Free Public Enemies by Bernard-Henri Lévy Page B

who could stay quietly at home enjoying life and writing novels, should spend so much of his life running around the world, denouncing its injustices and disorder, and why, although nobody asked him to do so, he keeps giving his learned opinion week after week on how to fix things—if our exchange could do that, I must admit that I would be pleased.
    The problem, I insist, is not only that nobody called on me to do this …
    It’s not only that, unlike those whose profession it is, in particular journalists, I could easily live without bothering with this.
    The strange thing is that when I think about it, I am at least as inclined as you toward skepticism, doubt, and a sense of futility.
    I’m a pessimist.
    In philosophical terms I’m not at all what is usually called a progressive.
    Actually, I believe that people who want to get too mixed up in the lives of their fellow men, to redesign or regenerate humanity excessively, are either dangerous lunatics or crooks, or both.
    Indeed, for the record, it’s that conviction that cost me the Prix Goncourt the only time in my life that I had a real chance of winning it. It was the year of my
Last Days of Charles Baudelaire
, and there was a passage in the novel in which I had the author of
Les Fleurs du mal
say that it was no coincidence that horrible Marat had called his newspaper
L’Ami du peuple
or that the abominable Robespierre believed he was a friend to humankind. On the jury was the late André Stil, who had two religions, or rather three—the Party (he was the only Frenchman to receive successively the Stalin Prize and the Prix Populiste Littéraire), Grasset * (he was the only juror in the history of the prize to have made a point of honor of never letting his emotions get in the way, and, over the fifteen to twenty years of his reign, always voting for his publishing house), and Robespierre (he harbored a puerile but intense devotion for “The Incorruptible,” following the line of a party that only ever saw the Bolsheviks as the reincarnation of the Committee of Public Safety and its blazing intransigence). You can guess the rest. There was unease in the civilization of Robespierre and Stalin.
Between my Party and my publishing house, I must choose my Party
. And by one vote, his, a Goncourt that had been in the cards slipped away and went to an undeniable lover of the human race, my comrade Érik Orsenna.
    I wanted to tell you that I know how it goes.
    I want it to be clear that I am aware of what, metaphysically speaking, may militate against the need for “commitment.”
    Nevertheless, in spite of that, in spite of all that, despite all I know about dangerous pity and its snares, despite the murky, suspect, even vaguely ridiculous aspects of this pose of the great intellectual hoisting the Enlightenment flag in all the dark rooms of the conscience and of the world (isn’t it Norpois who in [
À
]
la Recherche
[
du temps perdu
] exhorts the BHLs and Houellebecqs of his time to lay claim to the “great causes” and warns them that if they fail to do so they will be nothing more than “flute players”?), that is what I’ve spent my life doing. Instead of writing my novels and real philosophical tracts, I’ve traveled the length and breadth of this vast world looking for wrongs to be righted and causes to be defended.
    Why is that?
    I won’t mention the official, noble, blameless reasons, although they do count for something.
    Even if, in my case, these words are not merely hot air, I won’t mention anger, indignation, the unbearable sight of the world’s poverty, the immediate, mandatory, instinctive sympathy for history’s victims, those it has ignored, its damned.
    I will attempt to name the other reasons, the petty ones, the ones that are less easy to admit, but that count almost as much, if I try to be honest with myself and thus take seriously our decision to travel this part of our path together, following the route of confessional writing.