Translated by Ralph Hancock
Hardcover
ISBN/SKU 1932236325
ISI Books, 2004
Translated by Ralph Hancock
Hardcover
ISBN/SKU 1932236325
ISI Books, 2004
This excerpt is the eighth chapter of Philippe Bénéton’s Equality by Default: An Essay on Modernity as Confinement, which has been translated by Ralph Hancock and is newly available this year from ISI Books in their Crosscurrents series. Crosscurrents “makes available in English, usually for the first time, new translations of both classic and contemporary works by authors working within, or with crucial importance for, the conservative, religious, and humanist intellectual traditions.” Other books in the series include Icarus Fallen, by Chantal Delsol, translated by Robin Dick (from which a selection appeared in the last issue of The New Pantagruel), and Critics of the Enlightenment, edited and translated by Christopher O. Blum. Forthcoming titles include Russia in Collapse, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by Olga Cooke, The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century, by Chantal Delsol, translated by Robin Dick, and Tradition, by Josef Pieper, translated by E. Christian Kopff.
Bénéton, a prominent French religious conservative and Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Rennes, has long meditated on Tocqueville, and Equality by Default is Tocquevillian in that it does not offer a partisan polemic, but rather paints a picture of contemporary life—a picture that is also a guide for discernment for those who have a difficult time “seeing” contemporary liberalism for what it is. Equality by default, Bénéton writes, “is founded on an idea of man which breaks with all the humanism of the West. Man is pure indetermination, autonomy without a compass, liberty without a vocation, he is what he makes of himself.”
“This is an essay on the modern world, a world that has now reached the condition of late modernity. My purpose is less to describe this world than to attempt, by climbing on the shoulders of giants of thought, to make visible what is going on in this world and what the results have been.”
—from the author’s preface“Bénéton’s vision is sobering, to say the least, darker on balance than Tocqueville’s (which was already darker, more foreboding than is commonly appreciated), but somehow not a vision of despair. Tocqueville averted fruitless reaction before the leveling advance of democracy by straining to judge the new world from the standpoint of a God beyond all aristocratic prejudices, thus finding a way to accept and thereby to channel the democratic transformation of politics and society. Bénéton’s situation is of course different: he addresses a world in which this democratic and individualistic transformation of life has already proceeded far beyond the point Tocqueville provided for (if not beyond what he had the power to foresee). In our time, the option of sanctioning or sanctifying this transformation in order to moderate it is no longer viable. There is no longer any alternative to exhibiting in broad daylight the hollowness of pure, formal democracy, to plainly stating the dependence of democracy on understandings of human dignity that cannot be extracted from the pure form of democracy.”
—from the translator’s preface
Throughout the history of modern reason its status has undergone important changes. Once it was master, now it is only the servant or the master-servant. At its birth modern reason trumpeted the empire of reason, the reign of “Enlightenment,” while discrediting its opponent by presenting it as the camp of prejudice, convention, and the principle of authority. If these formulations were polemical and overstated, they nevertheless expressed a real break. Of course modern thought did not discover or rediscover reason, but it emancipated it (in a subjectivist sense), and it conferred upon it a dominant and exclusive authority (to the detriment of revelation and tradition), and, finally, it turned it in a new direction. Classical Christian reason was essentially concerned with personal life: reason was supposed to allow each person to master his or her passions and to lead a life in accordance with the nature of a rational animal. Modernity sought to transform reason’s perspective; modern reason would focus first on the exterior world; it proposed to change the fate of mankind through the conquest of nature and the mastery of society. The work undertaken by Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes issued in this revolutionary proposition: to transform the world we must rethink it. Reason was opening up a new era of the human condition.
The modern world thus embarked on a number of great undertakings (scientific, technological, and political), the repercussions of which reason has had to absorb. On the one hand, scientific rationalism (as originally understood) has disqualified itself, giving way to a new version of scientism that considers itself neutral on the subject of “values” and that, as a consequence, emancipates technoscience from all subordination in relation to reason in a higher sense—henceforth reason, committed to transforming things, concerns itself only with means and their efficiency; it is purely instrumental. On the other hand, in the realm of politics, rationalism as an ideology has collapsed, in spite of all the human sacrifices offered to the “Goddess Reason.” By contrast, liberal reason has come out the winner and at the same time has been radicalized, cutting its ties, under the influence of equality by default, with nature and with natural ends—henceforth reason as applied to the organization of society is at the service of the diverse and particular objectives that human beings pursue; it is purely procedural.
The result of all these experiences is what we see going on before our eyes: the growing power of a practical reason cut off from being, a reason reduced to a procedural or instrumental function. Reason no longer governs in view of ends; it limits itself to determining rules of the game and technical means, all in the service of formal rights and arbitrary goals. In the kingdom of equality by default, reason is ancillary, the reason of specialists; it officially abdicates all civilizing functions. But this is not to say that it abandons the leading role. The techniques forged by the “exact” sciences and the human sciences tend to rule over the whole of human activities. When substantive reason withdraws, technoscientific reason is free to display its whole force. The world, as we have seen, is now considered to be at our disposal; it has no vital distinctions to oppose to the grip of instrumental rationality. Human activities fall back on themselves without any reference points except uncertain and proliferating “human rights.” A narrow, specialized, professionalized, technical understanding of reason shapes our world, but without knowing the world it shapes.
To recapitulate: Modern reason (in its contemporary version) has nothing to do with the substantive reason of the Greeks and Christians—it is now taken for granted that there is no “life according to reason.” And it is no longer the triumphant modern reason of yesteryear—there is no question of its guiding great material projects associated with the progress of humanity. Rather, reason is now the servant or the master-servant in various external projects, diverse and without compass. It is a servant because it is instrumental to ends it does not govern, and a master-servant in that the economy and technology reign and develop according to their own logic within a world given over to them. What is called the rationalization of the world, following Max Weber, is a procedural and instrumental rationalization in which reason puts itself in the service of the irrational.
What can be more rational than a McDonald’s restaurant, at least if one reasons in economic and technical terms? There everything is thought through, weighed, calculated, recorded, analyzed; nothing is left to chance or to improvisation. The McDonald’s system is the fruit of a “doctrine” developed by a person, Ray Kroc, whose entrepreneurial talent is beyond question.1 Ray Kroc invented nothing; he borrowed the idea and the principles of fast food from the McDonald brothers from whom he bought the business, and he borrowed from others the principle of franchising. But it was he who knew how to organize, how to extend the principles of organization to the last detail in order to achieve maximum efficiency. With this talent he transformed the art of eating into a very successful technique. The great adventure began in 1955, when Ray Kroc opened the first McDonald’s (which today has been raised to the status of a museum). McDonald’s proliferated in the United States—in 1961 a Hamburger University was established near Chicago—and then began to appear on other continents. In January 1990, a McDonald’s was opened in Moscow a stone’s throw from famous Pushkin Square; in April 1992, the largest McDonald’s in the world opened its doors in Beijing. The hamburger had set out to conquer the world.
The McDonald’s system is a triumph of instrumental rationality. Nothing escapes calculations of profit, always subject to refinement: the size of hamburgers, the restaurant’s architecture, the number of fries, the speed of service, the arrangement of parking lots, the affability of the personnel, the interior design, the dimensions of the trays. The system offers standardized products, trains standardized employees, and tends to forge standardized consumers (by the rationalization of margins of choice, the uncomfortable seating, the interior colors). This would be the ideal: robots for employees, a Big Mac for everyone, and consumers in uniform.
The McDonald’s system is also a triumph of procedural rationality, a rationality appropriate to a market economy. There, as in the supermarket, the pure spirit of the market reigns. Nothing troubles the purely functional, abstract, impersonal relationship between the seller and the buyer. Here every person, whoever he or she may be, is exactly like all the others; he or she is a consumer, nothing but a consumer, entirely a consumer, a consumer from head to toe. McDonald’s is universalist; its calling is to embrace the whole world without regard to divisions. Once one passes through its doors, an alchemy takes over and erases whatever distinguishes and separates: the person becomes a consumer and every consumer’s money is as good as any other’s. This is the wonder of the system: it neutralizes differences and divisions among people, differences in traits of character, as well as social, national, political, religious, or other differences. It makes coexistence and cooperation possible among people who have nothing in common except respect for the same rules of the game. All over the world, in New York, Paris, Istanbul, or Beijing, McDonald’s restaurants welcome you in the same way (automatic smile, guaranteed hygiene, industrial food), whether you are of the left or of the right, Turk or Kurd, Chinese apparatchik or dissident, a child or his grandfather, a policeman or a criminal, a racist or an antiracist. McDonald’s is the missionary of a new humanity, the builder of a new world, in collaboration with all the other businesses set to conquer the world market and sharing this great cause with a view to the greatest profit. This new world is undifferentiated, destined to unify itself on the basis of uniform consumption—an egalitarian world, except of course for the only distinction that matters (money), a world called to achieve unity by the grace of the market. The political problem par excellence, the problem that arises from differences among human beings, is finally about to be resolved: consumers of all lands, unite over a Big Mac!
For the workers, craftsmen, and peasants whom Péguy fervently evokes at the beginning of L’Argent, “all was a rhythm and a rite and a ceremony.” At McDonald’s, everything is just the opposite of a rite and a ceremony. A ceremony is an intense moment that involves our being, a moment that breaks through the uniform flow of time and sets itself apart in a thousand ways (forms, objects, context), a moment in which human beings share strong feelings. A meal at McDonald’s, on the other hand, is a weak moment, a featureless act, a purely functional activity. McDonald’s is the functional place par excellence. It reduces everything to a function: things, actions, and people.
Let us take a closer look at things. Here is the final outcome (as seen, I remind the American reader, from the French perspective of the author) of this techno-economic rationality taken to perfection, or almost: 1. The act of eating does not constitute any rhythm in the flow of time. The first principle of the enterprise is to break with time as it is ordered by traditional customs, and more fundamentally to break with all ordering of time. The McDonald’s formula is made up first of all by these two golden rules: long hours, brief meals. At McDonald’s one eats at any hour and on Sunday just as on any other day. Time there is not regulated—a time for each thing, a time for lunch and a time for dinner—but rather is uniform and uniformly at our disposal. It is also rationally divisible; thus, the meal must be shortened as much as possible. The time spent “around the table” is not a separate time, a privileged time in social life. It is subjected like all times to the profit motive. McDonald’s time is the time of economic rationality, a time unrelated to the rhythms of life. 2. Formalities, or at least certain formalities, are deliberately absent. Norbert Elias saw the fact of eating with utensils as an important step in “the civilizing of mores.” At McDonald’s we take a step backwards. There one employs neither plate, nor knife, nor fork; one eats with one’s fingers, even the fries that leave one’s hands greasy. Why complicate what is rationally so effective and what does not burden the consumer with respect for manners? Respect for procedures is sufficient; formalities are costly and irrational. 3. Things are purely functional; they have nothing to do with human sensibilities. Paper cups, plastic boxes, straws—just a lot of objects so meaningless and worthless that one throws them away after utilization. The whole McDonald’s universe is made of plastic, cardboard, synthetic materials—and one has the impression that the food is no exception—materials without nobility or warmth, suited to functional man. The view is of the parking lot, the air is conditioned, cleanliness and ugliness rule—everything is in order. A rose or a tulip would be a cause for surprise in this universe. 4. The food, finally, is the product of an industrial technique that abolishes all nuances of taste. Taste must either be educated or degenerate. It is doubtful that taste becomes more refined by consuming cardboard bread, meat that doesn’t taste like meat, sauces that smother all they touch, and desserts crammed with sugar.
This rational universe is in perfect harmony with late modernity. At McDonald’s, everyone is equal—but by default. The system reduces human beings to very little: an elementary function. Here, people are gathered, they cross paths, but they share nothing, not a feeling, not a way of being valued even in the least for themselves; they stand side by side in mutual indifference. Here, the other is like me—but he is also a stranger.
McDonald’s is a true “nowhere,” where a life without rules, order, hierarchy, holidays, symbols, or ceremonies is carried out, a life in which one insignificant moment follows another. Here one speaks only of unimportant things, and one maintains only superficial relations. How could one speak—of heartfelt things while chewing on a hamburger? How could one recite a poem between two gulps of a Coke? Who would declare his love over a cheeseburger? McDonald’s is not made for such things; it is made for the convenience of the pure consumer, for whom eating means nothing but eating.2
By “McDonald’s” I of course mean more than McDonald’s. If it deserves this excessive honor and reproach, this is because it illustrates and foreshadows the world toward which we are heading, a world shaped by procedural and instrumental reason, a world at once perfected and decivilized.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 1.3.