Or How to Save the Golden Goose.

Auguste Comte coined the word "sociology," we were taught.* Recently, Éric Zemmour mumbled a few words about Ibn Khaldoun, who is said to be its father. I believe it was Henri Corbin who put forward this idea.

Comte rightly believed that the dead govern the living — the living of the present, that is. That is to say, their inventions, their institutions, and their religions determine our current situation. Which is a truism to my eyes. Yet many profess that the past is no more, that it is dead. Especially when one is a Buddhist, for they have drawn a line under the past, especially with the Vedic culture. They were right, up to a point. But they are extremists. They failed to keep the middle way.

In their death-dealing way, Marxists, Communists, and atheists fought to eradicate ancient traditions. They used materialist science to achieve their ends, without fully grasping the consequences of such a stance. History has broken them.

Today, despite the chaos in which the ideology — which holds that the dead should bury their dead and that only humanism, without romanticism, should prevail — the debacle has become uncontrollable. We have gone from Charybdis to Scylla, and lies have become common currency. Confusion is total.

They have made chaos — paradoxically, an ancient Greek cosmogonic philosophy — the foundation of their logic, integrating chance as the guiding thread of destiny. For them, doubt is merely a sophism they use to anchor their certainties and demagogic speculations.

For how can one not see that once nature is chased out, it returns at a gallop? That nature always ends up reclaiming its rights? They are savage. Unconscious man, inseparable from nature, is but a puppet before her power.

Auguste Comte's example should serve as a lesson. He invented a new religion, and made himself its Pope. What a sociology! What a democracy! How ridiculous, in the end! And Zemmour, with his Marxist ideological roots, would have us resurrect the values of that past...

* He also coined "altruism," which he made great use of. ■