Emmanuel Todd - French anthropologist - continued

 The last post excerpted from a lecture this famous writer recently delivered in Moscow. It was, however, only the beginning – it continues -

In “The Defeat of the West”, I explain that religious void, the zero stage of religion,

leads to anxiety rather than a state of freedom and well-being. The zero stage 

brings us back to the fundamental problem. What does it mean to be human? 

What is the meaning of things? A classic response to these questions, in a period 

of religious collapse, is nihilism. We move from the fear of emptiness to the 

deification of emptiness, a deification of emptiness that can lead to a desire to 

destroy things, people, and ultimately reality. Transgender ideology is not in itself 

something serious in a moral sense, but it is fundamental in an intellectual sense 

because to say that a man can become a woman or a woman a man reveals a 

desire to destroy reality. 
This, in association with cancel culture and a preference for war, was one element 

in the nihilism that prevailed under the Biden administration. Trump rejects all of that.

However, what strikes me at the moment is the emergence of a nihilism that takes 

other forms: a desire to destroy science and academia, the black middle classes, 

or disorderly violence in the application of the American protectionist strategy. 
When Trump thoughtlessly wants to establish tariffs between Canada and the United 

States, even though the Great Lakes region constitutes a single industrial system, 

I see this as an impulse toward destruction as much as protection. When I see Trump 

suddenly imposing protectionist tariffs on China, forgetting that most American smartphones 

are made in China, I tell myself that we cannot simply dismiss this as stupidity. It is 

foolishness, certainly, but it may also be nihilism. Let us move to a higher moral level: 

Trump's fantasy of transforming Gaza, emptied of its population, into a tourist resort is 

typically a high-intensity nihilistic project.

The fundamental contradiction in American policy leads protectionism to failure. The 

theory of protectionism tells us that protection can only work if a country has the skilled 

population that would allow it to benefit from tariff protections. A protectionist policy will 

only be effective if you have engineers, scientists and skilled technicians. 

The Americans do not have enough of these. Yet I see the United States starting to 

chase away its Chinese students, and so many others, the very people who enable it to 

compensate for its shortage of engineers and scientists. This is absurd. 

The theory of protectionism also tells us that protection can only launch or revive 

industry if the state intervenes to participate in the construction of new industries. 

Yet we see the Trump administration attacking the state, the very state that should be 

nurturing scientific research and technological progress. Worse still, if we look for the 

motivation behind the fight against the federal state led by Elon Musk and others, we 

realise that it is not even economic.
Those who are familiar with American history know the crucial role of the federal government 

in the emancipation of Black people. Hatred of the federal government in the United States 

most often stems from anti-Black resentment. When you fight against the American 

federal government, you are fighting against the central administrations that emancipated 

and still protect Black people. A high proportion of the Black middle class has found 

employment in the federal government. The fight against the federal government is therefore 

not part of a general vision of economic and national reconstruction.
When I think of the multiple and contradictory actions of the Trump administration, the 

word that comes to mind is dislocation. A dislocation whose outcome is somewhat unclear.

Absolute nuclear family + zero religion = atomisation
I am very pessimistic about the United States. To conclude this exploratory lecture, I will 

return to my fundamental concepts as a historian and social anthropologist. I said at the 

beginning of this lecture that the fundamental reason why I believed, quite early on, as 

early as 2002, that Russia would return to stability was because I was aware of the 

existence of a communitarian anthropological foundation in Russia. Unlike many, 

I do not need hypotheses about the state of religion in Russia to understand Russia's 

return to stability. I see a family-based, community-based culture, with its values of authority 

and equality, which also helps us to understand a little about what the nation means to 

Russians. There is indeed a connection between the form of the family and the idea of 

the nation that people hold. The communitarian family nourishes a strong, compact idea 

of the nation or the people. Such is Russia.
In the case of the United States, as in that of England, we have the opposite situation. 

The English and American family model is nuclear, individualistic. The nuclear family 

certainly has an advantage of flexibility. Generations in that system follow one another 

while remaining separate. The rapid adaptation of the United States and England, and 

the plasticity of their social structures (which enabled the English Industrial Revolution 

and the American boom) were made possible by this absolute nuclear family structure.
But alongside or above this individualistic family structure, both England and the United 

States had the discipline of Protestantism, with its potential for social cohesion. Religion, 

as a structuring factor, was crucial to the Anglo-American world. It has disappeared. 

The zero state of religion, combined with family values that provide very little structure, 

does not seem to me to be an anthropological and historical combination that could lead 

to stability. The Anglo-American world is heading towards ever greater atomisation. 

This atomisation can only lead to an accentuation, with no visible limit, of American decadence. 

I hope I am wrong, I hope I have forgotten an important positive factor.

Unfortunately, I can now only find one additional negative factor, which came to my attention 

when reading a book by Amy Chua, a Yale academic who was J.D. Vance's mentor - 

Political Tribes, Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (2018) highlights, as many other 

texts have done before it, the unique character of the American nation: a civic nation,

founded on the adherence of all successive immigrants to political values 

that transcend ethnicity. Admittedly, this was the official theory from very early on. 

But there was also a dominant white Protestant group in the United States, which itself 

had a fairly long and ordinary ethnic history.

Since the fragmentation of the Protestant group, the American nation has become truly 

post-ethnic, a purely ‘civic’ nation, theoretically united by its attachment to its 

constitution and values. Amy Chua's fear is that America will revert to what she calls 

tribalism. 

A regressive fragmentation.
Each of the European nations is, at its core, regardless of its family structure, religious 

tradition, or vision of itself, an ethnic nation, in the sense of a people attached to a land, 

with its own language and culture, a people rooted in history. Each has a stable foundation. 

The Russians have it, the Germans have it, the French have it, even if they are a little 

strange at the moment when it comes to these concepts. America no longer has it. 

A civic nation? Beyond the idea, the reality of an American civic nation deprived of morality 

by the zero state of religion is mind-boggling. It even sends a chill down your spine.
My personal fear is that we are not at the end, but only at the beginning of a downfall of 

the United States that will reveal to us things we cannot even imagine. The threat is there: 

not in an American empire, whether triumphant, weakened or destroyed, but in new things 

we cannot imagine.

Other Todd Material
The Final Fall – an essay on the decomposition of the soviet sphere  Emmanuel Todd 

(1976Fr-79Eng)
The Causes of Progress – culture, authority and change Emmanuel Tod (1987) 
After the Empire – the breakdown of the American order Emmanuel Todd (2003) 
Lineages of Modernity – a history of humanity from the stone age to homo Americanus 

Emmanuel Todd (2018)

When the English language first appeared in the fourteenth century, its kingdom of 3 million inhabitants was just a tiny peripheral country on the edge of a Eurasia that had a population of 300 million. This language is now unifying the world. The Anglosphere – the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand – is characterized not only by its language, but by an individualistic family structure, and by a corresponding social and political temperament: in 2018–19 it had more than 450 million inhabitants. British globalization in the nineteenth century, followed by American globalization in the twentieth, generated a worldwide economic organization. Yet Britain remains an island and continues to amaze Europeans with its particularism – its habit of driving on the left, its royal family, its humour, its general refusal to conform. Solving the paradox of a culture that is not only tiny but particularistic, one that created the United States and shaped the world, is the central focus of this book.

La Defaite de l’Occident Emmanuel Todd (2024)