Who Were the Sea Peoples?

As I am nearing the end of Manent's very interesting book, I want to try to summarize his thesis. (I am, of course, reviewing the book, and would need to do so soon anyway.) The topic which Manent wishes to explore is that of the relationship of French Muslims to the French nation as a whole, and vice a versa. And the first thing I want to note about this topic is how many people will reflexively reject the idea that there is any such topic worth discussing. "French Muslims," they will say, "are no different then any other French person: they are rights-bearing individuals who are citizens of the French nation, and more importantly, of Europe. And even to suggest that there could be some issue of the relationship of the French nation as such to the Muslim community as such is probably an indication of racism or Islamaphobia." But Manent sees such a response as a symptom of an ideological delusion, a deliberate refusal to look at reality. France is an histor...

"Those who speak only the language of individual rights will never treat a social or political problem pertinently." -- Pierre Manent, Beyond Radical Secularism , p. 79

"This ridiculous tyranny [of appearance over reality] affects our Muslim citizens as well, forcing them, too, to live on this artificial stage, the vanity of which is as evident to them as to anyone. It is true, as I said, that their first movement is often take advantage of this arrangement, and to enter into the role that is offered to them. In doing so, moreover, they are only participating in the great game of complaint that has for sometime been the preferred vocal register of the constituent groups of our society... In any case, the transformation of the public conversation into a tearful quarrel has deleterious consequences for society as a whole and for each of its parts consequences that are all the more serious for those parts that are more distant from the heart of national life." -- Pierre Manent,  Beyond Radical Secularism , pp. 75-76

"By their determination to lay down the law concerning social perception and the words that translate them, our governments are increasingly abandoning actual political action. They proceed as if social life were a spectacle and as if the parts of the body politic were objects the perception of which were subject to command: politics becomes a mise en scène . Through ever more emphatic words and gestures, they go to great lengths to command us not to see." -- Pierre Manent, Beyond Radical Secularism , p. 75 It is interesting to contemplate what we are "commanded not to see" here in the United States. For instance, although black people in New York City commit homicide at roughly 30 times the rate of white people, and a white person is many times more likely to be killed by a black person than vice-versa, we are constantly being told about how dangerous it is to be black, due to white racism. And merely to point out these facts, which really anyone living in Ne...

A plain fact that methodological individualism will block us from seeing or accepting: "The facts authorize us -- no, they oblige us! -- to say that Islam as such, Islam understood as a meaningful whole, is in motion, that it strives and struggles, in a world [where] it is an actor on the stage of history that must be taken very seriously. Thus the world in which we must live and act is a world marked by the effort, the movement, the forward thrust of Islam." -- Beyond Radical Secularism , p. 39

A friend of mine had mentioned on social media how puzzling the geopolitical events of the past year were for him. I could explain his perplexity with a single phrase: "methodological individualism." The idea(s) behind methodological individualism, however they are put, turn out to be false or vacuous. It is just not true that the only good explanation of social events individual, or that the only "final" explanation is individual, and so on for any exclusionary version of methodological individualism. Turn out to be not individualism at all: the fact that individuals mean something in social explanations is not particularly controversial, and doesn't really distinguish any methodological anythingism from any other one, except perhaps extreme holism. And it is not simply false but innocuous: It is actively harmful to to anyone trying to understand human social affairs. As Pierre Manent puts it: "As I've said, our political regime and our way of ...