The Need For Roots by Simone Weil (July 2017)
Weil’s book, published posthumously in 1949, is her report on how to regenerate France after the end of World War II. Most of her ideas describe the roles of various institutions in a thriving post-war nation. She also digs into how each person has basic duties toward his or her community and describes how a renewed emphasis on these obligations will prove vital in overcoming the problems resulting from a focus on declaring and protecting individual rights.
Weil devotes the early portion to exploring various human needs. For her, the concept of a ‘Golden Mean’ was too often misapplied to describe needs. There is not a balance but a duality: first one need is met, then the other. After rest is activity, before work comes play, and hunger always interchanges with satiety.
She applies this duality concept to societies as she did to individuals. A ruler bound to no oversight will ruin a nation because obedience is the balancing need for initiative. The society unable to fill newly vacated lower-class roles is unable to honestly provide opportunity for people to ‘work their way up’.
After Weil defines her ideas about human needs, she explains how institutions must exist to serve these needs. She saw the failure to teach religion in schools as a major failure given religion's great influence over time on human thought, activity, and culture. At the minimum, she thought important texts from major religions should be taught the way literature classes teach Shakespeare.
Weil considered it vital for public institutions to engage their citizens throughout the year. Those who only participate in civic life on election day are prone to view some or all public institutions with resentment.
The idea I liked best was about finding truth within a religion’s framework. If a believer wishes to probe a religion’s spirit of truth, it requires a preparedness to abandon the faith if the discovered truth compels a new spiritual commitment. Though this point was delivered in the context of religion, I know it applies to many other situations as well.
One up: Weil’s writing contained many insights or commentaries regarding various societal activities. I’m going to better organize these for an upcoming short post.
As a preview, here is one such commentary for today: a punishment is effective to the extent it wipes out the stigma of the crime.
One down: Weil points out the responsibility authors have to take care with their words. She compares a careless writer to a train operator who crashes despite ‘good intentions’. Though malice is lacking, an author who forgets the truth or simply wastes a reader’s time with empty fluff should be subject to some consequences.
Longtime readers may ponder here- is Weil's commentary about 'empty fluff' taking impressive aim at TOA some seventy years ahead of my first post? Her writing is certainly cited as example of a 20th century writer warning 21st century readers...
I'll defend myself here by pointing to another insight about punishment. For Weil, a person’s status should influence the punishment and only the highest-status offenders should be subject to society’s harshest punishments. I suppose applying this criteria makes any (hypothetical) TOA indiscretions subject to only the slightest rap on wrist…
Just saying: Society has done a great deal to identify man’s rights but accomplished less in the realm of defining man’s obligations. Though rights are important, they allow for justification of good or bad deeds.
Obligations, on the other hand, tend to almost always produce good deeds.
