The French Sociology Association (AFS) has chosen to use a drawing to announce its next annual congress on the theme of "Environment(s) and Inequalities."
This congress promises to be very interesting and will certainly give rise to rich and varied communications.
Let us nevertheless focus on the Congress poster, as it says so much about the ideology that now permeates a large part of sociology.
What do we see? In the background are the ruins of buildings and what looks like a nuclear power plant. We understand that these are the decaying remains of the old world: goodbye, then, concrete and nuclear power.
In the foreground appears the new world as dreamed of by sociologists. Here, nature has reclaimed its rights. The lifestyle and habitat are simple. We live in a sort of campsite made up of yurts, set in the middle of peaceful, verdant nature. There are no public facilities, and even fewer factories: it goes without saying that the earthly paradise can only be anti-capitalist and ecological.
People are happy and perfectly equal. They are healthy and travel by bicycle, which is a given (though one wonders how the sociologists will get to their conference).
Having become self-sufficient, the inhabitants heat their homes with wood and feed themselves thanks to a well-stocked garden, certainly organic, which clearly doesn't require much effort since no one works. All signs of luxury have disappeared. An old man teaches the children to sew. The clothing is rudimentary, almost in the peasant fashion of yesteryear. Fear and violence have disappeared, as have exploitation and hierarchies.
Culture is not forgotten: there are several books under a shelter. People read and laugh heartily, without anyone understanding the reason for this hilarity (are they reading the latest sociology textbook? the program of the Congress of Sociologists?).
In this idyllic world, one symbol stands out because it is clearly visible in the foreground: a keffiyeh, that good old keffiyeh, emblem of the Palestinian cause. The presence of the keffiyeh indicates that, in this magical world where all of humanity's ills will have been resolved, the Israeli problem will still be there. Or we must understand that Hamas has succeeded in freeing the world from all patriarchal and Western oppression.
Such a poster is obviously astounding. It looks like a drawing by a fifth-grade student whose teacher had asked them to imagine an ideal world. Is this all our sociologists can do, those who constantly plead their case by urging politicians to draw inspiration from their "work" and "research" to think about the complexity of the world?
The French Sociology Association had already made a name for itself in July 2023 during the riots that followed Nahel's death. In a press release, she then spoke of "legitimate anger" and denounced "systemic police violence", calling for support for "revolts in working-class areas". This position led to the salutary response of a handful of sociologists.
One is tempted to draw a connection between the AFS congress poster and another, older poster, distributed in 2018 by the Association of Higher Education Sociologists (ASES). This association has many things in common with the AFS, starting with the use of inclusive writing. In its 2018 poster, the AESE sociologists intended to oppose the reform of high school student guidance after the baccalaureate. Why not, but the text that accompanied this poster, inspired by the famous Shadocks, was particularly disturbing. Here is what it said: "it is better to fight even if nothing happens than to risk something worse happening by not fighting." In other words, for these sociologists, the fight is a kind of imperative, and even an end in itself: let's fight, comrades, we'll see why later.
Recently, this same AESE split of a press release which takes up the theme of struggle by conceiving the social sciences as a weapon in the service of a political project. The press release ends with a plea in favor of the development of social sciences in high schools: "More social sciences in schools to produce enlightened citizens." "Enlightened," in the minds of our sociologists, means activists.
In short, these two posters speak volumes about the mentalities of a large part of contemporary sociology. They should give pause to anyone who doubts the widespread spread of wokeness, while also raising questions about the effects that the introduction of social sciences into high school curricula may have had. If there is a woke generation, sociology is certainly not unrelated.
