◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Que Sais-Je? I want to begin with a question. The question I spent my life asking. The motto I had engraved: Que sais-je? What do I know? Not what I believe. Not what I'm certain of. What do I actually know — from the position of the person who might be wrong, who has been wrong before? This is the hardest question in human thought. Not because it is complicated. Because it is humbling. And humility is the one thing the present moment in America seems least able to afford. I retreated to my tower in 1571. A year and a half later, on August 24, 1572, the Catholics of France killed between five thousand and thirty thousand Protestants in a single night in the name of religious certainty. The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. And I went on writing essays. The word essai means attempt — the honest effort to think about something without knowing where the thinking will arrive. I wrote about my kidney stones. I wrote about cannibals. About friendship, experience, death. Everything honestly examined leads to the same place: the human mind is smaller than the human situation. The person who has forgotten this is the most dangerous person in the room. The people who killed their neighbors on St. Bartholomew's Day were not evil exactly. They were certain. Certainty is the mechanism. The person who asks que sais-je? — who does not know whether his neighbor deserves to die for their theology — cannot participate in the massacre. The person who knows — who has received the answer from the authority that permits no further inquiry — can. Has. Always has. In every massacre in human history. Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice. I wrote that after meeting three Brazilians brought to France as curiosities. I sat with them. Thought about their ritual practices. Then thought about ours — the rack, the burning of heretics. We call them barbarians, but we surpass them in every kind of barbarity. Not popular. Honest. My friend Étienne de La Boétie died at thirty-two. The great love of my life. Someone asked why our friendship was what it was. Because it was him. Because it was me. No doctrine for it. Only the irreducible fact of two specific people. The person certain about categories — who knows without examination what the immigrant deserves, what the refugee is worth — has never sat with them. Has never tried the attempt. I am watching an America that has stopped asking the question. The enemy is known. The only remaining task is the enemy's defeat. I understand the appeal. The question is exhausting. The certainty is comfortable. But the certainty kills people. I watched it kill thousands in a single night while I sat in my tower writing about kidney stones. The kidney stones were not an escape. They were the insistence that the actual, specific, mortal self is the only instrument of thought available. The self that examines itself honestly cannot sustain the certainty that kills. Que sais-je? Sit with what you actually know — not what you believe, not what your side says, not what the algorithm has confirmed three hundred times. From the position of the person who might be wrong. Be uncertain. Not about everything. About the things you are most certain about. Especially those. You may find the actual neighbor behind the category. You may find — as I found sitting with the Brazilians thinking about the rack — that the barbarian was in the mirror the whole time. Que sais-je? Start there.