Edgar Morin lost his mother when he was a boy. He spent the next century refusing to let anything stand alone.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) taught that a man builds his life as a defense against two terrors. The first is death, the plain fact of the worms. The second is insignificance, the suspicion that a man passes through the world and leaves no mark, that his life signifies nothing the grave cannot erase. Every culture hands its members a hero system, a set of rules for earning the feeling that they count beyond their span. Religion offers heaven. The Party offers History. The Nation offers the soil and the dead buried in it. Each promises a man that some part of him outlasts the body. Becker called these the vital lies, and he meant the word lie without contempt, because a man cannot live in the bare knowledge of his own rot. Long before complexity, death held Morin. His L’Homme et la mort came straight out of the boyhood loss.
Morin spent his life taking the vital lies apart.
He subtracted God. Asked late in life about Him, Morin said he had no relations with the fellow. He subtracted the Party. He joined the Communists under the German occupation, when anti-fascism and Communism ran together, and the Party expelled him in 1951, and he wrote Autocritique, which treats his own faith with the care a man gives a wound he has examined many times. He did not call his Communism a mistake of reason. He called it a hunger, the hunger for certainty and belonging and meaning, and he knew the hunger had not died when the faith did. He subtracted the Nation in its closed form. Late in life he wrote of an Earth-Homeland and held that mankind now forms one community of fate. He subtracted even the safe name of a trade. He refused to be only a sociologist, only a philosopher, only a filmmaker. He left every house he might have lived in.
The subtraction story runs like this. Strip away God and Party and Nation and the comfortable name of a trade, and what remains is reality, bare and cold and true.
Becker saw the catch. A man cannot subtract his way to nothing. Take away one hero system and he builds another from the rubble, because the two terrors do not leave when the gods do. So the question for Morin is not whether he escaped the vital lie. The question is which lie he built from everything he refused to worship.
He built a god out of the open future.
Morin held that novelty sits inside the structure of complex systems, that the unexpected always arrives, that the future cannot be foreclosed. A man who cannot believe in heaven can believe in this, and the belief does the work heaven did. It promises that the story is not over. It promises that meaning stays possible, that the grave does not get the last word, that something new will come. The dead mother is not the end of the boy, because in a world where everything connects, where the part holds the whole and the whole shows in the part, nothing stands alone and nothing is wholly lost.
And he built a cathedral to it. La Méthode runs to six volumes across twenty-seven years, and its content is that no system holds the whole. He gave a life to the proposition that no single life or system grasps everything, and the giving was the bid. A man devotes himself to complexity, and the devotion is a claim on the whole he says no man can have. This is the honorable paradox at the center of him, and it is honorable because he paid for it.
He paid under two regimes. The Germans, he said, had three reasons to kill him, since he was a Jew, a Communist, and a Gaullist. He learned to distrust the closed system in a Europe where closed systems built camps. His openness is not the cheap openness of a man who never believed anything. He believed, hard, in the Party, and the belief cost him, and he wrote the cost down. When such a man refuses to close the question, he refuses from the far side of having closed it once and bled.
Becker’s deepest point reaches past any single man. The hero system shapes what a word can mean. A man says complexity or uncertainty or homeland, and the word carries the weight his hero system gives it, and the same word on another man’s tongue carries a different weight, sometimes the opposite weight. Morin made certain words sacred. The words mean what they mean inside his system. Carry them into another, and they change.
Take uncertainty.
For Morin, uncertainty is where freedom lives. The open future is uncertain, and so the future is free, and so a man is free, and so the camps were not the last word and the Party was not the last word and death is not the last word. He told schools to prepare the young for the unexpected, to expect it, to navigate it. Uncertainty, for him, is the room where novelty arrives. He honors it the way a religious man honors grace.
Carry the word to a field epidemiologist tracking a new pathogen, and uncertainty turns into the thing he must kill. Every hour of uncertainty is a count of the dead he cannot yet name. His heroism lies in narrowing the unknown, in turning a fog into a number, in making the future payable in doses and beds. “Give me the interval,” he says, and he means the size of his ignorance, and he means to shrink it.
Carry it to a Marine under fire, and uncertainty is hesitation, and hesitation is death. The drill exists to abolish it. A man trains until his hands move before his mind catches up, so that under fire he does not weigh the open future, he acts. His hero system promises that the trained man lives and the man who pauses to admire the richness of the unexpected dies in the road.
Carry it to a Cistercian monk at vigils, and the great uncertainties are settled already. God exists. The soul faces judgment. What remains uncertain is only whether this one man keeps faith to the end, and that he offers up. He does not prize the open future. He has read the last page. His heroism lies in fidelity inside a closed and finished cosmos, the thing Morin spent a life refusing.
Four men, one word, four worlds. Morin’s sacred uncertainty is the epidemiologist’s enemy, the Marine’s death, the monk’s settled matter. None of them is confused. Each man means what his hero system needs the word to mean.
The same holds for the whole. In the early 1970s Morin crossed to California and spent time at the Salk Institute, among the biologists, talking with Jonas Salk (1914-1995) and Jacques Monod (1910-1976). He went looking for the whole. He wanted to fold thermodynamics and cybernetics and biology into a single way of thinking, and he went to the lab to learn from it. To Morin the whole is the highest calling. Reductionism, the cutting of reality into compartments, is the disease, and synthesis is the cure.
Stand a working specialist next to him. To the man who spends thirty years on one ion channel, the whole is the refuge of the amateur. Synthesis is what a man reaches for when he cannot do the hard narrow labor that moves knowledge an inch. The specialist earns his immortality in the inch. He adds one true thing to the record, and his name sits on the paper, and the paper sits in the literature, and so he outlasts himself. The grand synthesizer, to him, writes for journalists and dies without a footnote.
Each man called the other a danger to knowledge. Morin found the specialists learning more and more about less and less. The specialists found Morin too philosophical for the lab and too scientific for the seminar. He lived between the houses and belonged to neither, and the homelessness was the price of the whole.
Then there is the word homeland.
He gave the world an Earth-Homeland. He held that the planet now forms one community of fate, that economies and climates and weapons bind all men together whether they love one another or not, and that human solidarity must grow to meet the scale of the bond or the species courts ruin. He was careful. He did not preach a soft cosmopolitanism. He warned that markets and machines had gone global while loyalty stayed local, and that the gap might kill us.
Carry the word homeland to the tribal and national and traditional man, and it means something Morin’s phrase cannot hold. To him a homeland is the small piece of earth that holds his dead and bears his name, and it is a homeland because it is not the rest of the earth. A patrie with no border is not a large patrie. It is no patrie. He hears Earth-Homeland and hears a square circle. He hears one community of fate and thinks that a fate shared with all men is a fate shared with no man, that a love spread across the species is the thin love left to a man who has stopped loving his own. Solidarity, to him, runs concrete or it runs to nothing. It is owed first to kin, then to neighbors, then to the nation, in widening rings that thin as they spread, and a solidarity that skips the rings and lands on mankind has skipped the only solidarity a man carries in his body.
This man notes, without heat, where Morin came from. Morin’s father sold women’s clothing in Paris, a Sephardic Jew out of Thessaloniki, from the Mediterranean world that joined France and Greece and Turkey and North Africa into one scattered people. Morin’s patrie was an idea before it was a place, because his people carried their homeland on their backs across the sea. The scattered make the universalists. A man with one village to defend builds a hero system around the village. A man whose village lives in memory and diaspora builds a hero system around mankind, because mankind is the only home wide enough to hold a people with no single soil. The trad man sees this and says, without cruelty, that Morin universalized his own condition and called it the future of the species.
And Morin has his answer. The closed homeland, in his century, built the camps. The bounded patrie, sworn to blood and soil, gave the Germans their three reasons to kill him. A man who learned in his body what the sacred nation does to the man outside its ring might be forgiven for distrusting the ring. His own method holds that certain opposites never resolve, that order and disorder, the one and the many, live in tension and advance through it. The trad man and the planetary man might be such a pair. Neither erases the other. The argument stays open, which is the one outcome Morin’s hero system counts a victory.
How much of this did Morin see?
A great deal, and the seeing was his gift. In 1969 a rumor ran through Orléans. Jewish shopkeepers, it said, drugged young women in the fitting rooms of their clothing stores and moved them through tunnels into the prostitution trade across the sea. Morin and his team went into the city while the story still burned. A lesser man stops at proving it false, and it was false, no girl had vanished, no tunnel existed. Morin asked the harder question. He asked why men believed it. He found that the rumor never touched the newspapers, that it ran mouth to mouth through the networks of the town, that it fed on the fears of a changing France, on consumer dread and shifting sexual mores and an old hatred in new clothes.
Sit with the scene. The rumor accused Jewish clothiers. Morin’s father was a Jewish clothier. The son went to study, with care and without rage, the precise fear that in another town, in another year, might have emptied his own father’s shop. And he extended to the frightened people of Orléans the same charity he gave his younger Communist self. He asked what hunger their belief fed. He did not call them stupid. He read their fear as a human thing.
That charity is the height of his self-awareness. He understood, better than most men who ever lived, that belief answers need, that men hold ideas because the ideas hold them. He turned the insight on the antisemites of Orléans and on the Stalinists of his youth and on the whole machinery of ideology.
He turned it less often on the god he made of the open future.
The man who could name the near-religious hunger that drew him to the Party did not often ask whether his late faith in complexity, in synthesis, in the unexpected, fed the same hunger by another door. The boy who lost his mother built a theory where nothing stands alone and nothing is lost, and the theory consoles exactly where the wound runs deepest, and a man does not always audit the belief that sits closest to his grief. Here, near the warm center, his clear sight goes a little soft.
And yet he left the door open even there. Asked about God, he said he had no relations with the fellow, and then he said at once that he did not deny the mystery in things, that men cannot shut the infinite complexity of the world inside their own ideas. A man who says that has admitted that his own system does not get the last word either. The confession runs small and true. He kept intimate diaries of his decline, his mourning, his failing body, and he did not pretty them. He once said the Resistance had taught him the difference between surviving and living, and he added that his own war had run more to slogans painted on walls than to grand deeds. The candor reaches almost all the way down. Almost.
Three coordinates fix him.
The first is the wound. A mother dies, a boy is left, and the man he becomes spends a century building a world where nothing stands alone, where the part holds the whole and the lost are held inside the living. The theory of complexity begins in grief.
The second is the renunciation. He gave up God and Party and Nation and the safe name of a trade, and from the rubble of all he refused to worship he built a god of the open future, a faith that the story never ends and the grave never wins. He could not subtract his way to nothing, because no man can, and he was honest enough to live inside the new faith without quite naming it as one.
The third is the cost, and the honor in the cost. He chose a homeland with no border and paid for the choice with homelessness, marginal in the lab and marginal in the seminar, scattered like the people he came from, owing his solidarity to a mankind too wide to love him back. He earned the choice the hard way, under regimes that wanted him dead for his blood and his certainties, and he held to it for a hundred and four years, and at the end he refused to call the question closed. That refusal was his last heroism. He fought all his life to keep the world from breaking into pieces, and he fought just as hard to keep it from ever being finished.
