A book by Frenchman Pascal Bruckner pooh poohs the idea of love and romance and instead focuses on how much better off everyone is if they stay single and unattached! A Frenchman who doesn’t believe in love – what is the world coming to?!
Bruckner is known as one of the “new philosophers” of the 70s and 80s. The author of several books, The Paradox of Love is highly popular in France. “At the start of his exhilarating new book, The Paradox of Love (Princeton University Press), Bruckner recalls that the parents mostly hung out on the second floor of the building, smoking dope and enjoying sex, while downstairs the big kids tormented the little kids. . . . In France the bestseller status of The Paradox of Love owes much to Bruckner’s suave pensées. Comparing marriage with politics, for instance, he compacts half a dozen insights into a sentence: ‘The couple is a little principality that votes its own laws and is constantly in danger of falling into despotism or anarchy.’ There were a few parents who did some work. They were among the first to see what was happening and the first to withdraw. They shifted their children to schools run by what they sometimes called ‘the bourgeois capitalist state.’ After a few angry meetings, the alternative school closed its doors. That was a major event in Bruckner’s disillusionment with the ethos of his own generation. A few years later he became one of the nouveaux philosophes in Paris, a group that arose partly in reaction to the standard-issue leftist thought that dominated French discussion for many years. He’s now best known as a social critic, the author of The Tears of the White Man, about the often destructive policies intended to help the Third World, and The Tyranny of Guilt, on the West’s neurotic desire to blame itself for all the ills of the planet.” ― National Post
