Our Time of Damaged Thought
The insubstantiality of modernism and technicity is doing us in.
by Matthew Omolesky
August 15, 2020, 12:01 AM
Maurice Berger, the French child psychologist, psychoanalyst, and professor at the National School of Magistrates, has spent some four decades working with violent and delinquent children and adolescents in institutions like the Centre éducatif fermé. Since the early 1990s he has warned of a steady increase in gratuitous violence, only to find, as he put in a recent interview with Le Figaro, that “the attitude of successive governments has been implicitly to think ‘after me, the flood,’ only the flood is now here.†It is simply astonishing to hear that in France a criminal complaint is now filed for an act of gratuitous violence roughly every two minutes, indicating an outbreak of civil disorder of positively gargantuan proportions. (An article by Guy Millière of the University of Paris, “The Reverse-Colonization of France,†gives some sense of the almost ubiquitous barbarism currently wracking that nation.) The origins of this mounting socio-pathological crescendo are complex. Endemic domestic violence engenders the worst sort of learned behavior, while group codes of morality have become quite at odds with, while taking absolute precedence over, external laws and traditional norms. And yet the taproots of the crisis may lie even deeper, in what Berger calls “damaged thought.â€
“We are in an exhausted civilization. We only love what hates us, anything that destroys us is seen as great. There is a desire to destroy truth, history.â€
When looking back on his patient interactions, Berger marveled at the near total lack of empathy on display. “None of the young people I met showed a real feeling of guilt for their violence.†One offender flatly stated that “we were bored, so we set fire to a warehouse,†while another inmate responded to a question about how his victim’s mother must have felt with a callous shrug: “She would have been sad for a moment, then you have to move on and not feel sorry for your whole life, it’s silly [ballot]. He would have died one day anyway.†It was at this point, the psychologist realized, that “destroying, like hitting, is the game of those who have no imagination,†no capacity for fellow feeling. Berger admitted to feeling “destabilized†by this new awareness, appearing as it does to close off most every therapeutic avenue. What is really needed, Berger concluded, is something far grander in scale than that which a lone psychiatrist can provide: a vigorous push to “re-legitimize a very firm principle of authority at all levels (school, respect for the police, etc.) in order to restructure our collective functioning and to prevent the loss of any idea of ‘common good.’†Excellent advice, but it would seem that there are vanishingly few in positions of authority, in France or elsewhere, who are inclined to take it.
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https://spectator.org/our-time-of-damaged-thought/
