Taking sides, for and against, says Simone Weil, is an intellectual leprosy that originated in the political world and contaminated all forms of thinking.
Accordingly, this essay, translated into English for the first time, argues that political parties corrupt political life and should be abolished.
Simone Weil was an acclaimed French philosopher, Christian mystic and social activist, whose life was marked by an exceptional compassion for the suffering of others.
Although writing in 1943 about “serious” continental political parties, rather than Anglo-Saxon parties that had an element of a game about them, everything she says will ring true to an Australian audience.
The only legitimate reason for preserving something, Weil says, is its goodness; the criteria for goodness being truth and justice and then the public interest.
You can only approach the truth if you desire the truth and truth alone.
Democracy, she says, is only good if it provides a mechanism for truth and justice to prevail.
Weil refers to Rousseau’s notion of the general will; how reason chooses the just, consensus points at the truth and passion leads to crime.
Divergent collective passions belong to criminal gangs, who, unlike passionate individuals, do not neutralise one another.
People must express their will regarding the problems of public life and not merely choose among various individuals or organisations.
Means and ends reversed
Weil says, “We pretend that our present system is democratic, yet the people never have the chance nor the means to express their views on any problem of public life. Any issue that does not pertain to particular interests is abandoned to collective passions, which are systematically and officially inflamed.”
And there can be no legitimate democracy, she says, while there are political parties inflaming collective passions.
Since political parties are designed to generate collective passions and to exert collective pressure on the minds of all individual members; and since the party’s ultimate goal is its own growth, without limit — whenever thinking individuals are dominated by a collective structure there is a reversal of the relation between ends and means.
“Goodness alone is an end,” says Weil. “Whatever belongs to the domain of facts pertains to the category of means. Collective thinking, however, cannot rise above the factual realm. It is an animal form of thinking. Its dim perception of goodness merely enables it to mistake this or that means for an absolute good.”
And then: “The goal of a political party is something vague and unreal. If it were real, it would demand a great effort of attention, for the mind does not easily encompass the concept of the public interest. Conversely, the existence of the party is something concrete and obvious; it is perceived without an effort. Therefore, unavoidably, the party becomes in fact its own end.”
Weil says, “One cannot serve both God and Mammon. If one’s criterion of goodness is not goodness itself, one loses the very notion of what is good.
“Once the growth of the party becomes a criterion of goodness, it follows inevitably that the party will exert a collective pressure upon people’s minds. This pressure is very real; it is openly displayed; it is professed and proclaimed. It should horrify us, but we are already too much accustomed to it.”
Weil illustrates clearly how parties do not necessarily — and how necessarily they do not — best serve the public interest and justice. Their very existence precludes it.
Joining a political party in order to play an effective part in public affairs is evil, she says; an evil whose punishment is inner darkness.
“When a country has political parties, sooner or later it becomes impossible to intervene effectively in public affairs without joining a party and playing the game. Whoever is concerned for public affairs will wish his concern to bear fruit. Those who care about the public interest must either forget their concern and turn to other things, or submit to the grind of the parties. In the latter case, they shall experience worries that will supersede their original concern for the public interest.”
Secular churches
This sorry situation Weil tracks back to the Church: “We must acknowledge that the mechanism of spiritual and intellectual oppression which characterises political parties was historically introduced by the Catholic Church in its fight against heresy.”
And it was Reformation and Renaissance humanism — twin products of the revolt against the Church that attempted to stifle the spirit of truth — that inspired in large part the spirit of 1789 (the beginning of the French Revolution), which “resulted in our democracy, based on the interplay of political parties, each of which is a small secular church that wields its own menace of excommunication. The influence of these parties has contaminated the entire mentality of our age.”
With very few exceptions, says Weil, when a man joins a political party, he submissively adopts a mental attitude that he will express later on with words such as, “As a monarchist, as a socialist, I think that … ”
It is so comfortable, she says. “It amounts to having no thoughts at all. Nothing is more comfortable than not having to think.”
Of further interest to the modern reader, Weil briefly touches on press guidelines, science, art, celebrity, religion and anti-religion. “When talking about religion, the point was even reached where one spoke of ‘militants’.”
In his essay on the influence of Weil, literary critic and author Simon Leys attempts to refute arguments that Weil is being utopian, unrealistic and impractical. Weil, no doubt, will still seem crazy and irrelevant to those confined within the parameters of the game (among whom, we are now well aware, are most of those we depend on for serious political commentary).
This slim publication, also containing an essay by Nobel Prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz “on the importance of Simone Weil”, would seem the perfect book to read in an Australian election year.
Stephen Webb
Outside of the academic environment, a harsh and seemingly ever-growing debate has appeared, concerning how mass media distorts the political agenda. Few would argue with the notion that the institutions of the mass media are important to contemporary politics. In the transition to liberal democratic politics in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe the media was a key battleground. In the West, elections increasingly focus around television, with the emphasis on spin and marketing.