“If I am on the slope of conspiracy, you are on the slope of Lyssenkism!” It is in these terms – alluding to the Soviet figure of a “science” corrupted by ideology – that Lucien-Samir Oulahbib responded to the sociologist Gérald Bronner, engaged in a witch hunt to which our guest does not submit .
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Editor-in-chief of the journal of philosophy and human sciences “Dogma”teacher, political scientist, Lucien-Samir Oulahbib was on our set for an “Essential interview”, after his “Debriefing” last year.
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A fine observer of the media and intellectual world, he deplores an “extraordinary narcissism” which leads to the “construction of a hyperreality, as Jean Baudrillard said”. Having encountered the “Freed old version”, where we debated passionately, or the Marianne by Jean-François Kahn, in which there was a fairly strict line, he notes the disappearance of a certain critical spirit, a shift towards an ideological closure.
“Not just for a problem of conflicts of interest”: he refutes this simplistic cause. To get out of this vice, which for example, on health issues, forgot that “medicine is not only an exact science, it is also a practice, a discipline”, he practices the “double talk” dear to Orwell.
Asked about a certain “lexical dismemberment”, in which experts twist words and concepts, Lucien-Samir Oulahbib notes that this “dictatorship of experts” which hammers arguments from authority fortunately does not resist the facts: when “the king is naked “, “the facts are stubborn”.
Regretting the “loss of responsibility of intellectuals, artists”, who are transformed into “priests and policemen of thought”, or simply conform to it, he fears “a totalitarian spirit, of caste, of sect” which imposes, to the detriment of the “secular spirit”, which did not only imply “tolerance”, but also the capacity to train the critical spirit, claimed in Jules Ferry’s “Letter to teachers”.
What framework to remedy this? Contrary to the libertarians (like the Courier des stratèges whom he salutes), reluctant to any framework in the field of ideas, and following Idriss Aberkane, the sociologist envisages an essential regulation, which breaks the “monopolies” in ” the market of ideas”: why not an “independent authority” which would define a framework for the preservation of these “intangible goods” which are pluralism, critical thinking and freedom of expression? Isn’t this an “essential” fight?