Cet auteur est mort récemment (ce blog en a brièvement parlé). En passant par Google, vous retrouverez cet extrait dans une revue conservatrice américaine – mais ce n’est pas le but du jeu. Deuxième défi : trouvez la date, et donc le contexte.
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There remain many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by occasional outbursts of boldness and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments and with countries that lack support, or with doomed currents which clearly cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.
N’allez pas croire que je diffuse ce texte par accord intellectuel avec l’auteur. Au contraire : sa proposition est invérifiable, et je trouve sa sympathie pour l’antithèse assez effrayante. Un peu plus loin, on peut lire :
Even biology tells us that a high degree of habitual well-being is not advantageous to a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to take off its pernicious mask.
Certains accents du texte sont spontanément sympathiques, en particulier lorsque l’on connaît le passé de l’auteur. La lucidité du diagnostic est souvent imparable ; mais comme dans toutes les critiques de la décadence, on perçoit mal l’alternative souhaitable.
Today’s Western society has revealed the inequality between the freedom for good deeds and the freedom for evil deeds. A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; thousands of hasty (and irresponsible) critics cling to him at all times; he is constantly rebuffed by parliament and the press. He has to prove that his every step is well-founded and absolutely flawless. Indeed, an outstanding, truly great person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind does not get any chance to assert himself; dozens of traps will be set for him from the beginning. Thus mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints.
It is feasible and easy everywhere to undermine administrative power and it has in fact been drastically weakened in all Western countries. The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
On the other hand, destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.
Enfin, ceux qui me connaissent un peu relèveront la critique à laquelle je tiens le plus : celle du journalisme. La médiocrité endémique des pouvoirs élus m’a toujours semblé moins grave que celle-ci :
The press, too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word “press” to include all the media.) But what use does it make of it? […]
Hastiness and superficiality—these are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century and more than anywhere else this is manifested in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press; it is contrary to its nature. The press merely picks out sensational formulas.
Curieusement, on retrouve par certains moments la pensée de George Orwell (je recommande à tous ses interventions à la BBC pendant la guerre, éditées par Penguin).
Mise à jour, 16 août 2008 : bien vu à celui qui a répondu par email : Alexandre Soljenitsyne s’est adressé dans ces termes aux étudiants d’Harvard, en 1978. Très bon texte de Nicolas Weill à son sujet dans Le Monde.
J’ai récemment trouvé cette phrase d’Oscar Wilde qui complète tellement bien le propos de Soljenitsyne sur la presse :
There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
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