it if we did?

Existentialism dominated popular intellectual culture in the fifties and sixties, with its moody, romantic and slightly agonised atmosphere: an existentialist was a young woman with long dark hair sitting in a café in St Germain des Prés, reading the latest issue of Sartre and de Beauvoir’s journal Les temps modernes before going off to take part in a demonstration. And she probably had copy of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in her bag. (When I was an impressionable schoolboy learning French in the sixties, this was the dominant image of France.) Existentialism quickly conquered the Anglo-Saxon world as well, and existentialist writers like Colin Wilson became explosively, if briefly, popular. It influenced The Catcher in the Rye and the Beats, and films like The Wild One, as well as helping to create and reinforce a climate of irreverence towards authority and tradition: it was distantly connected with the satire boom in the Britain of the early sixties, for example.

Existentialism came out of a period of doubt, choice and crisis that did not stop neatly in 1945, and the new complexities themselves began the work of undermining it. To begin with, people began to look back on the War, and to see new shades of grey instead of simple and distinct moral choices. Rather than France being “divided in two,” there was more of a Gaussian distribution: firm collaborators and firm résistants, certainly,  but also a complex and shifting area in the middle, where people simply tried to survive. Most people had been faced with a constant set of micro-choices in daily life, rather than, for example, a decision about whether to join De Gaulle. How to relate to the occupier on a personal level? How to relate to the new regime, so similar to the old one, installed overnight? What was called “collaboration” (technically this was the relationship between Vichy and the Germans), came in many forms, and was seldom the result of a single, deliberate choice.

It’s easy to condemn the many industrialists who received contracts from the Germans, or the woman who became the mistress of a German General.  But what about the workers on the industrialist’s production line? What about the staff in the canteen? What about the secretary whose husband is in a prisoner-of-war camp? What about the baker on the corner, some of whose clients are Germans? What were these people actually supposed to do, for themselves and their families? Starve? Yes, Sartre would probably have answered, or at least assume responsibility for your actions. Not everybody was happy with this purist line, in retrospect. Many who were regarded as “collabos,” indeed, claimed that they had resisted to the best of their ability: the factory worker who had turned out sub-standard components for German aircraft, the Vichy official who had managed to commute the sentences of a few people due to be executed, the farmer who supplied rotten vegetables to the occupiers. And it was pointed out that Sartre himself had not exactly been a paragon of courage at the time. This was yet another subject which threatened to tear France apart, had not De Gaulle perceptively decided bury it in an official myth that the French people as a whole had resisted, each in their own way Everybody knew this was false, but it did, at least temporarily, solve the problem.

And the political context itself changed radically with the start of the Cold War, the political crises in Eastern Europe, and the new threat of nuclear devastation.  There were new and bewildering choices to make. The world seemed to be split into two camps, one led by the Soviet Union and the other by the United States. Some declined to take sides, but others, like Sartre and de Beauvoir, plunged in.  If it was necessary to choose, they would choose the Soviet rather than the US side, and their support would then have to be absolute and unqualified, if they were not to see themselves as acting in bad faith. So they supported the Soviet Union and its policies and positions to the ends of their lives, over the war in Indochina, the war to keep Algeria part of France, the Cuban revolution and the missile crisis, the East German rising of 1953, the Hungarian Rising in 1956, Prague in 1968, the Berlin Wall, Vietnam, and many other episodes.  You choose a side and you stick to it, and you live your choice absolutely.

The  Algerian war, in particular, tore the French intellectual world apart. True to his beliefs Sartre (with de Beauvoir) dived in unreservedly on the side of the FLN, going so far as to praise their killing of white Algerians. Yet for many other French people, independence for Algeria, which had been part of France for longer than Washington State had been part of America, was simply unthinkable. To Resistance heroes like Georges Bidault, the thought of France being cut in half a second time in twenty years was simply impossible to accept. Once again, De Gaulle cut the Gordian knot, with the 1962 Evian Treaty, but the underlying tensions never went away.

If the outer garments of Existentialism seemed to be everywhere, then, the heart of this rigorous, demanding philosophy of life was therefore starting to lose the purity of its appeal. This “choice” thing was becoming horribly complicated. Partly, also, it was the fault of its originators. Husserl was dead, Heidegger largely an unperson. Sartre himself spent the last part of his life deeply embroiled in political struggles, and closely attached to the same Communist Party which had once condemned Existentialism as bourgeois. Famous for beginning many more texts than he ever finished, he wrote most of his memorable works in quite a short period, from Nausea (1938) to his play Dirty Hands a decade later. Enormous studies of Genet and Flaubert, and an abortive attempt to write a sequel to Being and Nothingness didn’t add up to very much in the end.

Existentialism went up-market. Sartre and de Beauvoir were well-known, prosperous media figures, with real influence. And like much of what the French call the “caviar Left” their interests moved away from the everyday. Bluntly, they were more voluble about support for the Vietnamese peasants than about the condition of peasants—or indeed workers—in France. Existentialism rapidly became absorbed into the burgeoning counter-culture in the US and Europe, as a favourite pose for middle-class teenagers who really had to, like, get around to reading that book one day, but in the meantime demanded the right to be different, just like all their friends.

Similarly, de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, whilst a work of polemic rather than philosophy, helped unwittingly to create the Human Potential movement (“you can be anything you want to be!”), the Law of Attraction, The Secret, and any number of Californians telling us to “live your dream!” . Her message of rebellion against the traditional female roles of wife and mother, after her own disastrous childhood, was obviously only applicable to a small proportion of mostly middle-class educated women. She had advantages—intelligence, education, talent, good looks, a solid bourgeois background—that gave her possibilities denied to the woman who cleaned her apartment, the woman who did her laundry or, for that matter, the waiter who had served her apricot cocktails. In a sad little coda in the book by Sarah Bakewell that sparked this essay, she tells the story of one young woman, taking part in a representative survey of readers of de Beauvoir’s  book, now living in poverty as a single parent. And for every woman who became a successful lawyer, a business executive or a politician, there were many others who wound up like that. Indeed, de Beauvoir doesn’t seem to have realised that the shattering of the nuclear family she advocated would in the end work more to the advantage of men than women.

And, as always, there were new ideas in town. Actually, the most significant wasn’t new at all, but was discovered afresh by the rebels of the 1960s. Critical Theory goes back to the Frankfurt School, a group of middle-class Jewish Marxist intellectuals in the early 1920s, who grappled with the question of why the European working classes had not rebelled and created a revolution after 1917. Their pessimistic conclusion was that the workers were held back, not by force, but by the burgeoning capitalist society of mass production and consumption, and the integration of the proletariat into it. Without ever precisely saying so, the Frankfurt School clearly considered the working class to be stupid: indeed, some argued that they were masochists who sought their own domination. The job of Critical Theory then, was to illustrate the ways in which this domination was exercised. It was an entirely theoretical approach, though.  There would be no revolution, because that was impossible, but there was interesting analytical work to be done about the reasons for that impossibility.  (Cynics noted at the time that many of the School’s luminaries came from wealthy families, and their Marxist studies were being financed by their fathers: revolution would mean an end to that.)

Over the next few decades, in Germany, then in exile in the US, and in some cases later back in Germany, thinkers like Adorno, Marcuse and Fromm developed theories of surpassing grimness and negativity about western society, which they saw as every bit as repressive and totalitarian as the Nazi regime they had fled. This repression was reinforced in every possible way: all knowledge, all practice, all theory, all rules, all laws served simply to buttress capitalism. Scientific objectivity was a myth, sociology was just an ideology of repression; logic, rationality and reasoned argument were just tools of capitalist domination. To teach, say, physics or statistics, without explaining how their “laws” acted to reinforce capitalist domination, was to connive in that domination. A “critical” approach was required, and the School sought to provide that, through books which, uniquely it seemed, were not subject to the same totalitarian control as all others. Activists could only try to change the world in various ways they argued: the point, however, was to philosophise it.

The paradigm of this grim, hopeless doctrine was Marcuse’s  book One Dimensional Man, which presented an (American) working class so drugged with the comforts of consumer society, reinforced by mass media, that all thought of rebellion had to be abandoned. Even liberal political ideas such as free speech and tolerance were just further instruments of repression, he argued. Bizarrely, though, and for reasons Marcuse himself never really understood, the book’s theories were taken up by the New Left of the 1960s and turned into a revolutionary doctrine which led ultimately to 1968. It was a strange revolutionary doctrine though: an elitist, middle-class one, which in a sense paralleled the way in which Existentialism had developed, and appealed to the same intellectual market among educated middle-class idealists.

As usual, American ideas found their way to Europe, and Marcuse started to replace Sartre as the latest intellectually exciting guru. At the same time, other glamorous new ideas like post-modernism, structuralism and deconstruction were entering the intellectual discourse, and interacted with the revisionist Marxism of thinkers like Louis Althusser. Few of the “generation of 68” had actually read these works: as with Existentialism, though; they had a new vocabulary and a new set of ideas with which to confront their parents’ generation. There was no direct involvement in the Vietnam war to motivate the French students: they were essentially middle-class young people impatient with the conformism of society and with the poor organisation and provision of university education at the time. Once their demands for university reform were substantially met, the protests evaporated and the protesters went into politics, government, business and academia, as they had always been expecting to do.

Existentialism faded, then, under its own weaknesses, and the pressure of new and glamorous ideas: a strange cocktail of heretical Marxism, Critical Theory and Deconstruction, which has become dominant in France (and most other western countries) today, albeit with the marxist element somewhat in disguise. Some very sensible ideas of Foucault (that intellectual paradigms change with power structures for example) were misunderstood and allowed to spiral out of control.

But why? Obviously intellectual fashions come and go, but the complete eclipse of Sartre and Existentialism since the 1970s must result from more than that. Yes, the Cold War is long over, and Sartre’s largely uncritical support for the Soviet Union, which he never retracted, sets teeth on edge today. Yes, some of his extreme views on de-colonialisation, or Algeria, leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth. But others were wrong as well. And neither Althusser’s murder of his wife in 1980, and subsequent internment, nor Foucault’s much-publicised paedophilic holidays in Morocco in the 1970s, seem to have affected their popularity or their influence very much. Likewise, Camus, who broke from Sartre and de Beauvoir over support to the Soviet Union, is still venerated, precisely because he never really took firm positions. He was against the war in Algeria, but not that much. He was a leftist, but not that much. He criticised both sides in the Cold War, but not that much. Camus (who accepted the Nobel Prize that Sartre refused) indeed became the patron saint of a kind of soft, reasonable, moderate existentialism, which didn’t actually require too much effort, which is why the sixtieth anniversary of his death (in a car accident) was feted recently, whilst Sartre languishes in relative obscurity. And Raymond Aron, who had drunk the apricot cocktails with Sartre and de Beauvoir in 1932, was famous and respected for his pro-western, anti-Communist views when he died in 1983, and his reputation as a political thinker is infinitely higher than Sartre’s today.

The point, I think, is that Existentialism is inherently hard. It’s not all apricot cocktails. To accept that the world has only the sense you give it, that you are free whether you like it or not, that only you can take decisions and you are then responsible for them, is just too much for many people. “We’re on our own” said Sartre. “There are no excuses.” How much more agreeable to believe that there are excuses, that you are weak and powerless, and thus that you are not responsible for anything.

Consider: this strange contemporary cocktail of elements, shaken together, produces a mixture which seems like a point by point refutation of Sartre. Essence precedes existence. The world has a sense: it’s in this book I was reading. I am (like you) totally determined by my race, gender etc. I am imprisoned in an oppressive structure of ideology and discourse. I am a helpless victim. I cannot choose because all alternatives are ultimately the same. I do not even control my thoughts. And I am not responsible for my actions. Above all, whereas Existentialism was born of a period where there was no one to help you, this modern cocktail asks all the time, Mummy, help me. Make it go away. In his 1945 lecture, Sartre recounts how one of his students came to him with a terrible dilemma: to leave his mother alone, and go to join de Gaulle, or to stay at home and become an effective collaborator. Sartre’s reply, unsurprisingly was: only you can decide, and you are responsible for the choice you make. It’s hard to imagine such advice being possible in any context today. This cocktail is, in essence, the drink of a stable society, where wars, revolutions and repression are things of the past. (It is worth pointing out that Existentialism was, and still is, taken much more seriously in countries where war, revolution and repression still exist).

To get an idea of the practical change, consider the difference between two eras of government in France. Many political leaders and government officials in the 1950s came from the Resistance and the Gaullist exiles. Some had come directly from concentration camps. They rebuilt France economically and politically in record time, irrespective of political party, they put an end to colonisation and they radically modernised the country. Then consider what might be described as the first genuinely “post-68” government in France, when members of that generation had completely dominated politics, intellectual life and the media for years. In particular, they had total control of the Socialist Party. After the unpopular Presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-12), the Socialists already controlled most of the political levers in France. In 2012, they won the Presidency with François Hollande, and control of the National Assembly. They could do anything.

They did nothing. Or rather, the main activity of the government was managing the incessant internal feuding within the majority, by giving every interest group its own government post, from which they could make performative gestures and hand-waving speeches. Factories closed, jobs went overseas and social problems continued to mount. Challenged on what the government was actually for, they eventually claimed that their policy was “the struggle against all forms of discrimination.” But of course governments don’t “struggle”: they do things and make things happen.  Likewise, their programmes cannot be confined to the unlimited extension of rights for special interest groups. (We recall that the most famous slogan of 1968 was “it is forbidden to forbid.” This was extended, for example, to widespread support for legalisation of sexual relations with children among many of the post-68 intellectuals.) Retribution was swift: in the 2017 elections, the Socialist candidate was eliminated in the first round with scarcely 5% of the vote. In 2022 she could not manage 2%, and the Socialist Party is effectively dead.  And oddly, or maybe not oddly at all, the current President, Emmanuel Macron, who was not even born in 1968, makes a fetish of the refusal to choose. We can have everything, he says: his famous catch-phrase is “en même temps”: “at the same time.”

In 2020, as the pandemic started to change everything, sales of Camus’s book The Plague took off again. The book is an Existentialist allegory of the Occupation, and shows how individuals responded to it, some well, some badly, some heroically. It deliberately recalls the different choices that were made at the time, some easy, some involving the willing acceptance of danger and death. But it was different this time. Governments the world over decided to surrender to the Virus for fear of political disturbances, just as the French government surrendered in 1940, and intellectuals passed their time in vicious Twitter fights about pronouns, much as Joseph Grand, in The Plague, obsessed over the first sentence of a book he was unable to write.

And now the conflict in the Ukraine has broken out. The long, complacent liberal dream of an eternal, stable, rational post-Cold War world is ending, and it is not clear that our culture is intellectually equipped to handle the stresses and strains that might result. In the near future, we are likely to see a Europe which is militarily weak, politically marginalised, and economically dependent. The situation of the United States, though not identical, will not necessarily be better. Much of the post-1968 political culture (remember those tee-shirts with “be reasonable, demand the impossible!”) has assumed that you can have things automatically by right (decent public services without paying for them, educational qualifications without working for them), and act without consequences (in wars “over there” for example). For a generation of middle-class intellectuals brought up in comfort and security, this was perhaps understandable. It’s not understandable now.

Whether you believe that the set of post-1968 ideas that dominates today constitutes an “ideology” as people like Wesley Yang have argued, or whether you think it’s just an inchoate mess, it’s clear that our present political culture contains nothing at all which might help us to collectively meet the challenges and potential disasters of tomorrow. I see today that the Vice-President of the United States has just said that global warming impacts people with non-white skins especially severely. This may be true, but how can you build a collective policy to combat global warming on that kind of argument, even in principle?

Liberalism, with its tendency towards narcissistic individualism, is inherently incapable of providing a framework for society to act together in the face of common threats. Historically, Liberalism’s concept of conflict has been limited to manageable problems of the distribution of wealth, power and rights, to be decided by reasoned negotiation if possible, or by a court if not. In the past, Liberal societies have always been rescued in times of real crisis by the social cement of things such as religion, political beliefs and national unity, and communities such as political organisations and trades unions. Those things are mostly gone now, or, if still vestigially present, largely powerless. All we have left is ideologies of individual consumption, competitive victimism and demands made to others, from which, even in principle, no common framework for tackling problems can ever emerge. In the event of a real crisis, our only options today are to find others to blame, and demand special treatment for ourselves.

The triumph of Liberal ideology, in both its social and its economic forms, has already seen a corresponding rise in the incidence of mental illness in most western societies. This is not surprising. In practice, most people don’t find the role of simple consumer, divorced from every relation of family, society, community and nation very fulfilling. When they are then ascriptively brigaded into imaginary disciplined communities, depending on skin colour or genital organisation, people naturally feel isolated and lost, and begin to despair. And that is in times which, historically speaking, have been peaceful and stable.

The reality is that people are now on their own, with neither the collective ideologies, nor the personal philosophies such as Existentialism, that helped people survive the horrors of the first half of the last century. Existentialism was, after all, the only modern philosophical idea that ever penetrated the world-view of ordinary, educated people. It is true that we can imagine resurrecting the ghost of Sartre, to say “you are free. Make choices and take responsibility for them.” But would we even know how to, do so these days? When governments can no longer ensure heat and light in our houses, when the shops are half-empty and we cannot afford to buy what is there, when political systems themselves start to fall apart, where will we find the moral strength to go on? And what happens if we don’t?