Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [34]
I’d like to speak on behalf of a superior heroism, that of the Dalai Lama, say. In the writings of a Tibetan monk I was struck by the thought experiment he describes, where he imagines lying down on a railway line just before a train comes. The monk, he says, understands the phenomenon of his body being cut to pieces, and envisages it calmly as a representation of his spirit. This guy wasn’t joking; this was how far he’d got.
I haven’t got that far and in practice I speak on behalf of nothing very much. Of some vague concept of progress, maybe, which to my mind is scientific or technical. A vestige of the seriousness I had in childhood, continued through my studies, that means that I consider war (civil or religious, of independence or of conquest) as so much waste of time. The important thing, surely, is to invent the steam engine, develop industrialized production, control the weather. It is more than a vestige, in fact; this is how I was brought up, I can’t help it.
So, there are the good students who go home after class and do their math homework for the next day; and the bad, the morons, who hang around the streets looking to play some mean trick, to start a fight.
Later, there will be honest engineers who build railway viaducts and office buildings; and bloodthirsty clowns who seize on any pretext, ideological or religious, in order to destroy them.
Is this, then, the core of my beliefs? Is it as simplistic as this? Sadly, I fear it is. I have always felt the deepest mistrust for those who take up arms in the name of whatever cause. I have always felt there was something deeply unwholesome about warmongers, troublemakers, rabble-rousers. What is a war or a revolution, in the end, but a hobby fueled by spite, a bloody, cruel sport?
I have infinitely sympathized with, felt, and finally embraced the maxim by old Goethe: “Better an injustice than disorder.”
Above all, I have been fascinated by the phrase, so mysterious in its generality, from Auguste Comte, “Progress is nothing other than the development of order.”
Are we going to have to resort to philosophy for the rest of our exchanges? It bothers me that I still don’t have access to my books. Go on, let’s let the old mother sleep a little longer. And since you conclude your letter with another story about your father, I will tell you a story about mine, though I admit mine is a little more ambiguous.
Let’s be clear: my father was too young to be part of the “French Resistance.” There were of course exceptional cases; I think there may even have been fifteen-year-olds who were executed; let’s say that he could just about have been involved, but he did nothing about it. To tell the truth, even if he had, he wouldn’t have boasted about it; but I would certainly have known about it from his sisters, so proud of him, so quick to cut an article out of a newspaper if there was some mention of one of his Himalayan expeditions. If there were any heroic feats, I would have heard about them, but as far as heroic feats go, there were none.
Nor on the other hand did he collaborate with or get involved in the acts of violence perpetrated by the Milice; I don’t think he was even involved in the Chantiers de Jeunesse,* or at least he never talked about it. Actually, I believe (and it’s disturbing when you think about it) I never heard my father mention General de Gaulle or Marshal Pétain. From which I am forced to conclude that he spent the war years pursuing purely personal projects (of the sort, I imagine, that every teenager does).
Once, only once, he told me a story that reminded me that he had lived through the war. It was about two young French Resistance fighters who had killed a German officer in the metro. (Had my father had some sort of contact, whether close or distant, with these young men? I have no idea, but thinking back on the way he told the story, that’s what I believe.) And