Paul Nizan and the dangers of the progressive class clericature

I have been asking myself for a while how come the members of the progressive class, i.e. technologists and meritocrats, insist on presenting themselves as role models for the rest of the world, as if their values and life choices were key to their own relevance to people.

To look for answers, Paul Nizan is a great first step.

A radical French communist thinker born in 1905 who died in 1940 at the Battle of Dunkirk, he explored what he described as the modern alienation of people by the radical petit-bourgeois milieu, writing against what we could call today technologists and meritocrats.

He was especially curious about the reasons driving the search for spirituality and philosophical values in the bourgeoisie of his time.

He thought that there was something behind it, and in “the Watchdogs”, a hugely influential book, he drafted briefly the idea of clericature, the dictature of modern clerics based on philosophy, spirituality and reason, insisting that they were to be followed because they were right and because they were to be trusted.

It was faith disguised as reason, with Paul Nizan insisting that reason does not exist anyway.

Today too, Ivy League entrepreneurs and thinkers turn to the realm of ideas for answers. They insist on being role models in all matters of spirituality, from saving the planet to improving themselves.

Why this?

In that sense, spirituality is often introduced as a matter of bringing efficiency and reaching goals. It’s very typical of Mark Zuckerberg for example, but it’s a common reasoning something that goes back a long way for most people in the western world. To high school even.

In this way, everything people do must serve an efficient purpose. And everything intellectual they do is supposed to serve an even more efficient purpose. That’s why people give great credit to critical thinking, logics, and what they believe to be Science or Philosophy.

But there is no search for efficiency in Philosophy.

People don’t decide to think. They don’t do it for a purpose. They just do. Becoming a thinker does not transport anyone above the fray. There is as much passion, fight and partisanship in thinking than in anything else. Refinement is only a better mask than coarseness.

Even Truth is something easy to manipulate and redefine in many ways.

Paul Nizan insisted that every opinion, every philosophical thoughts, always serve someone’s interests, just like any other human activity. Pretending to work and to think for the benefits of humanity is only pretense.

And as real problems are difficult to solve, it leads to the need to increase in abstraction. It’s easier to tackle issues that only exist in theory, or that don’t really matter to people. And it’s also a way to inspire and to rely on faith, rather than on real merits.

In his view, a community, or a class, should not be only defined by its economical aspects, but also by its beliefs, its judgments, its moral and judicial concepts. It’s in that sense that technologists or technocrats function as a group.

As a group, they want their contributions to be steadfast, standing, unwavering. For this, they need titles. And as titles are abstract, to get them, they need to put as much emphasis as possible on intellectual works, faith and spirituality.

To quote Paul Nizan, “Every bourgeois feels he’s special” and that the People are constituted by “the Dispossessed of Intelligence”. And indeed, if we need AI, isn’t it because humans are stupid?

But in the end, this progressive class has no problem justifying poverty, dependence, and asking if democracy is so important after all? Isn’t China very efficient at what it does?

In that sense, the culture of intelligence is a weapon.

It’s a tool in the hands of the clericature.

Hence, the emphasis on the importance of reason and spirituality is wrong.

For Paul Nizan, in a world divided between masters and servants, one should only chose who to stand for.

Who do you stand for?