What is happening in France and the issue of morality

Much has been said about the economic, political, and cultural aspects of what has been happening in France. These are true. But there is also a moral dimension to the issue. Moralizing, making moral judgments, is not a stance I particularly embrace. However, if evaluations based on economic, political, and cultural codes do not lead to a moral dimension, then they lose their value.

Being right is a positional certainty. At a certain moment, it is possible to make a declaration of being right based on a specific relationship and action. Clustering in relationships based on righteousness does not show the same scene through static and dynamic perspectives. The dynamics of being right often, even dramatically, deviate from their static aspects to some degree or another. To put it in simpler terms, it is much more difficult to sustain the state of being right than simply being right. Nowadays, there are so many discussions about sustainability... What is strange is that no one talks about the sustainability of morality itself. It seems that everyone is very confident in their moral statics. They are unaware of the dynamics that can drive morality in different directions...

Starting off as right and veering into wrongdoing is an ordinary occurrence. Those who experience these deviations prefer to ignore or trivialize them. They are so sure of their statics that there are even those who consider the deviations that occur in the dynamic-practical dimension as their privileges. "That person is so right that" committing an injustice is a "privilege" they deserve. Of course, these are extreme interpretations. There are also others who find these deviations to be aberrations. Considering deviations as anomalies is a much more common assessment. Can injustice be committed in the name of righteousness? If so, to what extent? These questions are quite complicated, and if we were to honestly examine them, it would easily be understood that not every hero emerges unscathed from this test.

The modern world, centered around the West, undermined the moral resources of human reason even as it was being established. The Renaissance intellect, which could not be praised enough, accomplished this. It is often overlooked that Machiavelli, who proclaimed "All means are fair in pursuit of a goal," was a Renaissance thinker. To characterize the Renaissance, it is worth mentioning that the art-loving Medici family was brought to the forefront while the bloodthirsty Borgia family was kept in the background. We are not here to extol the political achievements of the ancient world. However, our ancestors did not give up on moral politics despite everything. The Renaissance intellect unraveled the Gordian Knot by differentiating between moral politics and realpolitik. The rationality of the modern world has been stripped of moral concerns. There were reasons, at least for those times, that could be considered justifiable. In the ancient world, both institutional religion and its established morality caused so many injustices, both numerous and significant, that removing truth from morality had, at the very least, an honesty dimension. Even Faust's confrontation with Mephisto can be explained to a certain extent by the ethics of honesty. This approach could perhaps be justified only as a reaction to the corruption of institutional religion, and only in a temporal or positional sense. The interpretation, however, was extremely excessive. After a certain point, it became increasingly difficult to maintain a sensitivity to truth. And indeed, that's what happened. Crude realities and crude realism replaced truth. When these became principles, the consequences were extremely destructive. Is critiquing and subjectivizing morality, and opening it up to individual interpretations, the solution to this issue?

The modern world has risen through the pillar of economic politics as a discipline. I consider this to be highly inhumane. What is strange is the masking of this aspect of the matter under the promise of prosperity and the transformation of economic politics into an object of desire for humanity. Consequently, realpolitik is not alone in this. The principles of modern economy are equally unethical, if not more, as those of modern politics. Trying to oscillate between rendering unethical as amoral, meaning detached from morality, and immoral, meaning contrary to morality, I later realized that it is not at all convincing. Immorality (immoralité) arises from the voids left by amorality. Despite the interventions of philosophers like Kant and Sartre, who aim to transform intention-thought ethics (Gesinnungsethik) into ethics of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik), practical progress could not be made in this regard. (Habermas and Apel, on the other hand, attempted to deploy discursive ethics in the same field). These were graceful intellectual interventions that fell into the void. In practice, the material necessities of the economic-political world prevailed over Kant's imperatives.

While economic politics functioned, these issues were not fully understood. Humanity abandoned the promise of humanization through a rhetoric of democracy, freedom, and prosperity. However, the economic-political world encompassed much deeper issues beyond the accepted ones. Deviations unfolded as follows: Yes, there was inequality, but civilized societies had overcome it. Yes, there were oppressions and injustices, but the civilized world had transcended them through democracies. Yes, there was poverty, but civilized nations had eradicated it through work and production. Why were these achievements exclusive to others? In fact, the civilized world achieved them by skillfully exploiting the resources of the world it had conquered and imposing its will on other worlds. They were prosperous because others were impoverished. They were becoming democratic because others lived under internal oppressions. They understood welfare because we labored. They were able to establish relative equality in their societies by subjecting the world to an unequal division of labor.

There is an intellectual naivety that believes the world will change through conscious uprisings of the oppressed and the defeated. It is the motto of historical oppressed peoples. However, it has not happened, and it will not happen. Systems do not collapse from the outside; on the contrary, they collapse from within. Today is no different. This collapse reveals what is usually unseen or deliberately ignored in normal times. We can now see the true nature of France, which gifted the world with two glorious revolutions in 1789 and 1871. Unfortunately, the moral deficiency that constructed modern France becomes apparent only when it kills Nail, a French policeman raised with that code.