With people jumping into the Canal Saint–Martin in 100°–plus temperatures in Paris, it’s a good time to recall Paul Valéry and his regrets at the mental and spiritual consequences of Europe’s Great War on itself.
The heat wave in Europe as captured by this Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission on May 26. (European Space Agency/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
One hundred four degrees Fahrenheit in Paris, a new record? That is what I read Thursday. Paris, as I figured out while studying there decades ago and freezing through the dark winters, is latitudinally further north (roughly 48.8°N) than Nova Scotia (43.5°N – 47°N).
The heat wave of all heat waves has Europeans in a state of shock and panic. There are “red alerts” across the Continent. In the foothills of the Alps temperatures are running into the mid–90s. The Swiss… how to put it?… do not know quite what to do when it is in the mid–90s.
In Paris, a 44–year-old computer engineer named Stéphane Guillaume watched the other day as his two children swam in the Canal Saint–Martin, a Right Bank waterway built for barge traffic in the early 19th century. Swimming in the canal is against the law, but the flics are looking the other way at this point.
“It’s going to get worse every year,” Guillaume remarked to a New York Times reporter. “It’s very worrying because we’re already at the limit of what’s bearable.”
This is the reality, and let’s skip the tiresome “new normal,” an insidious phrase corporate media promote to suggest there is nothing anyone can do about all the calamities that befall humanity in the 21st century. The French, the Spanish, the Greeks, all the Mediterraneans: This, the unlivable, is what the rest of us are in for.
No more sports or music festivals for the time being, the French government has announced. Hospitals are in emergency mode. No more drinking outdoors — no more looking pleasantly at your vin blanc as the sunlight sets the glass aglow.
O.K., the authorities must be seen to be doing something; we all must make our sacrifices. It reminds me of Gerald Ford during the mid–1970s oil crisis, when the American president got on television and told people to be sure not to let the kitchen door stay open when putting out the cat at night.
Then I read that at the recent Group of 7 summit in Évians-les–Bains, with seven environment ministers in attendance, all discussion of the climate change crisis was deliberately kept off the agenda to avoid dissension — specifically to make sure the American delegation did not get up and walk out.
Where is the seriousness in high places?
President Donald Trump during a press conference at the G7 on June 17 at La Grange au Lac in Evian-les-Bains, France. (White House/Daniel Torok)
Then I read that a conference intended to discuss extreme heat, part of the June 20–28 London Climate Action Week, was cancelled because the building where it was to be held was too hot. Yes indeedy. Just the thing.
These Climate Action Weeks, convened here and there on different continents, are a curious thing. Business execs, NGOs, policy wonks — all sorts of people attend. But “C.A.W.s” are decentralized by design. No one with power — no resolute president or cabinet minister ready to pass laws, to declare a new national or international direction — seems ever to go.
The mind wanders. Mine to two places.
Armies of Destruction & Paul Valéry
First it went to global spending on weapons. Always best to go to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute for this kind of thing. The latest iteration of S.I.P.R.I.’s Arms Transfers Database, published in March, shows worldwide arms sales at a record high last year. The top 100 manufacturers of killing machines reported $670 billion in sales —another record.
The connection between arms sales and the environment is beyond dispute. Militaries are the world’s No. 1 destroyers of our natural environment by a long way. And there is the case — singular but maybe not so singular as that — of Israel.
The incessant bombing in Gaza comes to multiples of what the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Depleted uranium, white phosphorus, in Lebanon and Syria now lethal pesticides 20 and 30 times what poisons land….
The Zionist regime, I am certain, nurses a Freudian death wish that more or less defines its conduct. But so it also seems with those who run the United States, I will add.
So far as I can make out the numbers, and there is a lot of mumbo-jumbo in them, the G–7 spends the equivalent of a quarter or so of that $670 billion on climate change projects — always with a view to promoting market capitalism in the old World Bank–I.M.F. mode — and about the same percentage to subsidize fossil-fuel extraction.
There are some good minds seriously devoted to the climate question — I do not wish to seem dismissive on this point. But in number and, let’s say, total brain cells if I can put it this way, there is no comparing those addressing the climate crisis with those in power who either ignore it or make it worse or both.
And so to that second place my mind wanders as I read of Europe’s desperate sweltering and the dedication of the Western powers and their barbarous client in West Asia to military technologies that produce not well-being, or solutions to humanity’s shared problems — nothing other than death, suffering and late-capitalist profits.
Paul Valéry, 1871–1945, was a modernist poet and essayist, briefly a bureaucrat at the French Ministry of War, for a long time the private secretary to the head of Havas, which later became Agence France–Presse. I wrote of Valéry some years ago in this space. That piece is here.
Valéry photographed by Henri Manuel, circa 1925. (Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
Valéry understood the vast consequences of the First World War. With notable foresight, he understood that by waging it against itself Europe had fallen from its place in the world order and become — how prescient is this?— “a little cape of the Asiatic continent.” Those who think about a new world order are just now catching up with this man.
Reading Valéry, I don’t have the impression he much regretted this world-historical turn. No, among the many things he regretted, as he wrote in one of his essays, was what the Great War did to the minds and spirits of Europeans.
How many brains dedicated themselves not to building a better world, he asked, but instead to “finding a way to remove barbed wire, baffle the submarines, or paralyze the flight of aeroplanes.” And further in the same essay. The italics are Valéry’s:
“A great deal of science was doubtless required to kill so many men… but moral qualities were equally required. Knowledge and Duty: Must we suspect you also?”
Valéry’s question was rhetorical: It was the perversions of European humanity’s notions of morality, of responsibility and of the best use of knowledge that he most regretted when, in 1919, just after the Armistice, he published The Crisis of the Mind.
We should not mistake this when we read of people jumping into the Canal Saint–Martin in 100°–plus temperatures, and of the prevalent collective flinch from why this is, and of the West’s unflagging determination to wage wars and of the Zionists singular dedication to terror and destruction not just of lives but also of human habitats.
These are all manifestations of the crisis of the mind shared across the West. Europe failed to resolve the crisis of which Paul Valéry wrote, as was evident 20 years after his essay appeared. Resolving ours is the only hope left to us.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being permanently censored.
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