Encore du Péguy

 Något av det bästa och mest relevanta jag läst i en akademisk bok på sistone är förordet i Matthew W. Maguires Carnal Spirit. The Revolutions of Charles Péguy (2019). Verket utgör en mycket noggran och rättvis analys av Péguys tänkande och kan verkligen rekommenderas för den som vill förstå honom på riktigt. Det intressanta är att Maguire själv så uppenbart sympatiserar med Péguy och hans kritik av "de moderna" att utläggningen av Péguys egna synpunkter oundvikligen - och detta är en öppen strävan, därtill helt kongenial med Péguys föreställning om den historiska tidens många dimensioner - tar färg av hur liknande fenomen ter sig i dagens samhälle. Jag ska gå igenom några ställen, så substantiellt träffande och retoriskt exakta att jag bara måste teckna ner dem: 

För Péguy fanns det två skenbart motsatta sätt att vara modern, vi kan kalla dem "progressiv" respektive "reaktionär". Vi börjar med de första:

Credentialed, procedural, and managerial in affect, the advocates of a
new, entirely immanent becoming, thought Péguy, work to transform
institutions patiently from within rather than seeking their overthrow.
Sustained in ways great and small by the ultimate assumptions and
insatiable expansion of global markets—with the market and its
technological artifices as the ubiquitous and paradigmatic form for all
human relations with others and with the world—this process brings the
imperatives of negotiated, contractual exchange and profitable consumption
to all our experiences, guided by the ongoing labor of sciences natural and
social.

The specifically scholarly advocates of this immanence often
complement the progress of technology and of the social sciences with a
highly developed if selective historical consciousness. A methodical and
comprehensive “contextualization” regularly falls with force upon
philosophies of life and the world different from their own; the injustices
that might or ought to be attributed to these views receive close attention,
and the injustices that might or ought to be attributed to the scholar’s views
are passed over in silence. It is assumed—and thus unsurprisingly
concluded—that alternative meanings and accounts of the whole ultimately
owe their existence to atavism...

Whatever their walks of life, the advocates of this immanent, expansive
becoming are at home in universities. Their sense of self is entwined with
them, and the order of merit and prestige attending them. Befitting their
professional status, an appropriate zeal for their own advancement and that
of their allies is suitable, even praiseworthy. To pay dearly in order to live
honestly in a flawed world is regrettably still necessary elsewhere; but
through the expansion of perpetually negotiable becoming to which they
have contributed as scholars and students, there is no longer a tension
between being honored by one’s contemporaries and telling the truth
without reserve.

Among these judgments often rests the assumption that most of the
longstanding particular forms of human conviction, belief, and allegiance
that mediate between individual persons and universal humanity—in
particular, notions of communal continuity, of peoples, and perhaps above
all of religious faith—should be allowed to dissolve inexorably, consumed
by the irresistible velocity of media and scholarship, and the general
liquefaction of identities in the flux of increasingly self-conscious
becoming.
      It is likely, and desirable—a kind of immanent justice—that these older
forms of being human will be altogether absorbed in that continuous,
perpetually contemporary negotiation and exchange, issuing in a cumulative
equanimity of perspective set loose from all particular fictions, all
arbitrarily inherited and given commitments. For the daring, this will
ultimately include the great given of being human. Human being may only
be a transitional moment in becoming’s perpetual advance. Perhaps most
important, a straightforwardly two-dimensional linear time, moving neatly
from past to present to future, will vindicate this immanent and ultimately
universal becoming.

Balansen är perfekt: detta är verkligen vad Péguy täkte, samtidigt som ordvalen på ett uppenbart sätt beskriver en nutida situation; en del kunde ha plockats ur något av de klyftigare nutida försöken att kritisera sammansmältningen mellan "the professional-managerial class" och ett progressivt konsensus. Sen får man förstås inte glömma - även om det är lätt hänt då Péguy faktiskt betydligt utförligare kritiserar sina (forna) vänner i vänstern än sina fiender i radikalhögern - att detta egentligen bara är ena sidan av myntet. För Péguy gällde nämligen att även den till synes rakt motsatta tendensen - den reaktionära - i sig var modern:   

These wrathful particularists often intimate a loyalty to older notions of
transcendence—including religious faith and its avowal of abiding truths—
but they conceive of that which transcends time only as an arrested
immanence. They often present an amalgamated past as a unity, the final
and definitive form for flourishing for themselves and their community, in
which a comprehensive fulfillment was possible, and which now must be
reinserted mechanically into the present, without creativity or surprise.
Within their arrested immanence, they express contempt for their learned
adversaries but also hope—once more the captives of their opponents—that
“science” will confirm their particularism and its prejudices.

(Vi bör notera i förbigående - Maguire skriver inte ut det på detta ställe - att detta var sant i en väldigt konkret mening, om vi ser till Péguys omedelbara motståndare i Action française. På samma sätt som man idag kan ha en rent anti-intellektualistisk hållning och samtidigt plocka lite rön från evolutionsbiologin, kunde Charles Maurras se sig själv som en arvtagare till Comte och 1800-talspositivismen: hans monarkism var inte baserad på legitimitet utan på dess uppfattade sociala funktionalitet.) 

Maguire påpekar mycket riktigt att de konflikter Péguy skrev om har dykt upp i nutiden med en ny och oroande kraft. Så är det. Jag försökte själv komma åt något av detta i en text jag skrev om Péguy i Axess men jag vet inte om jag lyckades träffa målet. Säkert är i alla fall att om man är sugen på en humanistisk kritik av båda de positioner som ingår i det s k kulturkriget, måste man läsa Péguy.

Det intressanta är att Maguire efter att ha skissat dessa grundkoordinater i Péguys tänkande går vidare till att applicera dem på själva Péguyforskningen, vilken alltså avslöjar sig som "modern" och därmed döv inför väsentliga aspekter hos det objekt de velat förstå. Det gäller för det första den bild som byggts upp av forskningen inom maskulinitet, fascism och liknande och som ofta bara sett Péguy som en deltagare i ett diskursivt rum man redan vet allting om och därför inte behöver undersöka i detalj. Här finns en fix och färdig tolkning av hur de gamla värdena i konflikt med moderniteten ledde fram till fascismen och krigen:

This type of argument has become a kind of standard model for a great deal of writing about late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. In it, it is claimed, or
assumed, that the public, civic culture of the West in general, and Europe in
particular, labored to prolong with only minor or at most gradual
adjustments the presumed (as we understand, a selectively muted and
amplified) culture of a premodern, traditional society with origins in the
early modern or even the medieval period and its classical inheritance.
In this account, this culture artificially prolonged and intensified often
rigid distinctions of gender and caste, a sense of beauty and morals and
metaphysics and honor, accompanied by other aspirations, prejudices, and
hierarchies from its past. It dimly perceived but refused to accept that this
public, civic culture had been stretched beyond the technological, social,
economic, material, and cultural imperatives that gave it its suasive power.
This disjunction produced “crises” and “anxieties” about decadence and
decline...above all, historians trace the pathologies that sought to freely combine
a steroidal enhancement of sundry limiting atavisms with the distinctive
technological, ideological, and (often pseudo-) scientific possibilities of
modern culture. It was this pathological response to an emerging late or
postmodernity that brought Europe—or at the least, left Europe vulnerable
—to the hecatombs of 1914–1945.

Detta känner man igen om man är det minsta bekant med den moderna forskningen om perioden. Vilken är då dess bakomliggande moral? Ty en sådan finns ju, även om historiker inte alltid vill framstå som aktivister. Troligtvis måste den baseras på ett modernt - enligt Péguy - partitagande: 

One moral of the standard model of late modern Europe tends to assume
the following, applying its truth of immanent becoming to the origins of the
twentieth century’s catastrophes: the notion of a rigorously ethical, integral,
strong, persistent, and sacrificial self is not a source of resistance to fascism
but rather and ultimately is a precondition and enabler of fascism.
Following Foucault and others, advocates of the standard model have
implied and asserted that resistance to fascism, and more generally to
modern tyrannies of either a bluntly political or a more subtle kind, can be
attributed to a refusal or repression of discontinuous identities, desires, and
forms of expression.

Given this account of fascism’s ultimate inner hold upon us via our very
notions of self and self-command, it is rather awkward that resistance to
fascism in the twentieth century was often carried out by those with a robust
attachment to some considerable portion of the aesthetic, moral, and
metaphysical commitments that many contemporary scholars consider to
be, as it were, incipiently fascist in their internal logic. They include
integral selves making deliberate moral decisions at great personal cost,
founded in what is often a mixture of quite traditional and quite modern
notions of virtue and civic good associated with solidarity, courage,
equality, integrity, independence, duty, socialism, Christianity, Judaism,
humanism, and so on.

Att besinna.