André Glucksmann

André Glucksmann, one of the most prominent of the French “New Philosophers,” a group of former radicals who broke with Marxism in the 1970s and became an intellectual counterweight to France’s political left, died on Tuesday in Paris. He was 78. 

His death was announced on Facebook by his son Raphaël. The cause was not given, but Mr. Glucksmann had been ill with cancer for years.

Mr. Glucksmann came to prominence in May 1968, when, as a teacher and militant Marxist at the Sorbonne, he publicly cheered on the student revolt both there and, a year later, at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes, where he and the philosopher Michel Foucault led the intellectual charge.

He joined the Proletarian Left, a Maoist group, in the early 1970s, but soon became disenchanted with revolutionary politics. He was dismayed when the group kidnapped a Renault executive and, as a Jew, was shocked when radical Palestinians murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. 

The turning point came with the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” a work that transformed him into an implacable enemy of the Soviet Union and all ideologies. 

In 1975, in “The Cook and the Cannibal,” Mr. Glucksmann subjected Marxism to a scalding critique. Two years later, he broadened his attack in his most influential work, “The Master Thinkers,” which drew a direct line from the philosophies of Marx, Hegel, Fichte and Nietzsche to the enormities of Nazism and Soviet Communism. It was they, he wrote in his conclusion, who “erected the mental apparatus which is indispensable for launching the grand final solutions of the 20th century.”

An instant best seller, the book put him in the company of several like-minded former radicals, notably Bernard-Henri Lévy and Pascal Bruckner. Known as the nouveaux philosophes, a term coined by Mr. Lévy, they became some of France’s most prominent public intellectuals, somewhat analogous to the neoconservatives in the United States, but with a lingering leftist orientation. 

Their apostasy sent shock waves through French intellectual life, and onward to Moscow, which depended on the cachet afforded by Jean-Paul Sartre and other leftist philosophers.

“It was André Glucksmann who dealt the decisive blow to Communism in France,” Mr. Bruckner told French radio on Tuesday.

Besides publishing many works on philosophy and politics, Mr. Glucksmann threw his considerable weight behind a variety of causes: the “boat people” fleeing Southeast Asia in the late 1970s; the Bosnians facing genocide in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s; and, more recently, Chechen rebels fighting for independence from Russia. 

“In the West, he presented the anti-totalitarian case more starkly and more passionately than anyone else in modern times,” said Paul Berman, who wrote extensively about Mr. Glucksmann in his books “A Tale of Two Utopias” and “Power and the Idealists.” 

“He was a passionate defender of the superoppressed, whether it was the prisoners of the Gulag, the Bosnians and Kosovars, gays during the height of the AIDS crisis, the Chechens under Putin or the Iraqis under Saddam,” he said. “When he turned against Communism, it was because he realized that Communists were not on the same side.” 

André Glucksmann was born on June 19, 1937, in Boulogne-Billancourt, a suburb of Paris. His father, Rubin, and his mother, Martha, were leftist Zionists who emigrated to Palestine, he from Czernowitz in present-day Ukraine, she from Prague. In 1933, they were sent by the Communist Party to join the anti-Nazi underground in Germany. Three years later they left for France. 

Rubin Glucksmann died in 1940 when a ship he was traveling on was torpedoed. André and his mother spent the rest of the war in hiding, while she worked for the Resistance. 

After the war, his mother moved to Austria. Given a choice, André decided to stay with his two sisters and an uncle. 

At 13, while a high school student, he joined the Communist Party, but he was expelled after criticizing the Soviet Union’s suppression of the revolt in Hungary. In a 2006 memoir, “A Child’s Rage,” he chronicled his parents’ lives and his early upbringing.

After earning the teaching degree known as an agrégat from the École Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud in 1961, Mr. Glucksmann enrolled in the National Center for Scientific Research to pursue a doctorate under Raymond Aron — an odd matchup because Aron was France’s leading anti-Marxist intellectual. 

Mr. Glucksmann’s first book, “The Language of War,” published in 1967, was an analysis of military thinking from Clausewitz to Mao, and a critique of nuclear deterrence that won praise from Sartre and Gilles Deleuze. He followed it with “Revolutionary Strategy” in 1968 and, after joining the Proletarian Left, became a leading contributor to its journals J’accuse and Libération.

His subsequent turn away from Marxism made him a reviled figure on the left, and former comrades looked on aghast as he became one of France’s most outspoken defenders of the United States. He argued for President Ronald Reagan’s policy of nuclear deterrence toward the Soviet Union, intervention in the Balkans and both American invasions of Iraq. In 2007, he supported the candidacy of Nicolas Sarkozy for the French presidency. 

“There is the Glucksmann who was right and the Glucksmann who could — with the same fervor, the same feeling of being in the right — be wrong,” Mr. Lévy wrote in a posthumous appreciation for Le Monde. “What set him apart from others under such circumstances is that he would admit his error, and when he came around he was fanatical about studying his mistake, mulling it over, understanding it.”

His books covered a range of topics. He returned to the attack against Communism in the bluntly titled “Stupidity” (1985), but wrote of the war between conviction and doubt in Western thought and dealt with the AIDS crisis in “The Crack in the World,” the moral relevance of De Gaulle in “De Gaulle, Where Are You?” and the nihilism at the heart of Islamic terrorism in “Dostoyevsky in Manhattan.” 

In his most recent book, “Voltaire Counterattacks,” published this year, he positioned France’s greatest philosopher, long out of favor, as a penetrating voice perfectly suited to the present moment. 

In addition to his son, his survivors include his wife, Françoise, known as Fanfan.

“I think thought is an individual action, not one of a party,” Mr. Glucksmann told The Chicago Tribune in 1991. “First you think. And if that corresponds with the Left, then you are of the Left; if Right, then you are of the Right. But this idea of thinking Left or Right is a sin against the spirit and an illusion.”

Dalai Lama's Sayings

Những câu nói đáng ngẫm của Đạt Lai Lat Ma

 
1. “Nếu một vấn đề có thể giải quyết được, chẳng có gì mà phải lo lắng. Nếu một vấn đề không thể giải quyết được, lo lắng cũng chẳng có ích gì. Vậy thì tại sao phải lo lắng?”

1. “Im lặng đôi khi là câu trả lời tốt nhất.”
2. “Mục đích chính trong đời của chúng ta là giúp đỡ kẻ khác. Và nếu bạn không thể giúp họ, ít nhất đừng hại họ.”
3. “Hạnh phúc không phải là điều tự nhiên mà có. Nó đến từ những hành động của chính bạn.”
4. “Đây là tôn giáo đơn giản của tôi. Không cần đền chùa. Không cần triết lý phức tạp. Tâm trí bạn chính là đền chùa. Và lòng tốt chính là triết lý.”
5. “Hãy nhìn những đứa trẻ. Khi chúng giận ai, chúng biểu lộ ra, xong rồi thôi. Chúng vẫn có thể chơi với người đó vào ngày mai.”
6. “Càng được thúc đẩy bởi tình yêu, hành động của bạn càng tự do và không sợ hãi.”
7. “Chúng ta có thể sống mà không có tôn giáo hay thiền định, nhưng chúng ta không thể sống mà không có tình người.”
8. “Bạn cũ đi, bạn mới đến. Cũng như ngày cũ đi, ngày mới đến. Điều quan trọng là phải làm sao cho nó có ý nghĩa, một người bạn ý nghĩa, hay một ngày mới ý nghĩa.”
9. “Chúng ta không bao giờ có thể có được hòa bình trên thế giới cho tới khi chúng ta có được hòa bình trong thâm tâm.”
10. “Mục đích của tất cả những truyền thống tôn giáo lớn trên thế giới không phải là để xây dựng những ngôi đền to lớn bên ngoài, mà là để xây dựng những ngôi đền thiện lành và từ bi bên trong, trong trái tim chúng ta.
11. “Tôn giáo của tôi rất đơn giản. Tôn giáo của tôi là lòng tốt.”

(ST)

The Price of Denialism by Lee McIntyre and Commentary by Wissai

The Price of Denialism:

We’ve all heard the phrase “you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.” Opinions are the sorts of things about which we can take a poll. They are sometimes well-informed, but rarely expected to be anything other than subjective. Facts, on the other hand, are “out there” in the world, separate from us, so it makes little sense to ask people what they think of them. As the comedian John Oliver so aptly put it in commenting on a recent Gallup poll that found that one in four Americans disbelieve in climate change: “You don’t need people’s opinion on a fact. You might as well have a poll asking: ‘Which number is bigger, 15 or 5?’ Or ‘Do owls exist’ or ‘Are there hats?’”

With the United Nations’ conference on climate change set to begin in Paris this month, and the presidential election only a year away, we are about to be steeped in political arguments on every conceivable issue, all carried out with the usual confusing mix of fact, opinion, opinion stated as fact and fact portrayed as opinion. How can we prepare ourselves to make sense of it?

A good first step would be to distinguish between skepticism and what has come to be known as denialism. In other words, we need to be able to tell when we believe or disbelieve in something based on high standards of evidence and when we are just engaging in a bit of motivated reasoning and letting our opinions take over. When we withhold belief because the evidence does not live up to the standards of science, we are skeptical. When we refuse to believe something, even in the face of what most others would take to be compelling evidence, we are engaging in denial. In most cases, we do this because at some level it upsets us to think that the theory is true.

The throes of denial must feel a lot like skepticism. The rest of the world “just doesn’t get it.” We are the ones being rigorous. How can others be so gullible in believing that something is “true” before all of the facts are in? Yet a warning should occur when these stars align and we find ourselves feeling self-righteous about a belief that apparently means more to us than the preservation of good standards of evidence. Whether they are willing to admit it or not — perhaps even to themselves — denialists often know in advance what they would like to be true. But where does that leave the rest of us who think that our own beliefs are simply the result of sound reasoning?

As Daniel Kahnemann so beautifully demonstrates in his book “Thinking Fast and Slow,” the human mind has all sorts of wired-in cognitive shortcuts that can feel an awful lot like thinking. Within the dark recesses of confirmation bias, an entire field of academic inquiry (behavioral economics) now proposes to explain whole swaths of human behavior based on such mental foibles. And entire television news networks now make their living through exploiting this by telling us exactly what we want to hear.

So how to tell a fact from an opinion? By the time we sit down to evaluate the evidence for a scientific theory, it is probably too late. If we take the easy path in our thinking, it eventually becomes a habit. If we lie to others, sooner or later we may believe the lie ourselves. The real battle comes in training ourselves to embrace the right attitudes about belief formation in the first place, and for this we need to do a little philosophy.

We hear a lot of folks in Washington claiming to be “skeptics” about climate change. They start off by saying something like, “Well, I’m no scientist, but …” and then proceed to rattle off a series of evidential demands so strict that they would make Newton blush. What normally comes along for the ride, however, is a telltale sign of denialism: that these alleged skeptics usually have different standards of evidence for those theories that they want to believe (which have cherry picked a few pieces of heavily massaged data against climate change) versus those they are opposing.

Surely few would willingly embrace the title of “denialist.” It sounds so much more rigorous and fair-minded to maintain one’s “skepticism.” To hold that the facts are not yet settled. That there is so much more that we do not know. That the science isn’t certain. The problem here, however, is that this is based not only on a grave misunderstanding of science (which in a sense is never settled), but also of what it means to be a skeptic. Doubting the overwhelming consensus of scientists on an empirical question, for which one has only the spottiest ideologically-motivated “evidence,” is not skepticism, it is the height of gullibility. It is to claim that it is much more likely that there is a vast conspiracy among thousands of climate scientists than that they have instead all merely arrived at the same conclusion because that is where they were led by the evidence.

Couldn’t the scientists nonetheless be wrong? Yes, of course. The history of science has shown us that any scientific theory (even Newton’s theory of gravity) can be wrong. And it is helpful to remember that not every field that claims scientific status — like certain branches of the social sciences — necessarily deserve it. But this does not mean that one is a good skeptic merely for disbelieving the well-corroborated conclusions of science. To reject a cascade of scientific evidence that shows that the global temperature is warming and that humans are almost certainly the cause of it, is not good reasoning, even if some long-shot hypothesis comes along in 50 years to show us why we were wrong.

In scientific reasoning, there is such a thing as warrant. Our beliefs must be justified. This means that we should believe what the evidence tells us, even while science insists that we must also try our best to show how any given theory might be wrong. Science will sometimes miss the mark, but its successful track record suggests that there is no superior competitor in discovering the facts about the empirical world. The fact that scientists sometimes make mistakes in their research or conclusions is no reason for us to prefer opinions over facts.

True skepticism must be more than an ideological reflex; skepticism must be earned by a prudent and consistent disposition to be convinced only by evidence. When we cynically pretend to withhold belief long past the point at which ample evidence should have convinced us that something is true, we have stumbled past skepticism and landed in the realm of willful ignorance. This is not the realm of science, but of ideological crackpots. And we don’t need a poll to tell us that this is the doorstep to denialism.

Lee McIntyre is a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and the author of “Respecting Truth: Willful Ignorance in the Internet Age.”

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and on Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

Commentary by Wissai:

The above essay provides me with enormous satisfaction and comfort in the twilight of my life as I am preparing myself for my eventual departure from the surface of this earth.

1. Have I ever been in denial as to who I am?

No, never. I've been brash, brutish, arrogant, and quite unhinged occasionally but I have always been honest with myself and others whereas I find most humans are emotionally and intellectually feeble. They have lived a life of a lie. I have not. They are cowards. I am not, at least not emotionally and intellectually.  

2. Why Am I Arrogant?

I know arrogance is not an amiable trait. I could fake humility, but to do so is worse than being arrogant itself. I am arrogant because I used to have some feelings of inadequacy. I worked very hard intellectually to overcome those unpleasant feelings. In the process, I acquired an arrogance which has been important to sustain me emotionally and socially. 

I have realized that I understand matters pertaining to logic, religion, philosophy, and language better than most people I have met. In addition, I have an innate passion and respect for facts and truths. 

Here are some facts and truths I have discovered by myself. Most, if not all, are not original or earth-shaking but they are important to me because they came to me after blood, sweat, and tears. 

a) Man makes God in his own image. There is no God per se. It's a concept, an imagination, not an entity. 

b) Religion is founded by Man, so all the so-called invocations of "God" or "Divinity" are bald-faced lies and/or delusions. 

c) Love only comes to those who are lovable. 

d) To test people, use money, power, and ego.

e) Only the strong and the smart are able to embrace truths, especially ugly truths about themselves. 

f) Most humans are despicable, stupid, superstitious, self-delusional, weak-willed, animalistic at heart, and deserve to be exterminated. They pollute the human gene pool. 

g) If you don't really respect yourself, nobody would. 

h) Be self-confident, but be prepared you could be wrong. Open your mind and heart to new facts and arguments that are sounder than your own. 

i) Don't talk down to people. Everybody, even the stupid and the ignorant, wants to be respected. Yes, be pleasant and be humble. We all die some day, even the smart, the rich, and the powerful. 

j) By all means, fall in love, but don't let yourself be used or abused. 

k) Learn to like and love yourself. 

l) If you could, talk very little, listen and laugh a lot more. Be pleasant, patient, and forgiving. Your life will have fewer unpleasant moments. 

m) Be prepared to die with a smile on your face. Life is short and temporary. Try to be happy and know the difference between facts and opinions. 

November 9, 2015

Wissai

canngonblogspot.com

Sự Thật và Đức Tin

Con Người là một sinh vật rất lạ, sẵn sàng hãnh diện chết cho "Đức Tin" vì cho "Đức Tin" là Chân Lý, dù không bỏ thì giờ học hỏi, suy tư về nguồn gốc và sự hợp lý thật sự hay không của "Đức Tin". 

Sống là phải tự mình tìm ra Chân Lý và tự mình suy tư, không nên lệ thuộc vào sự suy tư của người khác hoặc "Đúc Tin" thuộc loại mì ăn liền.

Đa số nhân loại chưa hiểu rõ cái  "What", đừng nói chi đến cái "How" và cái cực kỳ quan trọng "Why". 

Tôn Giáo là sản phẩm của Con Người, một điều ít ai nghĩ đến cho đến tận cùng của sự việc. 

The Price of Denialism

We’ve all heard the phrase “you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.” Opinions are the sorts of things about which we can take a poll. They are sometimes well-informed, but rarely expected to be anything other than subjective. Facts, on the other hand, are “out there” in the world, separate from us, so it makes little sense to ask people what they think of them. As the comedian John Oliver so aptly put it in commenting on a recent Gallup poll that found that one in four Americans disbelieve in climate change: “You don’t need people’s opinion on a fact. You might as well have a poll asking: ‘Which number is bigger, 15 or 5?’ Or ‘Do owls exist’ or ‘Are there hats?’”

With the United Nations’ conference on climate change set to begin in Paris this month, and the presidential election only a year away, we are about to be steeped in political arguments on every conceivable issue, all carried out with the usual confusing mix of fact, opinion, opinion stated as fact and fact portrayed as opinion. How can we prepare ourselves to make sense of it?

A good first step would be to distinguish between skepticism and what has come to be known as denialism. In other words, we need to be able to tell when we believe or disbelieve in something based on high standards of evidence and when we are just engaging in a bit of motivated reasoning and letting our opinions take over. When we withhold belief because the evidence does not live up to the standards of science, we are skeptical. When we refuse to believe something, even in the face of what most others would take to be compelling evidence, we are engaging in denial. In most cases, we do this because at some level it upsets us to think that the theory is true.

The throes of denial must feel a lot like skepticism. The rest of the world “just doesn’t get it.” We are the ones being rigorous. How can others be so gullible in believing that something is “true” before all of the facts are in? Yet a warning should occur when these stars align and we find ourselves feeling self-righteous about a belief that apparently means more to us than the preservation of good standards of evidence. Whether they are willing to admit it or not — perhaps even to themselves — denialists often know in advance what they would like to be true. But where does that leave the rest of us who think that our own beliefs are simply the result of sound reasoning?

As Daniel Kahnemann so beautifully demonstrates in his book “Thinking Fast and Slow,” the human mind has all sorts of wired-in cognitive shortcuts that can feel an awful lot like thinking. Within the dark recesses of confirmation bias, an entire field of academic inquiry (behavioral economics) now proposes to explain whole swaths of human behavior based on such mental foibles. And entire television news networks now make their living through exploiting this by telling us exactly what we want to hear.

So how to tell a fact from an opinion? By the time we sit down to evaluate the evidence for a scientific theory, it is probably too late. If we take the easy path in our thinking, it eventually becomes a habit. If we lie to others, sooner or later we may believe the lie ourselves. The real battle comes in training ourselves to embrace the right attitudes about belief formation in the first place, and for this we need to do a little philosophy.

We hear a lot of folks in Washington claiming to be “skeptics” about climate change. They start off by saying something like, “Well, I’m no scientist, but …” and then proceed to rattle off a series of evidential demands so strict that they would make Newton blush. What normally comes along for the ride, however, is a telltale sign of denialism: that these alleged skeptics usually have different standards of evidence for those theories that they want to believe (which have cherry picked a few pieces of heavily massaged data against climate change) versus those they are opposing.

Surely few would willingly embrace the title of “denialist.” It sounds so much more rigorous and fair-minded to maintain one’s “skepticism.” To hold that the facts are not yet settled. That there is so much more that we do not know. That the science isn’t certain. The problem here, however, is that this is based not only on a grave misunderstanding of science (which in a sense is never settled), but also of what it means to be a skeptic. Doubting the overwhelming consensus of scientists on an empirical question, for which one has only the spottiest ideologically-motivated “evidence,” is not skepticism, it is the height of gullibility. It is to claim that it is much more likely that there is a vast conspiracy among thousands of climate scientists than that they have instead all merely arrived at the same conclusion because that is where they were led by the evidence.

Couldn’t the scientists nonetheless be wrong? Yes, of course. The history of science has shown us that any scientific theory (even Newton’s theory of gravity) can be wrong. And it is helpful to remember that not every field that claims scientific status — like certain branches of the social sciences — necessarily deserve it. But this does not mean that one is a good skeptic merely for disbelieving the well-corroborated conclusions of science. To reject a cascade of scientific evidence that shows that the global temperature is warming and that humans are almost certainly the cause of it, is not good reasoning, even if some long-shot hypothesis comes along in 50 years to show us why we were wrong.

In scientific reasoning, there is such a thing as warrant. Our beliefs must be justified. This means that we should believe what the evidence tells us, even while science insists that we must also try our best to show how any given theory might be wrong. Science will sometimes miss the mark, but its successful track record suggests that there is no superior competitor in discovering the facts about the empirical world. The fact that scientists sometimes make mistakes in their research or conclusions is no reason for us to prefer opinions over facts.

True skepticism must be more than an ideological reflex; skepticism must be earned by a prudent and consistent disposition to be convinced only by evidence. When we cynically pretend to withhold belief long past the point at which ample evidence should have convinced us that something is true, we have stumbled past skepticism and landed in the realm of willful ignorance. This is not the realm of science, but of ideological crackpots. And we don’t need a poll to tell us that this is the doorstep to denialism.

Lee McIntyre is a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and the author of “Respecting Truth: Willful Ignorance in the Internet Age.”

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and on Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

Post-Travels Notes

Post-Travels Notes:

Whether we consciously admit it or not, the fact remains that our lives sadly are coming to an end. The end will come sooner for some than for others. Some of us stoically are preparing ourselves for the demise of our existence while others cling to some myths foisted upon them since childhood for solace and comfort. 

In this twilight of our lives, love and friendship take on a special significance because they are the succor that lessens the agony of the rapidly approaching extinction of our lives. Our trip was a success because there were many moments of true love and friendship in which we shared jokes, laughter, merriment, and tidbits of gossip. A proof that the trip was a success is that there has been a talk of planning for such a reunion again before infirmity or illness sidelines us. 

The days spent in Madrid after the cruise were truly memorable. Life, especially in its twilight, is mostly nothing but memories, and then we breathe out our last breath and leave everything and everybody behind. 

May each and every one of us enjoy good health, peace and prosperity in many years to come.

Ross Douthat's Review of "Submission", a French novel

Like many people who pretend to parle a little francais but get tired after reading a page, I’ve only just now read the newly-translated “Submission,” Michel Houellebecq’s dystopian vision of a near-future French republic that succumbs willingly to a vaguely Tariq Ramadan-esque form of political Islam. When I say “dystopian,” the casual reader may infer — as many people did when the book first appeared, literally at the same moment as the “Charlie Hebdo” massacre — that the dystopia is the Islamicized France, that Houellebecq is trying to do for Islamism or “Eurabia” what Orwell once did for Stalinism. But if you’ve read the keener reviews (or Houellebecq’s previous novels) you probably understand that no, actually, the dystopia is the contemporary West, and the Islamified future that Houellebecq’s story ushers in is portrayed as a kind of civilizational step forward, or if you prefer a necessary regression back to health.

I sort of knew this going in but even so it was remarkable how — well, I think neo-reactionary is really the only term to use to describe what Houellebecq seems to be doing in his portrait of contemporary France and his mischievous prophecy about its potential trajectory. And I do mean neo-reactionary in the internet-movement, Mencius Moldbug sense of the term (if you aren’t familiar with this particular rabbit hole, good luck): The overt political teaching of “Submission” is that Europe is dying from the disease called liberalism, that it can be saved only by a return of hierarchy and patriarchy and patriotism and religion and probably some kind of monarchy as well, but that religion itself is primarily an instrumental good and so the point is to find a faith that actually convinces and inspires and works (and that’s, well, a little manly), and on that front European Christianity and particularly Roman Catholicism is basically a dead letter so the future might as well belong to Islam instead.

Indeed one of the clever touches in the book involves the way the new Islamic Charlemagne of Europe, the Muslim Brotherhood leader turned French president Mohammed Ben Abbes, builds a power base that includes both France’s remaining conservative Christians, for whom his traditional-values pitch has some appeal, and (in a prominent cabinet position) a former Nietzsche scholar who presumably found in Islam a partial answer to some of old Friedrich’s sallies against Christianity’s weak-kneed femininity.

Now as this cleverness suggests, Houellebecq is considerably slyer than your average neoreactionary (or newspaper columnist, for that matter). And everything that happens in “Submission” is filtered through his frankly repellent, self-resembling narrator, so the actual message of the novel is necessarily somewhat more complex than the straightforward, un-Straussian reading I’ve just offered.

At the very least it’s safe to assume that the novelist is satirizing almost everybody, up to and including the neoreactionaries whose message he seems to adopt. For instance, when he has Europe’s Nietzcheans and conservative Christians get on board the Islamic express, what is that scenario, after all, but a variation on the relatively-commonplace liberal argument that the West’s social conservatives actually have a lot in common with the Taliban, to which said conservatives reliably take offense? Maybe not the Taliban, Houellebecq is saying to them, but you probably would find a Eurabia more congenial than your current anti-Islamic anxieties suggest!

Then he’s also satirizing, well, himself, as Noah Millman’s review of the novel for The American Conservative suggests, by having the Islamist takeover emerge as the very personal solution to the problems of late modernity that Houellebecq is obsessed with — a solution that works because it delivers meaning, domesticity and a clutch of docile wives to his chestless, sex-addled, Last Man academic without asking anything in return:

Houellebecq’s vineyard, which he has been working for decades, is Western boredom and exhaustion, the profound dissatisfactions of life under capitalism, the welfare state, and the sexual marketplace. When he began to write Submission, as he has said, he thought it would recount a character’s journey back to Catholicism, much as François’s subject, Huysmans, returned. But he found himself unable to feel his way into that particular journey. It felt forced, false. He couldn’t ultimately believe in such a return.

But Islam—that felt plausible. Not, I suspect, because it fit his needs better, but because he could fit it to his needs better. Catholicism might promise peace and harmony, but Houellebecq had some idea what that religion looked like in practice and what sacrifices it would entail. Islam, the perpetual “other,” he could imagine as being a “worldly religion” that would deny him nothing of consequence and cater to his deepest desires at no cost.

Islam, in other words, is playing the part of the fantasy second wife that the husband imagines awaits him if the old bag finally kicks or he gets the guts to leave. The one who makes no demands, who really gets him, yet somehow isn’t boring but exciting and exotic. She makes him feel alive again, without actually asking him to change anything at all.

But Millman loses me when he suggests that this satire on Houellebecq’s own desires is somehow incompatible with the novel also being a satire of the Western elite writ large:

… even if we attribute to [the West’s consciously multiculturally-minded liberal elite] a kind of unacknowledged subconscious yearning for an old-time patriarchal masculinity, this novel does not particularly indulge that yearning—because the men we meet are as far as possible from those types. François does not learn how to be a “real man” from Islam, the Islamic regime simply bestows upon him a new social position, as it has done for an even less likely candidate for transformation whom François meets at a party, an elderly and socially awkward professor who would never have been able to marry under the old sexual dispensation. Even the social-climbing head of François’s department, a character named Rediger who is clearly intended to be a kind of Mephistophelean figure, is more of a dandy than a man’s man and he has done nothing to seduce his teenage bride. She’s simply trained gigglingly to obey.

But why can’t Houellebecq’s point be precisely that the actual subconscious desire of Western man, liberal man, late-modern man is not really to somehow return to a true patriarchy, where you have to shoulder real burdens as the price of your authority, but rather to just play-act patriarchy with a giggling child bride or three while still drawing a government salary and living in a rent-stabilized apartment in a safe modern city? What can’t be he just be saying that many liberal men are themselves pathetically Houellebecqian, except without his self-awareness about their actual desires?

His suggestion, I think, isn’t that the modern enlightened adult male secretly “liking” teenage bikini pics on Instagram somehow contains, buried deep within himself, the soul of Saladin the Great. It’s that this pathetic excuse for a man could be effectively bought off, in the event of an actual cultural upheaval, by a regime that bestowed the illusion of real manhood (along with a comfortable sinecure) in a way that the present mix of official gender egalitarianism and internet fantasias do not.

But of course this cultural upheaval has to come from somewhere for the novel to work, and if both the European right (Christian and nativist) and the liberal left are hapless and exhausted ready to be bought off then it has to come from outside … and that’s why the one thing that isn’t really satirized at all in “Submission” is, well, Islam itself. Instead, it’s mostly just valorized, but from a safe distance, without much detail or dimensionality and without any realism at all.

As Millman notes, we never meet a cradle Muslim, and the figure of Ben Abbas, the brilliant Machiavellian who somehow gets every non-National Front party in France to let him have the presidency, is truly fantastical, a political superman who makes the original Charlemagne look like Jeb Bush. And so is everything associated with his religion: “Submission” takes place in a version of 2024, as Houellebecq has conceded, where France has demographics that won’t arrive till 2050 (if at all), but more than that it takes place in a world where Islamic civilization seems considerably more stable, integrated and attractive than in our own.

In Houellebecq’s world, Ben Abbas envisions a France-led revision of the E.U. extending south to encompass North Africa; in our world the actual E.U. is quavering in fear that North Africa’s Islamist-infused chaos will spread northward across the Mediterranean. In Houellebecq’s world Qatari and Saudi moneymen are competing to buy up French universities and subsidize French intellectuals; in our world they’re desperately spending money trying to influence the massive, region-destabilizing, intra-Islamic civil war next door to their own none-too-stable fiefdoms. In Houellebecq’s world, Islam is enough of a coming thing in the West to seduce high-profile academics a la Marxism and fascism in days gone by; in our world, at least for now, it’s not.

Part of what “Submission” does is to imagine a Europe that’s more violent, closer to internal civil war, than the real continent; in that way the novel shrinks the huge gulf that separates Western stability and prosperity from the ongoing agonies of the Islamic Middle East. But mostly Houellebecq just conjures up an imaginary Islam that’s considerably stronger than the real thing at the moment, that’s poised to seduce and conquer rather than tearing itself apart, that resembles the high-medieval Christendom his narrator repeatedly references (or for that matter medieval Islam) in its vitality and confidence rather than struggling, as the real Islamic world is, through a dark valley of political decadence and religious fanaticism. And then he keeps this Islam for the most part offstage, so he doesn’t have to flesh any of this out.

Again, he needs to do that kind of conjuring and invention for the story to make sense. But it means that “Submission” is as interesting for what isn’t recognizable about its vision as for what is. You don’t have to share the author’s dark view of late modernity to at least recognize the European society that he’s mocking, the types he’s ridiculing (himself included), the kind of decadence that he portrays as the West’s essential lot. But it’s noteworthy that while he only needs to exaggerate reality to make our own society seem ripe for some sort of submission, he needs to turn to a pure fantasy — one that’s not even detailed enough to be described as Orientalist — in order to envision how that submission might actually be imposed or brought about.

Which is, to harp again on an old theme of mine, the striking thing about our era in human history: There’s enough decadence in the West to make a fall or change imaginable, but it’s very hard, even for a novelist, to breath real life and plausibility into the alternative idea or way of life that might (in the near term) conquer or supplant our own.