Delegated Thinking

An intellectual person close to me asserts to me one day, as an established fact, what she has read on the cover of Le Monde: that the newly elected far-right mayors are already “uninhibited.” She has not read the article itself. I had seen that same cover, too. But I would never have drawn from this headline so firm an assertion, without first reading the article and understanding how it was built, on which examples and according to which method. This ordinary scene opens a question that concerns me for democracy: how is it that people who see themselves as intellectuals suspend their critical thinking on certain topics, while exercising it rigorously on others?

An ordinary scene

The other day, an intellectual person close to me, trained in thinking, was telling me about the newly elected Rassemblement National mayors. She asserted to me, as an established fact, that they are already “uninhibited” in the exercise of their new functions. She was relying on that day’s cover of Le Monde, which ran the front-page headline “Les premiers pas désinhibés des maires RN” (“The first uninhibited steps of the RN mayors”) and summarized the angles of the investigation in five columns: increased allowances, hiring of municipal police, removal of the European flag in Liévin, hostility toward culture and unions, and the European Public Prosecutor’s investigation into Jordan Bardella’s “media training” expenses. I asked her if she had read the article. No. I had seen that same cover too, I told her. She maintained her position. What she was expressing came not from the article; it came from the fact that Le Monde had published it.

I found the scene troubling, because I had had access to exactly the same information as she had, and I had drawn from it a very different reaction. To form a firm opinion from this cover, one would have had to read the entire article. To understand how the investigation had been constructed, on what sample among the seventy newly elected mayors the examples had been drawn, what criteria served to qualify a practice as “uninhibited” rather than as “assumed,” what space counterexamples occupied if there were any, what sources had been interviewed and which had been set aside. The headline alone gives none of these elements. The summary on the cover does not either. And yet the person in front of me was speaking, on the strength of this cover, with the same assurance as if she had conducted the investigation herself.

This person devotes, by the way, considerable energy to deconstructing dominant discourses in her professional field. On other subjects she exercises a fine thinking, attentive to nuances, to the historicity of concepts, to the conflicts of interest underlying scholarly statements. On this subject, however, the credit given to the newspaper served as investigation, and the headline seen on the cover served as thought. The anecdote is small. But it opens a question that has long concerned me: why do intelligent, educated people, capable of complexity, suspend their critical thinking on certain topics, and why do they suspend it precisely where thought would be most necessary?

Reading especially what suits me

I must clarify my own position, because it sheds light on what follows. I share, like this person, the political distrust of the Rassemblement National. As I read the cover of Le Monde, I myself was inclined to agree: yes, no doubt, these mayors are already uninhibited, and yes, this is troubling. It is precisely because of this inclination that I wanted to read the article. I make a point of not suspending my critical thinking on subjects where I am convinced in advance, because that is precisely where thinking for oneself is put to the test. In the same way, I regularly buy books with which I know in advance I will not agree, so as not to reduce my reading to what confirms me. Thinking needs friction to stay alive.

I write this article knowing that I could be accused of defending the RN mayors, or even populism as a whole. It is the opposite. The partial, situated view that believes itself pure and dominates without being aware of doing so is precisely one of the central arguments of contemporary populism when it denounces comfortable elites and “the system.” Refusing this posture in oneself, where one is, is to disarm this argument where it has its share of truth. It is, in my view, the opposite of a defense of the Rassemblement National. It is a condition of political lucidity, and it is what makes it possible to continue fighting it without proving it right on the angles where it is, unfortunately, right.

Credit as a dispensation from thinking

To trust a reference newspaper is not in itself unreasonable. Social life rests on chains of trust, one cannot verify everything oneself, and one must, to live, give credit to certain words and to certain institutions. The problem begins when the credit given becomes a dispensation from thinking, and one relays as knowledge an assertion one has not examined.

In Propagande, la manipulation de masse dans le monde contemporain (Propaganda. Mass Manipulation in the Contemporary World, 2019), David Colon documents a reality that runs counter to a commonly received idea:

“According to one last received idea, propaganda would affect primarily the least educated and least informed individuals, education appearing as the best bulwark against propagandists. Yet everything indicates, on the contrary, that propaganda affects primarily the most cultivated milieus and those most able to access information.”

The more educated individuals access information, the more they need a framework to organize it, and the more they become dependent on the framework that legitimate media offer them. Thinking for oneself, which would require on each subject an inquiry, a doubt, a suspension of judgment, is considerable work, almost inhuman in its complete demand. The credit given to a respected media outlet is, on the contrary, a massive cognitive economy. One saves time, one saves room in one’s head, and one also gains, more subtly, a sense of belonging to a community of viewpoints and values.

Pascal: thinking disturbs

Blaise Pascal, in a fragment of the Pensées (posthumous publication, 1670), formulated an intuition that sheds light on this mechanism. “All of humanity’s problems stem from one single thing, which is not knowing how to remain quietly in a room.” Diversion, in the Pascalian sense, is not frivolous distraction. It is everything that spares us the face-to-face with ourselves and with the complexity of the real. Pascal was thinking of hunting, gaming, war. One can extend the list: commentary without inquiry, conviction without examination, reading without thinking are contemporary forms of this diversion. They occupy us enough that we do not have to confront what disturbs.

Thinking disturbs, because thinking is to suspend, to doubt, to accept not knowing, and sometimes to discover oneself aligned with what one would not have wanted to be. It is an uncomfortable psychic work, which can threaten the image one has of oneself and the one offered to others. The credit given to institutional authority, whether it be a newspaper, an expert, or the community to which one belongs, anesthetizes this discomfort. It dispenses with the loneliness in front of what one does not know.

Arendt: thinking without bannisters

Hannah Arendt speaks, in several of her texts, of “thinking without bannisters.” Thinking, in this formulation, is not unfolding a reasoning within a framework already acquired. It is accepting that the frameworks themselves may be questioned, and that the railing to which one clings may, at some point, no longer hold. Such thinking is rare, because it is anxiety-inducing. It is no one’s particular property, and it can, sometimes, occur in anyone, when an event comes to shake acquired certainties.

During the Covid crisis, I saw many cultivated, intelligent, free, lucid people, sometimes even anarchists, suspend their critical thinking at the moment when it would have been most necessary. I saw in parallel people whom these same intellectuals sometimes despised, modest employees, peasants, artisans, maintain a lucidity that the former had lost. This reversal struck me. It is not anecdotal, and it deserves to be analyzed for what it says about the concrete conditions of free thinking.

The position from which we speak

Contemporary feminist thought offers on this point a fertile hypothesis, that of situated knowledge. Donna Haraway, in her article “Situated Knowledges” (1988), contests the idea of a knowledge produced from nowhere, what Thomas Nagel had called, two years earlier, in The View from Nowhere (1986), the view from nowhere. All knowledge is produced from a body, a context, interests, a history. The claim of objectivity is, according to Haraway, most often the concealment of a particular position that claims to be universal. Sandra Harding, in the same vein, proposes the notion of “strong objectivity”: it is by making one’s situated position explicit that one moves toward greater objectivity, while the claim to a view from above produces a “weak objectivity” that masks its own biases.

Beyond its epistemological relevance, this tradition carries an ethical gesture that I find decisive. It is about knowing that one is oneself part of the problem one claims to analyze. One is never outside. One is an actor of the system, even when one is not aware of it, and even when one denounces its effects. To place oneself in a position of overhead to criticize the world is precisely to be in denial of the fact that one is, oneself, a cog in what one criticizes. This denial is, in my view, what prevents critical thinking from fully deploying itself in many intellectuals.

The civilizing mission and its underside

This posture of the view from above has a history. It is, in my view, the direct heir of the civilizing mission that justified European colonialism. Aimé Césaire, in Discourse on Colonialism (1950), showed how abstract humanism, of the type “we, the civilized, know what is good for them, the non-civilized,” was the ideological engine of domination. Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), described the symbolic violence with which the colonizer imposes his language, his categories, his criteria of truth, and ends up convincing some of the colonized of their own cognitive inferiority.

What struck me during the Covid period was that the same structure was replayed within the national space, between social classes and between levels of education. “We, the enlightened, know what is good for them, the ignorant.” Western health diplomacy provided a textbook case at the global scale. African countries that did not vaccinate massively were considered, in European discourse, to be “behind,” “ill-informed,” “victims of disinformation.” That these countries might have had, on this question, a health policy reasoned with regard to their epidemiological realities (young population, low effective Covid mortality, other health priorities) was almost never considered. The “civilized versus backward” grid functioned as self-evident, including among intellectuals on the left who had nonetheless read Fanon. Colonialism survives in minds long after the end of empires, including in those who believe themselves the most removed from it.

Lucidity from the margins

In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), bell hooks makes a similar observation from the experience of African-American women. The margins see what the center does not see. Not because the marginalized are essentially more lucid, but because they do not have the illusion of occupying the place from which one speaks for everyone. The center, on the contrary, takes its categories as universal evidence, and has no reason to question them, since its categories are the world, in its eyes.

This is what is at play, for example, in the patriarchal relation between men and women. Men do not, in general, see the problems women experience, because they are not in their place. They do not perceive the risky life that women lead in public space, at work, in intimate relations. Worse, they often do not even realize that they are dominating, because they are situated at the place of domination, and that place is, for them, the world as it is. What appears as violence to some appears as banality to others, and the absence of violence felt by the latter serves them as proof that everything is fine.

The Covid crisis replayed this structure at another scale. The people at the center of the system, those who continued to receive their salary while teleworking, who were not excluded from their employment as long as they accepted some inconvenience, who could be vaccinated without it posing any problem in their lives, could not even realize that there was a problem. They did not see that those next to them, sometimes ten meters away, were being stigmatized, excluded from their employment, dehumanized by unprecedented legal arrangements. They looked at the world from their comfortable position, and their comfort served them as proof that the system, on the whole, was functioning well. Meanwhile, people with little education, sometimes without a diploma, sometimes workers or peasants, sensed, sometimes very early on, that something was not right. Not through erudition, but through an intimate knowledge of the way the powerful treat the powerless, and through an ancient memory of the violence of “benevolent” states.

The uncomfortable mirror

During this period, I had to acknowledge something that disturbs me. On sanitary totalitarianism, on the suspension of public liberties, on the biopolitical drift, some of the most accurate analyses came from people whom I place at the opposite of my political values. Reactionary people, sometimes from the far right. The immediate temptation is to sweep aside their analyses on the grounds of their ideology, but this reality seems to me to call for more reflection than rejection, because it says something about the blind spots of a thought that believes itself on the side of good.

First hypothesis: these people were right for the wrong reasons. Their distrust of the State, of science, of mainstream media is constitutive of their ideology. On this episode, their distrust happened to align with an empirical reality. This does not validate their ideology or their values. It says simply that a broken clock is right twice a day.

But there is a second hypothesis, more uncomfortable. If the intellectual left, which claims to be the guardian of liberties and human rights, missed the appointment, it is also because it has become institutional. Its employment, its legitimacy, its funding, its publications are, for the most part, within the perimeter of state power, of large administrations and large corporations. It can no longer think against these structures without risking what holds it up. The distrust of the State, which it abandoned as a theme, has been picked up by others, who do with it what they can. One does not owe them an acquittal for that. One does, however, owe it to seriously take up the questioning that has been left to them.

Laurent Mucchielli, in Défendre la démocratie, une sociologie engagée (Defending Democracy: An Engaged Sociology, 2023), documented with precision how this process played out in the media field during Covid. When a scientific conference on the assessment of Covid controversies was held at the IHU in Marseille in March 2022, about fifteen press articles were published before the conference took place, by journalists who did not attend it, in order to discredit it in advance. Intellectual content no longer mattered to these journalists; only the political position of the participants did. This phenomenon, in which belonging determines what one is authorized to examine, also affected a large part of the academic and intellectual world, including researchers whose earlier work should have made them vigilant.

Why suspend one’s thinking

Several causes combine, in my view, to explain this suspension of thinking among people otherwise capable of complexity. The social cost of dissent, which can go as far as job loss or professional exclusion. The narcissistic fragility of contemporary intellectuals, whose recognition is no longer economic but purely symbolic, and who can no longer afford to be wrong without losing what makes them exist. The religious dimension of belief, which transforms a political opinion into a fundamental identity. I have addressed each of these dimensions in other articles, and I do not return to them here.

There remains a more structural cause, which seems to me the most profound. Thinking for oneself, in Arendt’s sense, requires an anchoring that is not of an intellectual order. This anchoring is of the order of the body, of lived bonds, of concrete experience of situations. Intellectuals, by profession, live a great deal in language and in the community of their peers. What sustains them daily is less their direct experience of the world than the recognition that their community gives them. When this community requires a certain thought in order to be able to continue offering this recognition, suspending one’s critical thinking becomes a gesture of self-preservation.

A person who has a manual trade, who lives in a village, who has no need to be validated by a public stage to feel they exist, can afford intuitions against the grain without it threatening their anchoring. This lucidity comes from no moral superiority, but from a lesser dependence on symbolic recognition. This is, in my view, one of the simplest explanations of the paradox I have often observed.

“I am part of the problem”

If we want to come out of this suspension of thinking, we must accept knowing that we are ourselves part of the problem. To give up the posture of the view from above, which consists of analyzing the world while believing ourselves sheltered from the mechanisms we denounce. To recognize that we, too, are traversed by fears, by needs for belonging, by chains of dependence that constitute our relation to power. To recognize, above all, that we may be wrong, and that we probably are, on subjects we have not yet identified as such.

This recognition is, in my view, the condition for a democracy that works. A democracy supposes that everyone can, at some moment, be wrong, and organizes the conditions for these errors to be identified, debated, corrected. When a fraction of society believes itself exempt from this possibility of error, and authorizes itself thereby to impose its certainties on others, it prepares a totalitarianism, whatever the apparent rightness of its ideas.

The anecdote of the newspaper read without being read, with which I began, is a minor case. But it says something about the disposition of mind that makes the worst things possible. When one allows oneself to know without having read, without having inquired, without having doubted, one has already begun to let someone else think on one’s behalf.

This article owes much to the conversations and inspirations of Estelle Le Goasduff, whom I thank.