Glimpses of the Multipolar World, 22 April 2023

My readers and the eight-hour working day. Sleepwalkers. Macron and Strategic Autonomy. Reconciliation, Ricouer and Mindful History

Apr 22, 2023

Each week in my newsletter, I offer seven glimpses for seven days of the multipolar world. This week, I share glimpses of:

Gratitude. My readers, and the eight hour day.
Reading. The Sleepwalkers.
Governing the Multipolar World. Europe, Macron and Strategic Autonomy.
Using History Mindfully. Macron, Reconciliation, and Ricouer.
Fragments of the Burning Archive. Memory, History, Forgetting.
What surprised me most. The kindness of strangers and remote readers.
Works-in-Progress. Mindful History. A new cycle of poems. 13 Ways.

1. Gratitude

I am thankful first up to Aran Martin, John Menadue and all the team at Pearls and Irritations, which published a second article by me during the week. And to all the readers. Many readers have said kind things about the piece, and some have even joined here on Substack. Thank you and welcome.

I also would like to say thanks to the people all across the world who have shortened the working day, and kept our minds focussed on balancing work, rest and play. I wrote my PhD on the building unions of nineteenth century Victoria, and the culture of the eight hour day movement. 21 April 1856 was long commemorated as the start of the eight-hour day where I live. So, on 21 April and the week after, thank you all.

2. What I am reading

I have been reading Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, and Margaret MacMillan, The War that Ended the Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War. Both were part of the slew of books that offered fresh interpretations of the Great War in the years marking its centenary. Both are full of humane empathy, contingency, and narrative drama.

The parallels with the changing international order today are all too clear. Yet I also wanted to explore the differences. Since the consequences of lazy historical analogues are to misunderstand the past, and to act unwisely in the present. We will see, over coming months, how much history is stuck in parallel lines, how much we are sleepwalking to war again.

3. Governing the unruly multipolar world

On the podcast this week I examined Emmanuel Macron’s speeches and thought, and his philosophy of governing the multipolar world, informed by Paul Ricoeur.

I was surprised by what I had learned. I had been led to believe that Macron was a weather-vane, who lacked all conviction. But I discovered again, as Yeats wrote, in times when the centre does not hold, those who lack all conviction are the best. As Havel said, run away from those who are certain they have found truth.

The two speeches I examined were:

his Address to the Nation on the Pension Reforms, which was quite powerful, I thought as an old speechwriter. Text and video are here
his speech at the Nexus Institute in the Netherlands on the ‘Future of Europe’, which he delivered in excellent English (see below)

You can also read the transcript here. I learned it is best to use the French version of the Elysée Palace website. The English site is not updated frequently.

I came to the conclusion that Macron is serious about pursuing independence for Europe, even if it will be a difficult road. He evoked the complex civilisations and linguistic diversity of George Steiner and Paul Ricoeur at the end of this speech. The liberal rules-based order was left behind on a baggage carousel in Washington. His rhetoric at the end of this speech also echoed Vladimir Putin’s ‘symphony of civilizations’ and Xi Jinping diverse civilizations initiative. It gave me grounds for hope, that the America will not be able to dispense with the world’s civilizations, despite its belief in its exceptional indispensability.

Some links to the material I discovered on the presence of Ricoeur’s philosophy in Macron’s way of governings are provided below:

The latter piece, I think (a moment of sloppy note-taking, my apopolgies), also included this illuminating excerpt.

Ricœur and Macron attribute a similar role to the concept of political reconciliation, imagined as a means of remembering the past together through official enactments of commemoration and pardon, and, by doing so, achieving civic cohesion. Although Macron’s 2017 campaign book, Revolution, might have seemed to be a list of neoliberal economic reforms expressed with particular exuberance, it was in fact an effort to combine his economic program with Ricœur’s politics of memory. Its subtitle, “Reconciling France,” spoke to an ambition derived from the work of Ricœur’s final philosophical period—as expressed in Memory, History, Forgetting, the book a young Macron helped edit.
In 2017, Macron warned that France, divided by religion and class, “runs the risk of civil war” fueled by resentment against those who have benefitted from economic globalization, while the rest of the country, from immigrant ghettoes to the suburban and rural periphery, have stagnated since the 1980s in chronic unemployment. Against this risk, he called for three types of strategies: economic, securitarian, and symbolic. He demanded a greater openness to markets and labor flexibility to create jobs, the “reconquest” of neighborhoods controlled by radical Islamist networks, and a reaffirmation of France’s republican values that would pass through an avowal of “that which has not been praiseworthy” in France’s history, such as slavery, colonialism, and collaboration in the Holocaust.
This desire for “reconciliation” through political memory led Macron during his 2017 campaign to offer apologies to the people of Algeria for colonialism, a “crime against humanity,” and to opponents of gay marriage, whom Macron judged to have been “humiliated.” (Macron has recently performed yet another bit of discursive theater by claiming Algeria is only a nation because of French colonialism.) These idiosyncratic appeals to the left and right generated controversy and confusion but also reflected an understanding of politics as a process of smoothing over different interpretations of the past by recognizing grievances and bringing resentments into public discourse—a vision that owed much to Ricœur’s Memory, History, Forgetting.

I think we should give Emmanuel Macron a go, at least on the world stage, even though many in France today want him to go, right now.

4. Using history to live mindfully in the present.

In preparing the podcast this week I also read, or scan-read, Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting. The curious fact that Emmanuel Macron was Ricoeur’s research assistant is featured in the podcast.

Paul Ricouer was a major philosopher who lived from 2013-2005, and was profoundly shaped by the events of Europe’s 20th century, and in turn offered deep reflections on history, memory and forgetting of those events.

Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy summarised his philosophy as:

“Ricoeur seeks to give an account of the fundamental capabilities and vulnerabilities that human beings display in the activities that make up their lives, and to show how these capabilities enable responsible human action and life together.”

But this is not the rugged rational individual autonomy of American ideas, but a humbled, responsible self that can never be fully disclosed, and lives in a complex web of narrative, symbol and interpretation Ricouer emphasised the fact that we live in time and in history, and form our identities through a constant task of selfhood, in mutual responsible relationships with others. He stressed open, generous and faithful interpretations of texts - avoiding the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. He investigated themes of history, memory, forgetting, and recognition He was a rare philosopher who spoke to my heart.

Macron edited the great work of Ricoeur’s late life, of most direct relevance to me, Memory, History, Forgetting. Indeed, Ricoeur thanked Macron in the preface.

People have commented on certain verbal, conceptual habits of Macron related to his master’s thought. For example Macron often uses the phrase et en même temps ("and at the same time"), and expresses so a desire to reconcile incompatible things and to retain complexity of thought in an over-simplified age. He also articulates an ethics of responsibility inspired Ricoeur, and often borrows Ricoeur’s term, ‘practical wisdom’. Indeed, he evoked this idea at the end of his ‘Future of Europe’ speech in the Netherlands.

All this encourages us to think, mindfully, of Macron as someone who “wants to get to the roots of French social and political life in order to safeguard a fragile shared identity.” (Abel) When I read his speeches, I still saw a flame of Ricoeur in Emmanuel’s heart. And rekindled the flame in my own.

5. Fragments from the Burning Archive

So, of course, I made Paul Ricoeur the focus of my ‘Fragment from the Burning Archive’ segment on the podcast this week, and specifcally his late work, Memory, History, Forgetting.

Memory, History, Forgetting is long and complex. I had the uncanny feeling that I had read it before at university, but maybe that was Time and Narrative since History, Memory and Forgetting was published after I finished up at university. Or maybe I did, in one of my scholarly binges as a public servant. Maybe even when I was working on the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse?

The book deeply influenced historical truth and reconciliation commissions, especially in South America. I suspect it is not being read widely in Australia today given the tenor of the truth-telling debate. But I don’t know. Let me know if I am wrong.

And, of course, it shares many themes of the Burning Archive - the podcast, the metaphor, the poem published in my collected poems, Gathering Flowers of the Mind, and the blog posts metapmorphosed into essays and published in From the Burning Archive. Traces of the past can be lost, and all the past is beyond memory. But what of forgetting and the duties of history where the traces remain?

Towards, the end of Memory, History, Forgetting, indeed, Ricoeure evoked the famous angel of history from the painting by Paul Klee, described in Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History. This image also inspired my poems, blog, podcast, YouTube and now Sub-Stack newsletter. It marked a deep, unexpected bond between Ricoeur, Macron and I.

It is hard to choose a brief text from the many profound reflections on history, memory, and forgetting, and on guilt, forgiveness and mutual recognition. Maybe the last paragraph (Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 506) is best, when Ricoeur dissolved history and memory into happy and unhappy forgetting?

Under the sign of this ultimate incognito of forgiveness, an echo can be heard of the word of wisdom uttered in the Song of Songs: “Love is as strong as death.” The reserve of forgetting, I would then say, is as strong as the forgetting through effacement.
Under history, memory and forgetting
Under memory and forgetting, life.
But writing a life is another story.
Incompletion.

6. What surprised me most this week.

I was surprised and delighted by the many kind words readers used to describe my article, The Derangement of the American Mind. One kind reader even compared it to Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech! I was honoured and humbled. I repeated stubbornly this stanza from Zbigniew Herbert, ‘The Envoy of Mr Cogito’

beware however of unnecessary pride
keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror
repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I

The discovery in the internet wilds of kindness of strangers, and companionship of remote readers, is a most beautiful and surprising thing.

7. Works-in-progress and published content

This week my works-in-progress and published content were:

on the podcast I published Episode 97. Macron, European Sovereignty, and Reflections on a Philosopher President?
On the YouTube Channel I published videos - have a look and give them a like or comment:
- 5 Best Books on the History of Madness or Mental Illness
- 96. France’s People’s Revolt on Pensions. Tricoleur Revolution? The Burning Archive Podcast
- A short from the above. Not sure about shorts… I feel they need their own form, not just segments of longer shows. Comments?
I have loaded the first modules of my online course, Mindful History for Busy People. More news soon.
I drafted part of a memoir essay for the end of 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, and edited some late additions to this collection of essays.
On Twitter I promoted my work and threw out this aphorism, “All power corrupts the mind; imperial power corrupts the mind absolutely.”
My piece on the American threat to world peace was published here on Pearls and Irritations.
I began a new cycle of poems on history, prompted by Clark, The Sleepwalkers.

Let me know if there are issues or topics you would like me to talk about on the podcast or the YouTube channel or on the Sub-Stack.

Burning Archive