The Economist - UK (2021-11-20)

86 Books & arts The Economist November 20th 2021

Zemmour declares that the three members

of a French family who were murdered in a

terrorist  attack  at  a  Jewish  school  in  Tou­

louse  in  2012,  and  who  were  buried  in

Israel, did not belong to France.

The second obsession is paranoia about

decline, and the failure of elites to protect

French  identity.  For  Maurras,  the  chief

menace to it was that enemy within: Jews,

Protestants,  Freemasons  and  foreigners.

For  Barrès,  the  enemy  was  principally

without: Germany, and its military might.

For Mr Camus and Mr Zemmour, it is above

all  Islam.  Echoing  the  “great  replacement

theory”,  Mr  Zemmour  claims  that,  in  to­

day’s France, “an Islamic civilisation is re­

placing  a  people  from  a  Christian,  Greco­

Roman  civilisation”.  “Veiled  women”,  Mr

Camus recently told a tvinterviewer, “are

the flags of conquest, of colonisation”.

Today’s  reactionaries  tap  into  a  deep

undercurrent  of  fear  and  paranoia  in

France,  but  also  of  anti­Semitism.  An

unapologetic  anti­Semite,  Maurras  de­

fended  the  French  army’s  accusations

against  Alfred  Dreyfus,  a  Jewish  French

captain  wrongly  convicted  by  the  French

army  of  high  treason  in  1894.  That  was  a

time,  among  the  Catholic  and  military

French elite, of intense anxiety about spies

and  traitors,  and  of  conspiracy  theories

about  Jewish  financiers.  In  “Jewish

France”,  a  virulent  anti­Semitic  tract  pub­

lished  in  1886,  Edouard  Drumont  had

warned of the threat of a “Jewish conquest”

of  France,  led  by  a  “hateful,  gold­hungry”

people bent on bringing about the “painful

agony of a generous nation”. 

Himself of Jewish and Algerian descent,

Mr  Zemmour  occupies  an  ambiguous

place  in  this  tradition.  By  hinting  today

that Dreyfus may not have been innocent,

or defending Vichy for “protecting” French

Jews—because  it  deported  foreign  ones

first—Mr Zemmour is confecting not a se­

rious  historical  assessment  but  a  studied

provocation. As well as distorting history,

this is a way of “signalling his link to a pil­

lar  of  French  society,  which  is  the  army,

and  to  a  particular  set  of  right­wing  val­

ues”, suggests Jean Garrigues, a historian at

the University of Orléans. 

That  such  views  are  given  a  legitimate

airing is new, and disquieting. Jean­Marie

Le  Pen,  who  founded  the  hard­right  party

that his daughter, Marine Le Pen, rebrand­

ed  and  now  leads,  appalled  the  salons  of

Paris and was treated accordingly. Mr Zem­

mour,  who  is  well­read  and  flatters  the

French  regard  for  the  cultivé,  is  handled

with  respect.  Aspiring  presidential  candi­

dates  are  invited  by  debate  moderators,

with  scarcely  a  blush,  to  offer  their  per­

spective on the “great replacement theory”.

Moreover, France lacks the counterbal­

ancing  intellectual  voices  of  the  past.  “At

the time of Maurras, Émile Zola and repub­

licans fought back. But the intellectual left

andradicalleftinFrancehavebeenswept

away,”saysSudhirHazareesingh,a politi­

calscientistatOxfordUniversityandau­

thorof“HowtheFrenchThink”.Today,no

Frenchthinkerhasthetoweringstatureof

Jean­Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir,

AlbertCamus,MichelFoucaultorothersin

turtlenecksandtrenchcoatsontheleft

bank whose influence lingered wellbe­

yondtheirlifetimes.

Noleft­wingpoliticalleaderhasa com­

manding influence, either.In this void,

toxictheoriesareresuscitated,andusedto

framediscussion,withoutrobustorper­

suasiverebuke.Aselsewhere,reasonand

rationalityseem,likecontempt,tobefrag­

iletoolsagainstthepotentnarrativeforce

ofpopulistreactionaries.The declineof

thepublicintellectualontheFrenchleft

removesonemorelineofdefence.n

Artificialintelligence

Mechanical minds

E

arlylastyear,researchersattheMass­

achusetts Institute of Technology (mit)

used a machine­learning algorithm to look

for new antibiotics. After training the sys­

tem  on  molecules  with  antimicrobial

properties,  they  let  it  loose  on  huge  data­

bases  of  compounds  and  found  one  that

worked. Because it operated in a different

way,  even  bacteria  that  had  developed  a

resistance  to  traditional  antibiotics  could

not evade the new drug. 

Behind the success was a deeper truth:

the  algorithm  was  able  to  spot  aspects  of

reality that humans had not contemplated,

might not be able to detect and may never

comprehend. The implications of this gen­

eral development for science, business and

warfare—and indeed, for what it means to

be  human—are  the  subject  of  these  rumi­

nations by Henry Kissinger, America’s pre­

eminent  living  statesman,  Eric  Schmidt,

the former boss of Google, and Daniel Hut­

tenlocher,  an  expert  on  artificial  intelli­

gence (ai) at mit. 

In their telling, the most important way

that aiwill change society is by redefining

the basis of knowledge. “Whether we con­

sider it a tool, a partner, or a rival, [ai] will

alter  our  experience  as  reasoning  beings

and  permanently  change  our  relationship

with reality,” the authors write. “The result

will  be  a  new  epoch.”  If  uttered  by  a  Soy­

lent­quaffing  coder,  that  sentiment  might

be  dismissed  as  hyperbole.  Coming  from

authors of this pedigree, it ought to be tak­

en seriously. 

In an essay in theAtlanticmagazine in

2018,  Mr  Kissinger  argued  thatairepre­

sents  the  end  of  the  Enlightenment.  This

book substantiates that thesis with an en­

gaging romp through the history of reason

and  decision­making.  Unsurprisingly,  the

crunchiest  discussion  is  of  international

security. The authors show that aiis radi­

cally  changing  the  way  states  challenge

one  another,  and  why  fighting  wars  with

autonomous  weapons—which  could  de­

vise strategies, identify targets and kill op­

ponents—invites  calamity.  Interactions

between rivals will become harder to pred­

ict, and conflicts more difficult to limit. 

Hitherto in the era of nuclear weapons,

the  central  objective  of  national­security

policy  has  been  deterrence.  That  rests  on

the premise that a rival state’s capabilities

are  visible,  its  doctrine  known  and  its  ac­

The Age of AI.By Henry Kissinger, Eric

Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher. Little,

Brown and Company; 272 pages; $30.

John Murray; £20

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