When Jean-Marie Le Pen died recently at the age of 96, hundreds of people in various towns and cities in France gathered to dance with joy. I suspect that their joy was rather simulated, because the deceased had long since ceased to be an important political figure, having been expelled from the party he created; but the dancing for joy, simulated or real, was unseemly and even somewhat frightening.
It is not that I think that Le Pen was a good man: very far from it. He was violent and provocative and was not averse to using his fist as an argument. The evidence suggests he had personally committed torture in Algeria. He seemed to like a brawl, even late in his life. The ideas he expressed were often genuinely horrible, designed to bring him attention and appealing to the lowest of political emotions. At the same time, he was gifted in rhetoric and potential interlocutors avoided him. He aimed more at public notice and notoriety than at real political power.
But for all that he was no loss to the country, the celebration of his death by singing and dancing in public struck me as coarse and indecent. Bad as he might have been, he had long since ceased to be an active threat to anyone; in fact, he was no longer in charge of his own affairs because of his cognitive decline. There are circumstances, perhaps, in which the public celebration of a person’s death might be excusable, in the middle of a desperate war, but otherwise it is wrong, whatever one’s feelings about the deceased. To celebrate the death of a political enemy in public is to unleash the worst of emotions – emotions not so very far removed from those Jean-Marie Le Pen made his political career playing upon. And contrary to the pseudo-hydraulic conception of emotions, according to which an unexpressed emotion is like pus in an abscess that will eventually poison the blood if not released, the expression of such emotion only leads to a desire for ever more explicit and violent expression of it, until it is satisfied only by actual brutality.
In a crowd, inhibitions are lost, and responsibility is dispersed to the point of disappearance. It is well-known that people are prepared to do in a crowd what they would never do if they were on their own. This is why the maintenance of seemliness in public is so important, at least if violence is to be avoided.
This seemliness, however, has to come from within: it cannot be imposed by, for example, water cannon or the employment of police truncheons. Its loss, if widespread enough, is potentially disastrous, and it does seem as if the sense of seemliness is on the decline, increasing the likelihood of physical conflict.
I have not done the experiment, but I suspect that if you were to ask a sample of the population about the virtue of seemliness, a large majority would not understand the question, neither the meaning of the word nor the quality itself.
What to do about it: ay, there’s the rub.
One Response
Even a cursory glance at past episodes of ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ and its UK doppelgänger ‘The Jeremy Kyle Show’ – or, indeed, any of the current ‘Reality’ shows – certainly corroborates Theodore’s lament about the decline of ‘seemliness’. Coarse, inane and/or indecent attitudes and views – freely and sometimes violently expressed – have been legitimised and even celebrated in the popular media. Is this true ‘democracy’…or downright ‘decadence’? Answers on a postcard to ‘Big Brother’.