Frederic Gros - Disobey! - The Philosophy of Resistance

DISOBEY!

DISOBEY!

A Guide to Ethical Resistance

Frdric Gros

Translated by David Fernbach

This work is published with support from the French Ministry of Culture/Centre national du livre

This English-language edition first published by Verso 2020

Originally published in French as Dsobir

Albin Michel/Flammarion 2017

Translation David Fernbach 2020

Frdric Gros 2017, 2020

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-631-2

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-633-6 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-634-3 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gros, Frdric, author. | Fernbach, David, translator.

Title: Disobey! : a guide to ethical resistance / Frdric Gros ; translated by David Fernbach.

Other titles: Dsobir. English

Description: London ; New York : Verso Books, 2020. | Originally published: Paris : Albin Michel : Flammarion, 2017. | Summary: The world is out of joint, so much so that disobeying should be an urgent question for everyone. In this provocative essay, Frdric Gros explores the roots of political obedience. Social conformity, economic subjection, respect for authorities, constitutional consensus? Examining the various styles of obedience provides tools to study, invent and induce new forms of civic disobedience and lyrical protest. Nothing can be taken for granted: neither supposed certainties nor social conventions, economic injustice or moral conviction. Thinking philosophically requires us never to accept truths and generalities that seem obvious. It restores a sense of political responsibility. At a time when the decisions of experts are presented as the result of icy statistics and anonymous calculations, disobeying becomes an assertion of humanity. To philosophize is to disobey. This book is a call for critical democracy and ethical resistance-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019054562 (print) | LCCN 2019054563 (ebook) | ISBN 9781788736312 (hardback) | ISBN 9781788736343 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Civil disobedience. | Government, Resistance to. | Social conflict. | Political science--Philosophy.

Classification: LCC JC328.3 .G7613 2020 (print) | LCC JC328.3 (ebook) | DDC 322.4--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054562

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054563

Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

For Grard Mordillat, fraternally

The present book is inspired by lecture courses delivered at the Collge universitaire de Sciences Po, Paris. My thanks to the students there for their critical study. It is offered as an initial contribution to Humanits politiques. My thanks also to Hlne Monsacr, Amandine Chevreau and Grard de Cortanze for their skill, vigilance and encouragement, which were so valuable to me in writing this book.

Monsters exist, but they are far too few in number to be truly dangerous; the most dangerous monsters are ordinary men, functionaries ready to believe and obey without discussion.

Primo Levi

To start with a paradox, I will quote Howard Zinns provocative statement: The problem is not disobedience, it is obedience.

The reasons for no longer accepting the present state of the world, and its catastrophic course, are almost too numerous. Listing them all would amount to a litany of disasters.

I shall give here only three or four solid reasons that should have long been arousing our disobedience and should continue to provoke it today, since they are only worsening before our eyes.

And yet nothing is happening, scarcely anyone rises up.

The process is accelerating and out of control. Actuarial rationality, the rationality of insurance (a cold calculation of risks), forces everyone without money to pay dear for the money they need. It has an icy arithmetical self-evidence that, at little cost, cleanses the souls of economic decision-makers all those who, with the next clutch of redundancies in their hands, can say with an air of humiliating condescension: What do you want, then? Of course its unfortunate, but in the end figures are figures, you cant go against this reality.

Except that the reality of figures is nowhere to be found, outside its seat in their good conscience.place in conformity with the iron law of economics, the inescapable reality of equations: figures are figures.

What reality? Not the stifled reality of solidarity between individuals, of an elementary sense of justice, an ideal of sharing. Not the dense tissue of human realities, which the rulers those in charge, as people say, perhaps ironically forget and dissimulate in a mixture of indifference and calculation, shielding it from themselves behind their statistics printed on glossy paper.

And what higher law? All I see here is a shameless greed. Where is the providence they appeal to, the inevitable necessity? I understand how the forces of power and money, given the opportunity, can show what they really believe in. The piety proclaimed by business leaders long struck me as hypocrisy. Yet it is not. Their cynicism has reached a higher, almost ethereal, degree, where it is not detachable from sincerity. The laws of economics are like the decrees of God, floating in a transcendent realm where the two merge together, propagating an inescapability imposed on all without exception, like the weather outside or the coming of death. Things have reached a point at which finding oneself immensely privileged, a beneficiary of the world order in the face of the mass whose fate is no longer anything but to survive is almost a humbling experience. When it seems that so much unreason this demented monstrosity of inequalities is only a surface appearance and must have a higher explanation, theological and mathematical. That is indeed the atrocious function of bringing mathematical formalism into economics: to acquit those who rake in the profits. No, humanity is not being killed off by profiteering scoundrels, but by the humble servants of laws whose sovereignty and complexity escape the common mortal. I hear the voices of these overpaid business leaders, these millionaire sports stars. They ease their consciences by objecting: But really, I didnt demand these exorbitant payments, they were offered me! And so obviously I must deserve them. Go and tell the over-exploited workers that they deserve the wages they get, and are underpaid because they are under-people.

The double process of enrichment of the rich and impoverishment of the poor leads to the steady collapse of the middle class.

Yet this rift has still not done very much to stir up peoples political hatred of the privileged. It is diffracted into an endless series of internal divisions. Because the condition of the most well-off everywhere arouses a bitter passion to resemble them; because a pride in being poor, fuelled by the hope of future revenge, has given way to an aggressive shame; because the message conveyed on all sides is that the only meaning of life lies in maximum consumption, in being drawn by the present into a facile enjoyment. For these reasons and others again, the just anger of an exploited majority against the minority is short-circuited, redistributed into a hatred of petty profiteers and a fear of petty criminals.