Violence against openings

All openings, which are irruptions of novelty, provoke resistance and violence. Why do humans in society so fear what comes to disturb their certainties? I propose to understand this collective reflex, in order to preserve freedom, in other words critical thinking.

The subversive nature of opening

When I speak of “opening,” I deliberately borrow from the metaphor of the door. To open is to give oneself the chance to glimpse other universes that can both disrupt and emancipate. But far from any comfort, an authentic opening necessarily implies the unexpected; it is a questioning, never a simple extension of the familiar. Its principle is to bring about what could not be foreseen. If it had been possible to anticipate what it brings, it would only be one more step on an already marked path, therefore not an opening. To imagine, for reassurance, that an opening should be predictable, is to betray its essence. We can sometimes have the retrospective illusion that makes us believe we had anticipated what, in reality, had surprised and destabilized us, which is a form of revisionism.

The unpredictable nature of opening is fundamental. As philosopher Gaston Bachelard reminds us in Applied Rationalism (1949), “novelty cannot be foreseen, it is constructed”. Opening confronts us precisely with that for which our mind was not prepared. This is what Henri Bergson already suggested in Creative Evolution (1907): “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to understand”, thus the eye is essentially closed to novelty. The unexpected therefore naturally sets in motion an initial mistrust, because it escapes our known and recognized evaluation criteria. As long as no criterion of authority comes to legitimize this novelty, it remains profoundly destabilizing.

Thus, any form of real change, whether artistic, political, social or intimate, disturbs the systems in place. These, to continue being legitimate, must seek to neutralize the breach. Opening then appears as a threat, not because it is bad in itself, but because it makes the existing framework unstable and potentially exposes the precariousness of certainties, which is their antithesis.

Collective assent, key to acceptance

Faced with uncertainty, the human, this social animal, does not first call upon their own judgment, but that of the collective. They seek security at the heart of the group, turning toward the authority of peers, leaders or the community. As Hannah Arendt analyzed in The Crisis of Culture (1961), authority imposes itself with the most force in moments of upheaval, where the individual seeks to absolve themselves of the burden and risk inherent in exercising critical thinking. For an opening to obtain status, become legitimate, admissible, even recommendable, it must be validated by the norm, therefore pass a stage.

Here emerges a major paradox of our societies: we glorify critical thinking in theory, but we sanction it as soon as it manifests outside of consensus. Thinking differently exposes one to suspicion, social stigmatization, even hostility. As Roland Barthes said during his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1977: “The property of censorship is not to silence, but to forbid thinking”. In post-democratic West, thinking for oneself has become suspect. Think of the recent period of Covid, where any disagreement, even the most well-founded, exposed one to immediate and radical social exclusion. This took place today even, 3 or 4 years ago, it wasn’t in distant times when neither Hannah Arendt, nor Michel Foucault, nor Giorgio Agamben, had yet expressed themselves.

On the other hand, once novelty is validated by the group, the majority hastens to conform to it with palpable relief, that of belonging again to the dominant current. The individual, alone, can then only choose to adhere, and no longer to decide. Adapting is ultimately not so difficult and is even very quick, once one has abdicated the responsibility of judging for oneself. We could see during the Covid period the entire society modify almost overnight its way of life and thinking about the world.

Any opening, however obvious it may seem to us today, will therefore have first weathered this double trial: initial fear, then mimetic regimentation. And certain openings, never legitimized by the powers in place (because there are different instances of power, of course, linked to communities, the State, family, religion, peers, etc.), remain stigmatized.

Social violence against bearers of openings

What happens when opening does not find this collective endorsement? If it is not quickly legitimized by a recognized authority, the mechanism brutally reverses. The initial fear, left to itself, metamorphoses into hostility. What was only a new proposition is immediately relegated to the register of existential danger, a threat that seems indispensable to exclude, reject, discredit to ensure one’s psychic and social survival. What is quite terrible is how much each individual, convinced of their probity, can become an executioner, in service of what they perceive as their responsibility to ensure the survival of the social system. It is not “society” that excludes, it is the people themselves. This defense reaction then unfortunately passes through a muted or open violence, of an intensity that can seem cruel and disproportionate.

This violence is never motivated by the relevance of the proposition, but by the archaic fear of change and the terror of finding oneself alone facing the requirement of personal judgment. Mechanisms of disqualification and symbolic annihilation are put in place. Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish (1975), brilliantly theorized this process: it involves setting aside what threatens the established order, even if this threat is only a possible contribution to the collectivity. Group speech then legitimizes violence, giving it a veneer of justice and necessity. History is full of these examples where critical thinking or non-conformist creativity have been punished, sometimes to the point of persecution. And, many years later, we can rehabilitate what had been most stigmatized. Think of Alan Turing, condemned by justice in 1952, who committed suicide in 1954, rehabilitated only in 2013, finally receiving official and public recognition of his exceptional contribution to science and of the suffering inflicted by his own country for his sexuality. Think of the resistants of World War II, considered as dangerous terrorists, and then as liberators. Moreover, during the war itself, the official voice of the French State knew with great efficiency how to discredit the so-called “liberators,” thanks to what is called “the red poster” (1944), which is here:

This violence often clothes itself in the garments of virtue: it is invoked in the name of common sense, prudence, respect for traditions, public safety, or even health security. In reality, it is the armed wing of a good conscience that is completely unconscious. This is what René Girard analyzed with his scapegoat theory in Violence and the Sacred (1972): collective violence falls upon the one who puts the apparent unity of the group in peril. By desire to remain aggregated to the security of the majority, one can thus renounce even one’s close ones, dissociating oneself from those whose opening could have enriched us, as well as the collectivity.

Toward an ethics of active tolerance

If we hold to critical thinking, and therefore to democracy, we must be conscious of these processes. The exercise of personal judgment exposes one to social solitude and to multiple forms of violence. The song by Georges Brassens, Bad Reputation (1952), perfectly depicts how “good people” become, in the name of their tranquility, the most merciless censors of what could simply enrich them and open their eyes. The greatest threat often comes from those who are moved by fear.

Cultivating critical thinking then requires reconnecting with what Kant, in What is Enlightenment? (1784), called the “courage to use one’s own understanding” (Sapere aude). To offer an opening to the collectivity is to accept receiving first its blows much more than its gratitude. This is not a call to victimization, but to lucidity. However, it is not because we are rejected that we must reject in return. It is about not responding to violence with closure, but inventing an ethics of active tolerance: the capacity to hear, understand, even accompany those who attack us out of fear. This is a difficult but fruitful path: not to close the door on those who slam it in our face. This is a path I learned to take during the Covid period.

This posture finds its limit in the famous paradox formulated by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945): “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the impact of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with it”. My proposition is not resignation, but tenacious resistance. It is, as Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “in the knowledge of the authentic conditions of our life that we must draw the strength to live and reasons to act”. True opening is never an act of violence, but it is often perceived as such. Understanding this dynamic and resisting it with endurance is the price to pay so that freedom, innovation and democracy continue to be living conquests.