The Lack of Nuance in Thought

The Covid crisis acted as a revealer of the fragility of critical thinking among those very people who proclaim themselves its guardians. A reflection on intellectual ethics in the face of fear and power.

The mirage of intellectual virtue, or critical posture as imposture

Contemporary intellectuals readily cultivate a radical critical posture. They diagnose the world’s ills with the confidence of a doctor facing a patient: toxic social networks, rampant conspiracy theories, threatening populism. This overarching position grants them a comfortable moral authority. As La Boétie already wrote in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1575), “tyrants are only great because we are on our knees”. But who really kneels? Those who blindly obey or those who theorize their submission?

These virtuous thinkers presuppose a sick world of which they would be the enlightened therapists. Their wholesale criticism of the contemporary world, its technologies, its excesses, its supposed ignorances, places them in a reassuring position of intellectual superiority. Yet this critical ease often masks an inability to think against the real powers in place, the very ones that precisely guarantee their positions as recognized intellectuals.

Authentic intellectual engagement requires something other than this conventional criticism. It demands what Hannah Arendt called “thinking without a banister”, that is, accepting to put one’s certainties and, sometimes, one’s social position at risk. The nuance of thought begins with recognizing that we all participate, to varying degrees, in the systems we claim to criticize.

But who are these paragons of virtue, these white knights of philosophy, when they themselves are seized by their own fears, anxieties, resentments or hatred towards those who frighten them? Does their moral posture, so solid in theory, withstand the pressure of reality? They position themselves as critics of power, but don’t they become its most zealous servants when it flatters their anxieties and offers them a prime position on the side of “good”?

We had the chance, or misfortune, to be collectively subjected to a full-scale ethics test during the Covid crisis. It was a sadly revealing period, where we saw the vast majority of these intellectuals, supposedly enlightened, sink into blind obedience to the absurd, obscurantism and authoritarianism, in complete political and philosophical unconsciousness, almost as one. This situation recalls the theme of The Treason of the Intellectuals by Julien Benda (1927), who already denounced intellectuals abandoning the defense of universal values of truth and justice in favor of the political and nationalist passions of their time.

The full-scale test of ethics

The period 2020-2022 thus constituted an involuntary philosophical experiment of unprecedented scale. Suddenly, abstract ethical principles collided with concrete choices: to accept or refuse liberticidal measures, to question or endorse hasty and partial scientific consensuses, to defend or abandon stigmatized minorities (young people first, the “unvaccinated” second). This moment revealed, as Orwell wrote in 1984 (his anticipation novel written in 1948), that “orthodoxy is unconsciousness”, an unconsciousness particularly widespread among those who believe themselves to be the most conscious. It is this paradox that I believe needs to be illuminated.

I therefore observed with sadness and disappointment the majority of enlightened intellectuals sinking into what I would call soft collaboration. Not out of malice, but through the mechanism that Étienne de La Boétie already described very well: the habit of servitude that becomes second nature. They defended the indefensible, barriers at the entrance to public places, the stigmatization of those who questioned, the criminalization of doubt, with all the more ardor as they saw it as the expression of their civic virtue. As Simone Weil analyzed, “power contains a kind of intoxication to which it is almost impossible not to succumb when one touches it, even from the outside”. These “great thinkers” actively participated in the disgrace and shameful stigmatization of those who dared to criticize. These few dissenting voices, these whistleblowers and watchdogs of democracy, rightly criticized liberticidal and scientifically absurd policies. Five years later, many of their analyses have proven correct.

The most hackneyed manipulation techniques, all documented for a long time, were deployed: sowing fear, confusion, imposing authoritarianism, lies, division and the criminalization of an entire part of the population, suddenly presented as a public danger for the simple reason that it refused to believe official nonsense.

Today, it is therefore notorious and proven that most justifications for these measures were based on false claims (even members of the scientific council and Pfizer laboratory executives have admitted, with the skill of turning their coats when the wind changes). But at the time, what did the great virtuous intellectuals do? For the most part, they polished the boots of power and protected their privileges, in defiance of the ethics they claimed to embody. Their true faces appeared. They are not necessarily fundamentally evil people, but people who, out of comfort or fear, let evil happen. Driven by the need to preserve their social position, they betrayed the principles they themselves had written about. Even Noam Chomsky advocated vaccination, he who had nonetheless documented all the processes in “Manufacturing Consent” in 1968.

The thought of these intellectuals then transformed, adapted, simplified to the extreme. This is what we can call the disappearance of critical thinking (this ability to think for oneself, against power if necessary). We must understand power here in its broadest sense, as Foucault analyzed it: not just the government, but symbolic power, the one that ensures you are “in good graces,” that collective within which one feels strong and supported. As after the Second World War, where alleged last-minute resisters exercised “legitimate” violence to settle simple neighborhood conflicts, a power was constituted and distributed certificates of good conduct.

The mechanics of intellectual submission

How can brilliant minds thus betray their own principles? Philosopher Günther Anders spoke of “the obsolescence of man” in the face of the structures he has created. This obsolescence also affects thought: it adapts, simplifies, aligns with dominant interests. Critical thinking does not disappear brutally; it gradually erodes under the pressure of social necessities.

An academic depends on public and private funding. Their laboratories form partnerships with industry. Their conferences are sponsored. Their publications circulate in networks of influence. How, under these conditions, can one maintain truly independent thought? As Upton Sinclair wrote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Anatomy of thought without nuance

This is how the great thinkers of democracy let, without flinching and with their assent, barriers be set up at the entrance to public places for those who refused to be inoculated with an experimental product. They relayed the lies uttered by powers and media subservient to the financial interests of the sellers of these same products. To oppose was to risk social sacrifice. And who is willing to pay that price for the coherence of their thought? This is where I now perceive, after this full-scale test, that the thought of most of these intellectuals was in reality sharp, superior, authoritarian. Brilliant thought, certainly, well-argued, but without any nuance.

This thought stigmatizes wholesale. Criticizing “social networks,” for example, what does that mean? It’s not an entity. It’s people, it’s us. By using this kind of formula, one creates a caricature, the brain-dead young person addicted to electronic dopamine, to spare oneself the complexity of reality. In the same way, we forged the figure of the stupid and dangerous “conspiracy theorist,” when they were often the best-informed people, who sought to protect themselves and others with more discernment. This tendency to prefer the comfort of a sweeping judgment rather than the effort of understanding and possibly questioning and overcoming one’s fears, is the symptom of a thought that has renounced nuance.

This belief in one’s own knowledge, this seduction of superiority, this is what I call the lack of nuance in thought. I believe we are all susceptible to succumbing to it when we allow ourselves to be dominated by fear, particularly the fear of losing our privileges and status. Conformist pressure, brilliantly highlighted by Solomon Asch’s experiments, shows how much an individual can deny their own perception to align with the group’s opinion. Nuance is the first victim of this pressure.

Learning nuance

This experience taught me something essential about the nuance of thought. I learned to respect those I consider to be profoundly wrong, these modern “collaborators” who supported what I hold to be democratic ignominies. Not that I relativize our disagreements, but because I recognize in them a part of myself: the temptation of intellectual comfort, the fear of exclusion, the desire for recognition.

Maintaining nuance does not mean renouncing one’s convictions. It means accepting that the other, even radically opposed, remains a possible interlocutor. They may see me as irresponsible, I rather see them as voluntary submissives. Yet we can continue to dialogue, provided we abandon the certainty of being right. As Emmanuel Levinas wrote: “The face-to-face with another is the first situation where I am not alone in the world.”

This nuance requires distinguishing the person from their positions, intelligence from its wanderings, sincerity from its errors. A collaborator can produce nuanced thought, Heidegger is the troubling example. A resistant can sink into violent dogmatism devoid of humanity. History teaches us that moral positions do not guarantee the quality of thought.

True nuance accepts the permanent discomfort of doubt. It refuses definitive camps, reassuring labels, expeditious condemnations. It always keeps open the possibility of dialogue, even with those who disgust us. Not out of cowardice or relativism, but out of fidelity to the complexity of reality.

Towards an ethics of complexity

Cultivating the nuance of thought constitutes in my view an act of resistance today. Faced with media simplifications, political polarizations, militant certainties, maintaining complexity becomes subversive. This does not mean adopting a lukewarm or consensual position, but accepting that truth rarely lodges in extremes, even those on the side of majority thinking.

This nuance begins with recognizing our own contradictions. We criticize systems from which we profit. We denounce powers in which we participate. We theorize resistances that we do not practice. This lucidity about our compromises constitutes the foundation of truly critical thought. As Pascal wrote: “Man is neither angel nor beast, and the misfortune is that whoever wants to act the angel acts the beast.”

Intelligence and erudition do not protect against intellectual ease. One can construct sophisticated reasoning to justify ethical capitulations. One can mobilize complex concepts to mask simple cowardices. The real difficulty consists in maintaining the tension between our ideals and our practices, without yielding either to cynicism or hypocrisy. This uncomfortable tension perhaps constitutes the very place of authentic thought, one that refuses to reassure itself in the certainties of power or opposition, but continues, despite everything, to seek an ever-elusive truth.