Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on November 17, 2024. It was translated into English by the Observatory before being edited to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission.
There is no stopping progress in the invention of new woke causes intended to wake the troops who are a little too asleep again. Because it’s true, by force of stuffing ourselves with “gender”—about half of the themes listed in the 250 or so items of our 2023 Report—”racialization,” “Islamophobia,” “homophobia,” “transphobia,” “fatphobia,” and all the phobias imaginable—except that of mice and reptiles, the only ones that I unfortunately have to confess—we end up finding the soap opera a little repetitive. Thus, the dreary flock of “sheep of thought” periodically struggles to renew the livestock of the unfortunate victims of domination—curse your name, which is too pronounced! And the latest discovery to date is children. Dare you?
Already, the “Tracts” collection of Gallimard editions published “For the right to vote from birth.” Written by Clémentine Beauvais, “teacher-researcher in sociology and philosophy of childhood,” it presents this right as a “fair and necessary reform of democracy,” expressing its indignation that “the fact that babies, children, and adolescents are forbidden from voting is shocking to almost no one.” And then, in October, a conference entitled “Misopédie: la domination adulte dans les discours contemporains” was organized at the University of Limoges: Our colleague Jean Ferrette devoted an editorial to it on October 31 on our site, “No to misopedic adultism!” “It is high time to make this culture of misopedia visible with the hashtag #touchepastongosse!” he joked in a beautiful burst of solidarity with these poor kids horribly discriminated against by adults. But since ridicule only kills those who are sensitive to it—and humor is not the strong point of the wokes—this was not enough, alas, to stop the movement: here is the site TheConversation—winner, let us recall, of one of our last “golden woke”—published on November 14 an article signed by six—no less—teacher-researchers—anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers—entitled “Adult-child: the forgotten domination.”
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Oh yes, that’s right, we almost forgot that one.
The article announces the holding in Paris on November 16 of a demonstration intended to “denounce violence against children and adolescents:” violence which is, it is stated, only “the visible face of a structural domination analyzed by Tal Piterbraut-Merx in Forgotten Domination: Politicizing Adult-Child Relationships, ” which “analyses the legal, family and school logics that maintain minors in the status of unfinished political beings.” So, are teenagers, children, and babies unfinished? But what an insult to equality!
The article informs us that “adult-child relationships are increasingly frequently considered as relationships of domination”—but does not specify which areas are not yet considered from this astonishingly original angle. Thus, the inferiority of children is “constructed”—another concept of astonishing novelty—and their vulnerability is “naturalized”—quick, a good deconstruction to clean all that up!—because “produced by their legal status as minors.” With this scandalous result: “The child is not only deprived of all economic and psychological autonomy, but also cannot choose where he or she lives, nor leave the family home without permission, nor even constitute himself or herself as a civil party in a trial”—quickly, let’s put the children on the street so that they are no longer deprived of their freedom, and if they are not happy, let’s send them to complain to the court! And the worst is still school: being free and compulsory, it “corresponds to a forced and unpaid incorporation of capitalist social and political norms” so as to make children “employable and productive” —what a scandal!
Inclusive writing, of course, is not forgotten: “All children become adults, and all adults are former children”—we still have to give pledges to political correctness. Thus, “They therefore pass, over time, from the status of dominated to the status of dominant.” But what a powerful proposition: the world would be divided once and for all into “dominated status” and “dominant status,” so that if you are in one, you cannot be in the other. Only in which box should we put women, dominated by men but dominant towards children? And Mohammed Merah, a poor victim of neocolonial racism who nonetheless murdered three children because they were Jewish? Children who were doubtless “dominant” because they were “Zionists,” as we would say today? In short, what should we do with reality, which has the bad taste of not entering into the low-brow, ready-to-think of our new revolutionary thinkers?
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Normally, on a university site, a book review, even a very favorable one, indicates at least some reservations and some questions. Nothing like that here: without being rhetorically apologetic, the article restores with the greatest seriousness propositions which, clearly, are not—to the point that one wonders if it is not a hoax. If this is the case, may the editorial staff of TheConversation please let us know and forgive me for letting myself be taken in by the trap. But everything suggests, alas, that this is a serious article.
Our colleague Pierre-Henri Tavoillot explains in his latest book, Do we still want to live together?, at Odile Jacob that the child does not belong to himself, nor his parents, nor to society, but to the adult, he will one day be, and that his parents and society have the duty to help him come into being. Our other colleague, Jacques Robert, recently published a post along these lines: “The duties of parents towards children are just as essential as the rights of children: our children are temporarily entrusted to us by the adult they will one day be.” But to hear this wisdom, one must not have sunk into presentism—everything, right away!—into absolute individualism—I have all the rights!—and into ideological blindness, which prevents us from seeing the most obvious realities, and in particular, this one: that a child is a child, which means that he does not have all the capacities of adults and that, consequently, adults have the duty to protect him.
This is what is stipulated in the Geneva Convention on the Rights of the Child, recalled on the site of TheConversation in an article by Yves Denéchère on November 15—an article which perfectly illustrates what analytical work devoid of ideological bias should be: “The hungry child must be fed, the sick child must be cared for, the backward child must be encouraged, the misguided child must be brought back, the orphan and the abandoned must be taken in and rescued.” Are our valiant detractors of the “domination” of adults over children going to demand the cancellation of this international protection?
And so the passion for victimization turns against those it is supposed to defend.
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