Emmanuel Todd: The Specter of a Soviet-Style Crisis
By Marie-Laure Germon and Alexis Lacroix
Le Figaro
Monday 12 September 2005
According to this demographer, Hurricane Katrina has revealed the
decline of the
American system.
Le Figaro. - What is the first moral and political lesson we can
learn from the catastrophe Katrina provoked? The necessity for a
"global" change in our relationship with nature?
Emmanuel Todd . - Let us be wary of over-interpretation. Let's
not lose sight of the fact that we're talking about a hurricane of
extraordinary scope that would have produced monstrous damage anywhere.
An element that surprised a great many people - the eruption of the
black population, a supermajority in this disaster - did not really
surprise me personally, since I have done a great deal of work on the
mechanisms of racial segregation in the United States. I have
known for a long time that the map of infant mortality in the United
States is always an exact copy of the map of the density of black
populations. On the other hand, I was surprised that spectators to this
catastrophe should appear to have suddenly discovered that Condoleezza
Rice and Colin Powell are not particularly representative icons of the
conditions of black America. What really resonates with my
representation of the United States - as developed in Apr=E8s l'empire -
is the fact that the United States was disabled and ineffectual. The
myth of the efficiency and super-dynamism of the American economy is in
danger.
....
American neo-conservatism is not alone to blame. What seems to me
more striking is the way this America that incarnates the absolute
opposite of the Soviet Union is on the point of producing the same
catastrophe by the opposite route. Communism, in its madness, supposed
that society was everything and that the individual was nothing, an
ideological basis that caused its own ruin. Today, the United States
assures us, with a blind faith as intense as Stalin's, that the
individual is everything, that the market is enough and that the state
is hateful. The intensity of the ideological fixation is altogether
comparable to the Communist delirium. This individualist and
inequalitarian posture disorganizes American capacity for action. The
real mystery to me is situated there: how can a society renounce common
sense and pragmatism to such an extent and enter into such
a process of ideological self-destruction? It's a historical aporia to
which I have no answer and the problem with which cannot be abstracted
from the present administration's policies alone. It's all of American
society that seems to be launched into a scorpion policy, a sick system
that ends up injecting itself with its own venom. Such behavior is not
rational, but it does not all the same contradict the logic of history.
The post-war generations have lost acquaintance with the tragic and with
the spectacle of self-destroying systems. But the empirical reality of
human history is that it is not rational.
cont'd...
http://www.lefigaro.com/debats/20050912.FIG0354.html?083700