Recently I was reading an article ( I infuriatingly can not identify it now) in which the author plugged a book that he had read. I believe the premise of the article was the way that people can be drawn into living in circumstances that they wouldn't have thought possible formerly.
The book that he mentioned is titled "Submission" and the author is French novelist Michel Houellebecq. The story is set in 2022 but the book was written in 2015. It is the story of a France that has been "taken" by Muslim efforts in the political arena, and how the native French respond.
I was intrigued by the mention and so I got the book on my Kindle.
I don't have a lot to say about French politics, Muslim immigration, any immigration really, or the way that particular story might possibly play out somewhere in Europe. It might be a scenario somewhere in Europe in the future, but at this time I am more concerned with the parallels that I see between the characters and the storyline in Submission, and the way that many things seem to be playing out in our own country.
I am not that far into it, but the main character, Francois', who is obviously a protagonist of a sort, is living as a true hedonist at the beginning of the story. He, and it seems most of the academics that he spends his time with, as a French Literature professor at the Sorbonne, seem not to have any deep convictions to go with their deep thoughts. They float through life, from bed to bed, and from the classroom to the bedroom in particular, without any plans for the future and without any real roots in the past.
So just to this point, we live in our own time and place without the roots of Faith that have in the past served to moor us at least in the broadest sense. People seem to be casting dispersion on any and all "traditional" values, without anything of substance to replace them with.
If you are going to give up on God, at least have a good reason and something profound to replace Him with! Otherwise what is the point of your rebellion, sleeping in on Sunday?
In "Submission" there seems to be a political void, or vacuum, into which the rootless are drawn, mostly the young people, young men in particular. The vapid and inane, who had been filling seats within the French political system, don't appear to have thought that there would be anyone to oppose them.
What do our own politics say about our level of national cohesion and inspiration to live for something higher than ourselves? Just from a purely political standpoint we don't have anything that could be called national cohesion. We used to have a fairly collective vision of what we considered "true, good and beautiful", the things worth aspiring to. Now we have people in power who make it their job to break up and bring down as much of the mortar of our foundation as possible.
The culture is thoroughly confused, with nothing being true at all. You can't even be sure of who you are or who you will or should be in a year from now, at the most fundamental level. A persons identity is expected to be as fluid as the Mississippi.
This seems to be where the French, at least Francois and his contemporaries find themselves.
There should be a satisfying resolution to this story, there should be something that makes sense, that leads us to some great lesson and shift of perspective back to what we understand as "good". I'm just having a hard time seeing how we will get to the end of the story without a common vision of what we are aiming for. What do we really desire? Who do we want to be? Does anybody know?
