On First Opening Marcel's Man Against Mass Society

I AM BOTH ticked off and ashamed to find that this late in life I wished that back when I was reading a lot of the then still fashionable existentialism that I never came by or bothered to find out about Gabriel Marcel, a French philosopher, playwright, critic, etc. who I now find out is sometimes identified as one of the first existential philosophers.  I will speculate that my early disgust for the approved, canonized (literally in the literary sense of the word) atheist-existentialists I read (and read of) probably had something to do with me not finding out about him earlier, though some of that might have had to do with which ones were placed more prominently on book store shelves and mentioned in journals and magazines.  I think it was sometime after I read Sartre in the original and realized his plays were stupid and his philosophy maybe even more so, his girlfriend Simone de Beauvoir and found her as worthless a writer that I pretty much said adieu to existentialism.  

Apparently what became of the word "existentialist" was not what Gabriel Marcel would have chosen himself to be identified with later in his life because he wanted to distance himself from the more famously promoted existentialists such as a student of his work, Jean Paul Sartre and others in that camp.  

I'm not far past the first chapters of his post-WWII work translated into English as Man Against Mass Society and I want to start discussing it and encouraging People to read it.  Translated in the language of seventy years after he wrote it, it's as fresh as any of the more informed of current writing on our current troubles. In fact, it's a lot fresher than even most of that, mired as so much of it is in the kind of academic-journalistic abstraction he railed against.  

Most interesting to me in terms of what I post here is the section that starts here:

. . . On the other hand, this hostility of mine towards the spirit of abstraction is quite certainly also at the roots of the feeling of distrust aroused in me, not exactly by democracy itself, but by the sort of ideology which claims to justify democracy on philosophical grounds.  At no time in my life, for instance, has the French Revolution inspired in me anything at al akin to admiration or even attachment; one reason may be that, when I was still very young, I became aware of the ravages in French social life that are due to a sort of egalitarian bigotry.  But another feeling had its effect.  It was also when I was still very young that my parents - for what reason, I am still not too clear - compelled me to read Mignet's very dry history of that great event;  and the other feeling, which that reading aroused, was my innate horror of violence, disorder, cruelty.  

At that time, the glaring abuses in French social and political life which had dragged on until 1789 struck less feelingly hom3 to me than the crimes of the Terror.  Naturally, as time went on, I arrived at a more just or at least a more balanced estimate of the French Revolution.  But the feelings of indignation which the September Massacres and the other mass crimes of the Revolutionary period aroused in me in adolescence, were not, in the end, essentially very different from those much more recently aroused by the horrors of Stalinism or Nazism, or even by the shameful aspects of a purge nearer home.

Can there be any doubt, then, that a bent of mind so deeply rooted is the point of departure of my whole philosophical development?  But my readers, very naturally, will want to ask me if there is any connection that can be grasped between my horror of abstraction and my horror of mass violence.  My answer is that such a connection does certainly exist.  Even for myself, however, it existed for a long time below the level of conscious understanding.  It is, certainly, only at a fairly recent date that it has become explicit to me; since, as I hope to show in detail in the present volume, the spirit of abstraction is essentially of the order of the passions, and since conversely, on the other hand, it is passion, not intelligence, which forget the most dangerous abstractions. Now I can say without hesitation that my own thought has always been directed by a passionate love (but passionate at another level) for music, harmony, peace.  And when I was still very young I grasped the truth that it is impossible to build true peace on abstractions;  though I grasped it, of course, in a form that had not yet reached the stage of conceptual elaboration, (In passing, the fact that it is impossible to build true peace on abstractions is the deepest reason for the failure of the League of Nations, and of other pretentious organizations which resemble it.)  Perhaps also the sort of prejudice which I have always had in favor of Christianity, even during the very long period in which I could not envisage the possibility of becoming a practicing and confessing Christian, may be explained by the unconquerable conviction that I had that, so long as Christianity remained true to itself, Christianity could be the only authentic peacemaker.  

A reader may ask, 'But so far as that goes.  Christians of the Left think as you do;  and it is not perfectly permissible to suppose that Christianity of the Right will always remain conformist in spirit,  that its essence is to try to appease and to manage by tact those who hold power in the world, or even to lean on them for support?'  To that my answer would be that in fact I have always been extremely suspicious of a Christianity of the Right!  I have always thought that such a Christianity runs the risk of distorting in the most sinister fashion the true message of Christ.  (I have even been tempted to adopt as my own certain phrases of Pascal Laumiere's from the final act of my play.  Rome n'est plus dans Rome. [Rome isn't in Rome, anymore].)  Only I should like to add immediately that the men of the Right are very far from having a monopoly on the spirit of conformity and appeasement;  there is a conformism of the Left,  there are men of the Left who hold power in the world, there are 'right-thinking people' (in the conformist sense of the phrase) on the Left as well as the Right;  I remember one day before the war saying something of this sort at the Ambassadeurs,  thus greatly shocking Jacques and Raissa Martian.

One must add that conformism of the Left, not only because it has, if I may put it so, the wind behind its sails these days, but because it is in such glaring contradiction with the principles that the Left claims to be defending, must be denounced just as ruthlessly as conformism of the Right.  Not, of course - this hardly needs saying - that there is any excuse for allowing conformism of the Right, with all it to often implies of blindness and unconscious cruelty, to cash in on that weight of reprobation with which, on this count, one must load the shoulders of the Left.  One must recognize the fact that, in certainly countries of Europe and the Americas, the spirit of clericalism, with the hateful political connivances that it implies, is tending to take on a character that, for a truly Christian conscience, becomes more and more offensive.  The note of a truly honest mode of thinking in these matters, as in book-keeping, is to have a system of double entry, and to prohibit oneself from marking down-by an intellectually fraudulent operation - to the credit of the Right what one has to mark down to the debit of the Left.  I am thinking now of people who, because of their horror of the Soviet world, are today tending to regard Nazism with a certain retrospective tolerance.  That is an aberration - end a criminal aberration.  In any case, who could fail to see at once the simple mechanism of the mental conjuring trick by which we belittle a danger that is past, simply because it is past, or because we believe it past?  Is it really past?  Or may it not in fact appear again, and in a form not radically altered?  In this realm of discourse we must learn once more to express ourselves categorically and to denounce the errors of amoral relativism which is, as may be easily shown, radically self-centered.  Human nature being what it is, the movement which I condemn morally is too often the movement which hurts me personally;  and I am likely to go on condemning it for as long as (and just so long as) it is really able to hurt me.  

I hadn't expected to type out so much of Marcel's introduction but I felt compelled to go on once I started.  I will continue this in the coming days but I want to make several comments on the above.

One of the ways in which the Left and certainly the Right that Marcel wrote about in the late 1940s and early 1950s used to refuse to address what someone like him said was to dishonestly associate him with Nazism or Marxism or some other disfavored ism of the time.  I'm not aware enough to know what his detractors in France and in the English speaking world may have done in that regard to Marcel Gabriel's thought but I know it was the typical way of such discourse.  Something like that, today, is rampant in the attribution of "antisemitism" to any critic of Israel and its many crimes against humanity and in the almost comic clowning of the American Neo-Stalinist fanboys and gals (now uniformly Trumpian Republican-fascists!) calling the most conventional of moderate, democracy loving Democrats "communists" and "Marxists."  

There is fodder of that kind in some of what he says, such as his criticism of Jean Genet.

. . . the novels and characters of Jean Genet are a striking case in point.  From such a novelist's point of view, a middle-class hero practicing the dreary virtues of his retrograde social group is a much less brilliant character than a thief and pervert who has the courage to put into action those desires which, for the plodding bourgeois, never get beyond the stage of unadmitted day dreams.

I am sure that someone old enough to still have the rote-reaction against any criticism of Jean Genet - a hero of the mid-brow "left" who knew the name and that he was "homosexual" and risque and allegedly some kind of persecuted artiste.  I may have held that view of him myself until I did what so few of them bothered to do, read some of his work and I have to say, my reaction to what I read there was akin to my reaction to the crimes against humanity during the French Revolution.  Maybe it's because by that time I had been the victim of a violent crime, ironically, one committed on the basis of my sexual orientation.*

I'm sure many if they read him would be inclined to view Gabriel Marcel through the phony, stupid, left-right "which side are you on" pantomime of political identity which I rejected about fifteen years ago.  Or, more typically, those who might skim him to find the kind of dishonest grounds for launching such a leftist (or rightist) fatwa against him such as is mentioned above.

In regard to Genet and his then fashionable elevation of the gutter level of the demimonde of "perversion" and criminality, pretty much the only reason he ever became a championed figure of the fashionable "left" in France and beyond, I'd seen enough of that even in the pre-Stonewall gay milieu to realize it was a vestige of political and legal oppression and violence which was not sustainable or even desireable.  Ironically, thinking about this since reading the above on Monday, I think one of the most striking "artistic" portrayals of that is in the decidedly non-intellectual, decidedly of that genre John Waters movie Female Trouble in which a rich, thrill seeking couple go trawling through the demimonde of Baltimore, Maryland to thrill at the trashy criminality of the character played by Divine and her two cat thieving, probably prostituting "cheap girl" sidekicks, filming the perversity and violence they encourage, including her character murdering her daughter and (in her first star turn, members of the audience).  I mean, if the John Waters of that period saw through that kind of thing, how much more obvious could it get?  

Of course one of the things that will be grasped onto in that way by the several mid-brows who troll me is his mild semi-criticism of democracy and the phrase "egalitarian bigotry."  I will note that the "democracy" he almost certainly meant was the liberal democracy of post-WWII France, probably that of the United States (which had a long, long list of crimes committed by a government democratically chosen), which I have, as well, come to see as something to be overcome, not maintained.  His phrase "egalitarian bigotry" as well has to be seen in the context of the society and times in which he wrote it.  A society in which morality and virtue, even highest levels of those unattached to self-gain or even self-esteem, were disdained.  The popular literature of the 20th century, especially the most fashionable of it, reveled in violence and moral depravity and the virtue of the mentally and morally lazy, cynicism.  The value placed on spectacle, in line with what was in popular literature, and so depravity and violence, is the predominant strain in even what passed and passes even more, today, as high-art.  The kind of equality which I say is the actual foundation on which a genuine egalitarian democracy has to be founded is an equality of human beings, of natural living beings not an equality that covers their ideas or, really, their preferences generally based on their desires and self-gain.  That ties in with Marcel's condemnation of abstraction but it also figures highly into his skepticism of any democracy, any equality which values those things more highly than it does the lives of People and other living beings.  

My reading of the promoted, and so, in a way, approved atheist existentialists, Sartre, Camus. I suppose de Beauvoir, . .  had, by 1975 filled me with a disgust for the word that I'd pretty much stopped paying attention to it.  I don't see Gabriel Marcel as being anything like that, from the little I've read of him and I feel a kindred feeling with him, I could translate a lot of what he said into my own biography.  Even during my long, stupid and cowardly agnostic period I held to the morality of the Gospel and the Prophets and even much of the radical egalitarian economics of The Law.  I could never acquiesce to the elevation of abstractions over the lives and pain of any others, those who looked and spoke like me or those who I only read about in newspaper estimates of the victims of individual or mass slaughter and maiming.  Clearly the ersatz atheist saints of that time, such as Sartre could blithely support Mao as his regime was murdering millions of Chinese People, just as the Left talked about above could the millions already credibly reported on being murdered by Stalin and Lenin before him, just as D. M. Mackinnon in his Foreword to the English edition points out:

There is a deep, albeit unrecognized kinship between the man who in 1937 was denying Guernica, and the man who in 1947 is justifying, or denying Stalinist deportations and slave camps; ('progress' and 'tradition' are excellent examples of the sort of abstraction from whose tyranny M. Marcel would free us).  

The same kinship finds its banality right now in the American free press which recapitulates that in its "journalistic ethics" that excuse and normalize even the neo-Nazi ravings of Donald Trump and his camp with a monumentally lop-sided "even handedness."  But that will get me on to the dangers of viewing even freedom in the abstract as removed from the inconvenience of morality and the concreteness of reality.

I will try to continue this.