Bosses don’t care about your Ivy League degree anymore

Callum Borchers

It’s hard to get a job at Charlie Gipple’s financial advisory firm if you went to the wrong college—like Harvard, Yale or Princeton.

The chief executive of CG Financial Group in Johnston, Iowa, says academic credentials don’t impress him like they used to. He worked with many graduates of top-tier colleges in previous jobs at MetLife and ING Groep, where he was a vice president, and says they too often approach clients’ challenges like textbook case studies, rather than real-world problems.

“If I were hiring somebody to be my right-hand person today, there’s not a chance in hell it would be an Ivy League person,” says Gipple, who graduated from the University of Northern Iowa and manages a network of about 500 advisers.

Traditionally a springboard to the top of the résumé pile, a degree from a prestigious university can now prompt questions about its value or even work against job seekers.

In extreme cases, it’s disqualifying. A group of 13 federal judges signed a letter in May saying they will not hire law clerks who enrolled at Columbia Law School this fall because of how the school has handled campus protests. A spokeswoman for the university referred me to a statement issued when the letter was publicized, which says the school’s graduates “are consistently sought out by leading employers in the private and public sectors, including the judiciary.”

More often, people who studied at Ivies and similarly elite schools like Stanford, Duke and the University of Chicago say they’re used to snide remarks about their alma maters being woke or elitist.

That skepticism has intensified in the last year after a landmark Supreme Court case exposed inner workings of elite-college admissions and upended affirmative action. Evidence presented in the case revealed, among other things, that 43% of accepted white applicants at Harvard were recruited athletes or children of alumni, donors, faculty or staff.

Bryan Mark Rigg, president of Rigg Wealth Management in Dallas, says his Ivy League degree used to command universal respect from clients and colleagues.

“Going to Yale has opened up doors left and right,” he says.

He says he now gets mixed responses when people learn where he went to college. Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives on campus have gone too far, in his view. And while Rigg, who is Jewish, says he never caught a whiff of antisemitism as a student, he considers anti-Jewish bias a big problem at top universities, citing campus protests against Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza.

“Some people will say to me ‘Would you ever send your kid to an Ivy? They’ve lost their way,’ ” says Rigg, 53. “I have to agree with them.”

America’s changing perception of elite universities was evident on the campaign trail. President-elect Donald Trump, who holds an Ivy League degree himself from the University of Pennsylvania, chose as his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who has bashed selective colleges, despite having graduated from Yale Law School.

Looking elsewhere for talent

Karen Berman grew up in a working-class family, lost her father in high school, then went on to earn a bachelor’s degree at Harvard and an M.B.A. from the Wharton School at Penn. She says her Ivy pedigree represents perseverance.

The nonprofit consultant has grown concerned about whether students at her old stomping grounds are developing critical-thinking skills on campuses that consistently land near the bottom of free-speech rankings. An internal Harvard report last month found roughly half of professors and students are afraid to express their views on controversial issues.

Berman says she feels the loss of open dialogue and civil debate takes some of the shine off her credentials.

“What should I do—take it off my résumé?” she asked when I pressed about what it feels like to be an alum and a critic of these institutions. It was a rhetorical question because, truth be told, the advantages of brand-name diplomas generally outweigh the drawbacks.

For proof, look no further than the booming market for college admissions help, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year. Even sharp Ivy League critics, like hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, acknowledge the value of alumni networks, and blue-chip banks and consulting firms continue to prize graduates of what their recruiters call target schools.

Bain & Co. still recruits from “the usual suspects” but the share of new hires who come from those schools is shrinking, says Keith Bevans, the firm’s head of consultant recruiting.

That’s partly because those few dozen schools don’t produce enough high-quality graduates to keep up with Bain’s head count needs. And, he adds, the firm has started conducting Zoom interviews where the interviewer doesn’t know the job candidate’s university affiliation.

“You’re purely judged on the merits of how you did in the interview, not my preconceived notions of how many people I should expect to like on a certain campus,” Bevans says.

McKinsey & Co. uses a problem-solving game to weed out job candidates whose skills don’t live up to their credentials, and to identify talented people that might have been overlooked in the past. The firm’s latest crop of business analysts includes graduates of tiny Grinnell College in Iowa and Santa Clara University, which admits almost half of applicants.

Broadened recruiting is partly a response to the way some elite universities have de-emphasized grades and SAT scores, says Blair Ciesil, a partner who co-leads recruiting at McKinsey. Grade inflation makes a sparkling GPA at a prestigious college less meaningful, she says. (For instance, about 80% of the grades awarded to Yale undergrads in recent years have been an A or A minus, according to a university report.) With a lot of top colleges no longer requiring applicants to submit standardized-test scores, McKinsey is sometimes missing a data point that historically informed hiring decisions.

I told Ciesil that the McKinsey game, called “Solve,” sounds like a contemporary version of the chalkboard that reveals a surprise genius in “Good Will Hunting,” a movie in which the janitor is more gifted than the students at MIT.

“I’m stealing that analogy,” she said. “Wouldn’t we be lucky to find our Matt Damon through the test?”

New York real estate attorney Adam Leitman Bailey doesn’t bother with games. He simply refuses to hire recent Ivy League grads, mostly because he thinks a lot of them get by on connections instead of talent and grit.

He notes that some top law schools, including Harvard and Yale, don’t rank students or give letter grades. Bailey, who got his law degree at Syracuse University, says he prefers to hire associates who rose to the top of less-glamorous schools because he believes competition prepares them for legal battles.

“It’s wonderful that we have these incredible institutions like Harvard and Yale, who produce presidents and leaders and big thinkers,” he says. “But that’s not what I do for a living, and it’s not the type of lawyer I need.”

Clara Pretus, neurologist: ‘There are evil agents who are profiting by generating this nervousness’

 

The neuroscientist studies how people fall into extremism and how the brain processes misinformation in polarized situations

Few people know the minds of extremists like the neuroscientist Clara Pretus, 36, because she has literally looked inside them. In her most celebrated work, the researchers scanned the brains of young people who wanted to participate in violent jihadist acts to understand the personal and social mechanisms that activated this interest.

In a more recent work, her team studied the grey matter of voters of Spain’s far-right Vox party to understand why they spread lies on issues important to them, such as immigration. The research revealed that when these topics were discussed, regions of the participants’ social brain were activated. “These are not the usual decision-making areas but those that help infer the thoughts of others,” explains Pretus from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. In other words, they share false information with the group’s approval and cohesion in mind.

Pretus — who is an advisor to the United Nations Office on Terrorism and director of the Social Brain Lab — warns that a tragedy like the flash flooding in the Spanish region of Valencia create fertile ground for disinformation to spread. “When you are in danger, it is better for you to believe any information that can save you or that can help you,” she says.

However, she also criticizes the way certain political actors exploit such crises for their own advantage. Pretus notes that in times of anxiety and danger, opportunists often use emotionally charged language to “hack our nervous system.” “We must take this into account, because there will be more and more emergencies of this type, very conducive to disinformation and political gain,” says Pretus.

Question. The very night of the floods in Valencia, when people realized that the situation was very serious, the political blame-game started.

Answer. We are not used to something like this, it creates uncertainty, alarm and a sense of emergency, and it makes us rely on the little that we know. And the biases that we have already incorporated, whether consciously or unconsciously, come to the surface more intensely. For example, our social identity or political identity, the beliefs of a certain party and that vision of the world: who are the enemies, who are the allies... You rely on that in moments of uncertainty. And so we are going to be biased when we look for information, how we process it and it even affects how we perceive it. A person, whether on the left or the right, looks at the points of information that most confirm their pre-existing beliefs. There is an experiment on climate change where they show the temperature curve of the last centuries to liberals and conservatives in the United States. They follow their gaze and see that the liberals look at the last decades, they focus their attention where the most dramatic rise in temperature occurs. On the other hand, the conservatives do not pay particular attention to this last part of the graph. Even if we read the same news, we focus on the parts that confirm our worldview.

Q. Identity predisposes us to consume misinformation.

A. What we tend to do is look for things that reaffirm us as members of the group, trying to safeguard those things that put it in a good position. This is one of the proposals made to explain why we consume disinformation: to reaffirm our sense of belonging, not only on an abstract level, but also with our immediate environment, such as the audience we have on social networks. We are motivated to share information that we know our audience will receive well and that will serve to reaffirm us. And this is more important the more critical the information is. For example, in an emergency or when it is key to the group’s identity.

Q. Do we spread a hoax because we turn off our critical spirit, because it is a hoax that proves us right?

A. There are different reasons. Some are more cognitive: I don’t have time to pay attention or I don’t have the ability to look at this information critically and fact-check it. Then there is an educational aspect: a layer of protection is needed that education provides, to see the specific techniques used to spread disinformation, such as the use of false experts, negative emotions, and so on. And finally, there is the more partisan motivation, which also plays a role. Strategies have been developed that work for the average citizen with the most cognitive and most pedagogical approach, with some success. In reality, most disinformation is shared by a minimal percentage of internet users. It is a small but radicalized group that puts out most of the disinformation we consume. The problem is that for them, none of these strategies are effective because their motivations are different.

Q. Because it is deliberate.

A. It may be 100% deliberate, it may be in bad faith. And it may be a bit fanatical: the individuals may be very blinded by an ideology and when they see this information, their blood boils and they have to share it.

Q. In that sense, how do you see fact-checking strategies, combating each hoax, when there is a large machinery behind them producing them?

A. At the moment, fact-checking strategies have very limited effectiveness. They may reduce the spread by a very small percentage. There are initiatives and tools, but they are by no means sufficient. We have seen this in the case of the flooding in Spain and I think there will be many changes in this regard. Above all, because the spread of misinformation must have legal consequences. Because if not, we will not be able to create a healthy information environment, where people can exercise their right to make decisions based on truthful information.

Q. Should laws be passed against hoaxes?

A. Yes, because it can’t be acceptable that there are no consequences. But that is a very slow system to stop misinformation. To make it faster, we are experimenting with another approach: crowdsourcing, that is, open collaboration between users. It is an emerging idea, but we think it could be a faster system: that users can verify information on social networks.

Q. But studies show that when someone wants to correct us, it’s important that it’s someone in your group, someone you trust. It’s crucial to have people with enough courage and intellectual honesty to call people out within their group.

A. This is important, but it cannot be forced. It is difficult to influence what happens within a group. There is a study in the U.S. that shows that verification of comments coming from the opposite side not only does not work, but it makes the other side angrier and even more in agreement with the initial comment. When it comes from within the group itself, it is much more reliable, much more effective, but it is difficult. Ideally, there should be a social norm that says it is desirable to be critical of one’s own group. There should be an almost a moral value, which would be above our partisan interests, which is honesty.

Q. We can also award more importance to other types of entities. In these polarized times, we are broken down into a single identity: politics. But we have more identities, we share more things, we are parents, we are Barça fans... Can we generate trust in another identity area to resolve this?

A. It is a strategy that is being used with regard to climate change. Many Republicans in the United States are very skeptical, but when their identity as parents is appealed to, they are more open to improving the future conditions of their children. If I ask you about climate change, appealing first to your identity as a parent, you answer me differently. It is valuable to know that we have multiple identities and that we can appeal to them to be closer to the truth of the information.

Q. Was there a polarizing breeding ground that crystallized in the pandemic and has now become exacerbated again?

A. Yes, even before that, I think that Trump’s arrival reinforced impunity in the face of lies and misinformation. And then there have been a series of hard blows that have made people more desperate, more uncertain. And the media that we follow, the leaders that we listen to, have a super-important role. We recently did an experiment in the U.S., where we paid people to stop following hyper-partisan accounts for a month, both Democrats and Republicans. And we saw that there was a reduction in people’s political attitudes. There was less animosity towards the political opponent, towards the opposing group. And they were also exposed to less misinformation. In other words, our information diet has an impact on maintaining this state of inflammatory nervousness. Or reducing it if we disconnect from these sources. It is not just disasters like the pandemic or the flash floods, but there are actually agents of evil who are profiting and making a lot of money, investing a lot of money, in generating this nervousness and desperation.

Q. We follow these types of hyper-polarized accounts because they give us satisfaction. Should we all make a personal effort to reduce that type of exposure?

A. Absolutely, but there is always a problem with individual responsibility. First, because it is impossible. That is to say, if you are already reflecting on this, it is because you may not need it. And second, obviously structural changes at the political level, in terms of European regulation, are much more effective. There is always a tendency to shift responsibility to the individual. But people are working 10 hours a day, they have time limitations, they have to scrutinize information while trying to get through their day. They have a responsibility, but the change has to be more structural, more profound. And we cannot leave citizens alone in the face of misinformation.

Q. Speaking of loneliness, does social isolation and loneliness, which is reinforced on social media, play a role?

A. Yes, absolutely. It’s because we work remotely, we don’t go out, we don’t meet other people... And meeting up with people is a dose of reality. Some people say that working is good because it forces you to be compatible with reality. Because when we’re alone we start to go online and you end up in corners of the internet without even knowing how you got there. Many times, when you share it with someone, when you externalize it, it sounds ridiculous to you while you’re telling it. It’s very, very important to have social interaction and this has been proven by many studies. Loneliness has many drawbacks, it reduces life expectancy, and one of the drawbacks is that if you lock yourself in your own mind and on top of that you have access to the internet, it takes you to increasingly radicalized places, towards more extreme content. It’s very good to be in contact with people in real life.

Q. But it is increasingly difficult to find those points of friction, since we surround ourselves with like-minded people.

A. Yes, and extreme situations like Spain’s flooding make you polarized in your personal life too. You stop seeing certain people. For example, Brexit caused a restructuring of friendships. It has an impact on your personal relationships, but at the same time it is in personal relationships where it is easier to express different identities. Interaction in three dimensions provides the opportunity to connect on other levels. It is much more nuanced, there are interdependencies, you have emotional ties.

Q. The solution is to connect more in three dimensions.

A. In four dimensions, because time is also there.

Q. And how will the wild episode of disinformation we are experiencing affect us in the future? Will it generate problems of social cohesion?

A. Erosion of the fabric of social cohesion, yes, 100%. And also a crisis of confidence in institutions, clearly. People keep repeating: “We are in a failed state.” People are incorporating this type of information, and trust in these democratic institutions that are here to, in principle, safeguard our peaceful coexistence is deteriorating further. The great threat of polarization is violence: if we lose the notion of a shared reality and anything goes, any narrative is valid, this favors the justification of violence. It is easier to justify the use of violence because this reality does not exist, and I don’t even mean an objective one, but an intersubjective one, in which we are all in agreement. And it is easier for these stories of victimization to proliferate, which is the formula for success to justify violence. But it is not a new phenomenon. George Orwell said that he had seen dead people who had not been spoken about, and read about battles that had not taken place. This is typical of conflict situations: distorting reality to justify the violence that some individuals want to use to advance their political agenda.

Q. When you talk about playing the victim, are you referring to conspiracies about replacing white people and theories of that sort?

A. Victimization is the star tool for justifying violence. And it is used. But there are stories of victimization that are true and others that are exaggerated or false. For example, women have traditionally been subordinated to men. It’s true. Now there are men who say they are being victimized by feminism. And when you expose these narrative structures of “they are oppressing us,” it is easier and more justifiable to fight against that oppression.

Q. Is this deliberate exercise of disinformation to undermine all confidence in official sources caused because when you don’t believe anyone, you can believe anything?

A. Of course, everyone is discredited, delegitimized, as a source of information. It is a very good strategy to make a change of power. If we have a status quo, institutions that have been in place for decades, it is the best way to blow up what is there.

France’s Atomic Legacy in Algeria

Chahrazade Douah is a French-Algerian writer based in Cairo

Veterans of the 1954-62 war are defying taboos to raise awareness about the atrocities their army committed in North Africa

n 1954, the French 24-year-old Stanislas Hutin was pursuing religious studies as a Jesuit in Madagascar when he was drafted to fight in the war in Algeria. Having witnessed colonial injustices firsthand, he refused to go. Despite securing permission to leave, he was placed on a military boat set to depart the following day, with no known destination. The 500 other conscripts on board bet on Algeria or Morocco. Like him, they did not want to fight a war they knew nothing about. 

“So we rebelled. We refused to go. We wrote on the boat, ‘Morocco to Moroccans, Tunisia to Tunisians and Algeria to Algerians,’” Hutin recalled. Not long after, the boat docked in Algiers.

Between 1954 and 1962, France deployed over 1.2 million soldiers to suppress Algeria’s fight for independence, targeting a population of just 8 million. The atrocities committed by the French army are still rarely publicly acknowledged in France today. Even less discussed are those within the military’s ranks who, confronted with these horrors, defied orders, refused to participate or supported the Algerians. These men stood against a military hierarchy that fixated on preserving France’s most valuable colony and disregarded the humanity of the Algerian people. 

Such stories stand in stark contrast to those I had heard all my life, and when I became aware of them I wanted to meet these people and hear what encouraged them to stand against a colonial apparatus that silenced all dissent. I reached out to the veteran Hutin, now 94 years old. Even at his advanced age, he dedicated much of his time to advocating against war. In our conversation, he vividly remembered the horrors he had witnessed.

His Jesuit upbringing meant he had pacifist sensibilities and disagreed with the ongoing war. However, one incident profoundly affected him, transforming him into an open dissident. “I heard terrible screams of pain in the middle of the night. The next day, I discovered that they were those of a boy. He was at most 14,” Hutin said. The boy had apparently been subjected to torture with a device known as the “magnet,” a generator that delivered painful electric shocks.

Repulsed by what he had witnessed, Hutin fought with his superiors. These were seasoned military men, embittered by France’s defeat in Indochina, which led to the independence of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in 1954 — the same year the Algerian rebellion began. Hutin also took photographs of the young boy to alert the world to the routine use of torture on civilians, feeling a need to document what he had seen. 

Years later, in 2013, Hutin tracked down the young man whose ordeal had become the impetus for his rebellion. The two men embraced each other. Said Boutout still looked very much like his photo and remembered in great detail the night of torture he had been through as a boy. The photo went on to be widely shared, serving to break the omerta and becoming a symbol of French colonial abuses.

Stanislas Hutin with a photo of Said Boutout. (Stanislas Hutin)

The consequences of Hutin’s dissent were immediately felt. He was marginalized and threatened by his regiment: A fellow conscript told him there was talk of making sure a stray bullet would find him during the next mission out of camp. He carried on disobeying, feeding prisoners at night and refusing to ever take part in any fighting. There was little support around him. “Other conscripts recognized the inhumanity of this war and that Algerians should be fighting for their freedom. But fear turned them into savages,” he explained. The harsh winter and fear of being killed during an ambush turned the rebellious conscripts who rode the boat with him to Algeria into dutiful soldiers.

Dissent was rare, even more so when driven by moral convictions. The army recorded only 420 conscientious objectors — soldiers who refused to wear the uniform or bear arms on principle. The concept of a conscientious objector was not legally recognized and moral disobedience was treated as a criminal offense, punishable by two years in prison. The first conscript to openly refuse to bear arms was a young communist, Alban Liechti, who went against his party’s line. In a public act of defiance, he wrote to French President Rene Coty, reminding him that France’s own constitution contained a pledge to support peoples in achieving self-governance. Branded a traitor, he was forcibly mobilized and jailed for over four years in terrible conditions. Those who followed his example experienced similar fates, finding themselves on the wrong side of the law and often exiled until an amnesty was issued in 1966.

The historian Tramor Quemeneur estimates that around 15,000 soldiers — a little over 1% of those deployed — can be deemed to have disobeyed orders in some form. Most were conscripts who failed to report for duty and the second-largest group was deserters. We do not know their motives: They may have been profoundly anti-colonial or terrified of the war, or have simply longed for another life. History remembers a few exceptional names, like Noel Favreliere, who crossed the Sahara for seven days with a wanted prisoner before joining the Algerian ranks. Henri Maillot is another one: In his daring escape, he stole a truck full of ammunition, which he delivered to Algerian communists. 

“The number of dissidents is very low and yet it is much higher than what we previously thought,” Quemeneur said. “It shows that French society participated in the war and supported it, but less than we thought.” While dissent appeared to have little effect on the war’s trajectory at a structural level, Quemeneur argues that genuine dissent is found not in official records but in personal stories like Hutin’s. Such daily acts of disobedience were far more prevalent, though they are difficult to quantify.

Some soldiers did not disobey and still regret it to this day, such as Remi Serre, who, at 20, left his rural home in Tarn, southern France, for military service. As with most conscripts, it was a rite of passage in the institution in which his forefathers had served. He is now 86 and clearly remembers the discrepancy between what he was told and the reality on the ground. 

“In our time, going to Algeria was like going to the moon,” he said. “We were told we needed to restore order and that it would be done rapidly. But we realized that was not true at all. We were sent on a manhunt against people who wanted to have their humanity acknowledged on the same level as Europeans. Every day, we wondered what we were doing there.” Although he considered it, desertion was not an option. It carried the risk of a death sentence from French courts and would disgrace his family. In a France that still held military institutions in high regard, “deserter” meant dishonor.

Upon his return, the young farmer advocated against war in a society that had embraced a total silence on memories of Algeria. “What we saw haunted us forever. Some went mad, some are dead and others try to live with the memory,” he said. “But most of us went silent because what we had to say was too difficult to listen to.” Years later, he kept thinking of ways to contribute to the development of a land he previously harmed. At the time, he started receiving a veteran’s pension for his time in Algeria. “I did not have the political maturity to say no to the war at the time,” he said. “But in 2004, I knew I did not want a penny from this money, it is tainted by blood.” 

Driven by profound remorse and a deep sense of honor, Serre and his first companions, farmers like him, whose modest revenues barely covered their basic needs, pooled their veterans’ pensions to create a fund for Algeria. They founded the Association of Former Conscripts in Algeria and Their Friends Against the War, known by its French acronym “4ACG,” in 2004. Today, the association counts over 400 members, including Hutin. They are 85 years old on average and donate the 826 euros they receive each month in veterans’ pensions to 24 nongovernmental organizations across Algeria, Palestine and Morocco that support families, farmers and artists in need. 

Their first efforts to advocate for greater transparency over the horrors of the war met with little interest and even outright hostility on the French side, especially from members of the public belonging to the same generation. Former soldiers and “pieds noirs” — Europeans who lived in Algeria during the colonial period — would come to disturb the association’s public meetings, shouting their disagreement. Some prominent members of the association, including Hutin, still regularly receive threats via email or phone. These extreme attitudes are typical of a certain segment of French society known for its unapologetic nostalgia for colonial Algeria. After decades of taboo, many others in France are now more openly critical of the country’s colonial legacy in Algeria, particularly regarding the use of torture during the war.

The response in Algeria was drastically different. Members of the 4ACG were warmly welcomed. They tell stories of a population that never considered them to be enemies: To them, the enemy was the French state, not individual conscripts. They see these men as taking the first steps toward reparations, though the French state has yet to fully acknowledge the extent of its crimes.

Veterans of the 4ACG have forged deep connections not only with the communities surrounding the NGOs they supported but also with former “fellagas,” Algerian guerrilla fighters, who, in some cases, were the very men they once confronted on the battlefield. Serre could not believe his eyes when, on one of his trips to Algeria, he encountered a familiar face he instantly remembered from 50 years ago. Joudia Toumi, a former fellaga, had opposed him in combat. He was now inviting him into his house, and there began a profound friendship between the two until Toumi’s death last year.

As the brutality of colonial violence is now once again broadcast live, this time from Gaza and Lebanon, revisiting stories of disobedience serves as a powerful reminder: Even in times when such horrors could be hidden, many in the ranks of the occupiers recognized the barbarity they were complicit in and some refused it, no matter the consequences.

France used napalm extensively in Algeria, indiscriminately burning entire villages and crops and displacing 2 million Algerians — about one-quarter of the population — into internment camps that bred hunger and misery. Forced disappearances, summary executions and the placement of antipersonnel mines throughout the territory were all common practice. Surely, if Algerians had had the means to record how their call to self-determination was suppressed, they would produce images strikingly similar to those we see today.

Polémique, la Cène en scène sur la Seine ? « La parodie du religieux a toujours fait partie de la culture populaire française »

Le spécialiste du religieux et politiste Olivier Roy analyse la controverse qui a suivi la prestation de Philippe Katerine lors de la cérémonie d’ouverture des Jeux olympiques. Il y voit l’illustration de ce qu’il appelle la “sainte ignorance”.

 Alors, dernier souper ou mise en bouche? Cène ou mise en scène? Dieu ou Dionysos? Peu importe! La polémique révèle surtout le fossé culturel qui sépare ce qui reste de chrétiens croyants (ici tendance tradi) et la société française. Dans le banquet de la chair et de la bonne chère exhibé sur la Seine lors de l’ouverture des Jeux, les catholiques ont immédiatement reconnu la Cène et exigé un copyright sur une séquence religieuse qui est au coeur même de leur foi (l’incarnation). Ce faisant, ils refusent que la culture profane s’empare de cet événement fondateur, alors même que la parodie du religieux a toujours fait partie de la culture populaire française (que l’on songe aux carnavals).

Ils revendiquent désormais la séparation entre le religieux et une culture devenue profane, et donc assument un divorce qu’ils ont été les premiers à déplorer : la société française n’est plus chrétienne.De son côté, la culture profane semble avoir tout oublié de ses origines chrétiennes : si la dénégation des metteurs en scène fonctionne (« Nous n’avons pas voulu nous moquer du christianisme »), c’est sans doute que peu de gens dans le public savaient ce qu’est la Cène. Car pour se moquer, il faut connaître ce dont on se moque, ou du moins le reconnaître quand il se manifeste.

 C’est bien le temps de la sainte ignorance ! Le religieux rejette la culture dominante car païenne, et le païen est tellement païen qu’il ne sait même pas de quoi il lui faudrait se repentir. Mais ce qui est intéressant, c’est aussi la séquence suivante. Comment laver l’affront ?

On a vu se déployer deux registres : faut-il répare rune offense faite au croyant, ou bien expier un blasphème qui fait souffrir Dieu? Dans le premier registre, on demande à la justice des hommes de réparer la souffrance infligée à une communauté spécifique : les chrétiens pratiquants. Et voici que Jean-Luc Mélenchon entre en scène à son tour (1). Il condamne l’offense faite aux chrétiens. Serait-il devenu le Judas de la laïcité ? Va-t-il s’approcher de la Table consacrée ? Bien sûr que non. En fait il ouvre aux catholiques la porte de son club : bienvenue à la table des minorités souffrantes, des racisé·e·s, des LGBT et des musulmans. Bienvenue chez les victimes, les incompris, les invisibilisés. L’affaire des « Versets sataniques » n’est pas si loin : pour éviter la violence du fanatique, pourquoi ne pas écouter d’abord la plainte du croyant qui souffre. Un petit coup de « cancel culture » et on annule la cause de la souffrance ; on efface cette « appropriation culturelle » commise par une élite artistique aux dépens d’une minorité dont on interprète la foi comme une simple identité. La compassion est le stade suprême de la sécularisation. 

Mais il semble que la hiérarchie catholique ait senti le piège. Du film de Rivette « la Religieuse », en 1967, aux scandales de « Piss Christ » et « Golgota picnic »,en passant par « la Dernière Tentation du Christ » de Scorsese, toutes les tentatives de demander à la justice laïque réparation contre le blasphème ont été des échecs prévisibles, car Dieu n’est pas un sujet de droit. Si l’on veut éviter la violence qui transmuerait avec « les Versets sataniques », le seul moyen est d’offrir à Dieu la souffrance du croyant en expiation du blasphème et non d’en faire un marqueur identitaire.

(1) « A quoi bon risquer de blesser les croyants ? Même quand on est anticlérical ! Nous parlions au monde ce soir-là », a écrit sur son blog Jean-Luc Mélenchon, après la cérémonie.

Women are from Venus, Men from Mars (ideologies broaden or narrow the gap)

John Burn-Murdoch 

One of the most well-established patterns in measuring public opinion is that every generation tends to move as one in terms of its politics and general ideology. Its members share the same formative experiences, reach life’s big milestones at the same time and intermingle in the same spaces. So how should we make sense of reports that Gen Z is hyper-progressive on certain issues, but surprisingly conservative on others?

The answer, in the words of Alice Evans, a visiting fellow at Stanford University and one of the leading researchers on the topic, is that today’s under-thirties are undergoing a great gender divergence, with young women in the former camp and young men the latter. Gen Z is two generations, not one.

In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women. Tens of millions of people who occupy the same cities, workplaces, classrooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye.

In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up.

Germany also now shows a 30-point gap between increasingly conservative young men and progressive female contemporaries, and in the UK the gap is 25 points. In Poland last year, almost half of men aged 18-21 backed the hard-right Confederation party, compared to just a sixth of young women of the same age.

Outside the west, there are even more stark divisions. In South Korea there is now a yawning chasm between young men and women, and it’s a similar situation in China. In Africa, Tunisia shows the same pattern. Notably, in every country this dramatic split is either exclusive to the younger generation or far more pronounced there than among men and women in their thirties and upwards.

The #MeToo movement was the key trigger, giving rise to fiercely feminist values among young women who felt empowered to speak out against long-running injustices. That spark found especially dry tinder in South Korea, where gender inequality remains stark, and outright misogyny is common.

In the country’s 2022 presidential election, while older men and women voted in lockstep, young men swung heavily behind the right-wing People Power party, and young women backed the liberal Democratic party in almost equal and opposite numbers.

Korea’s is an extreme situation, but it serves as a warning to other countries of what can happen when young men and women part ways. Its society is riven in two. Its marriage rate has plummeted, and birth rate has fallen precipitously, dropping to 0.78 births per woman in 2022, the lowest of any country in the world.

Seven years on from the initial #MeToo explosion, the gender divergence in attitudes has become self-sustaining. Survey data show that in many countries the ideological differences now extend beyond this issue. The clear progressive-vs-conservative divide on sexual harassment appears to have caused — or at least is part of — a broader realignment of young men and women into conservative and liberal camps respectively on other issues.

In the US, UK and Germany, young women now take far more liberal positions on immigration and racial justice than young men, while older age groups remain evenly matched. The trend in most countries has been one of women shifting left while men stand still, but there are signs that young men are actively moving to the right in Germany, where today’s under-30s are more opposed to immigration than their elders, and have shifted towards the far-right AfD in recent years.

It would be easy to say this is all a phase that will pass, but the ideology gaps are only growing, and data shows that people’s formative political experiences are hard to shake off. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that the proliferation of smartphones and social media mean that young men and women now increasingly inhabit separate spaces and experience separate cultures.

Too often young people’s views are overlooked owing to their low rates of political participation, but this shift could leave ripples for generations to come, impacting far more than vote counts.