Georges Bernanos: Politics, imagination, and responsibility June 29, 2018

India Insight with Sunny Sharma

Georges Bernanos, like President Barack Obama, has helped me to understand my responsibility, place as a citizen in America and the power of individual agency to transforming our society. Yet, if I strive to be a social reformer, I can indeed heed the words of Bernanos's writing, but I must understand that Bernanos in no way lays out the blue print for change in society. Yet he knew the next generations, through creativity and imagination would organize a political and spiritual front to combat very real social evils in society.
Bernanos knew that even after political independence is achieved rights have to be declared to protect citizens from organized power and tyranny of the majority. Moreover, the power of money and political party dominance corrupts real agency and ideas of everyday citizens who strive to reform society through public policy.
Bernanos uses his literary imagination to understand the inherent despotism of the future as well as possibilities of a past not predicated on machine civilization, something he believed would lead to a loss of liberty in society.
July 10, 2018

Plea for Liberty: I’ll share a few ideas from the only two pages that really matter for Americans pg 188-189. In these pages, Bernanos asks Roosevelt to address the leaders of Christian opinion in Europe by saying:
“Gentlemen, we are going to establish a Christian society, that is, a society based upon the ideas of Equality, Liberty, and Fraternity.
These three qualities are the legacy of the French Revolution and Age of Enlightenment. Even the human rights advocate and writer of the Indian constitution Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar believed society should be made along the lines of this phrase if not stated as Christian per say. This quote I shared is important because it is the meeting of the minds between a man who was the voice of the French resistance and the conscious of the French Declaration of Rights with the mind of the leader of the New Deal and proponent of the Second Bill of Rights. Most importantly, this plea was an imposition of the view that America’s destiny was to be the leader in human rights of the entire globe.
One can only imagine that Roosevelt read the words of this awkward idealist and that it touched his heart and also coincided with the spirit of the Economic Bill of Rights which was Roosevelt’s legacy and dream for the American people at the end of his tenure.
We have certainly come a far way from Roosevelt with the passing of Universal Health Care by President Obama and other social programs which contribute to the American Dream of meritocracy, but we still have not fulfilled the ‘Plea for Liberty’ by Bernanos to create a society that doesn’t just adopt the vocabulary of human rights, but places the notion of human dignity on a pedestal so it may act upon the consciousness of the globe.
So Bernanos has one request, that American leaders and politicians say to their public in times of struggle:
“We do not ask them to line up respectively behind us; we implore them to go before us, to show us the road.”
Bernanos always believed the day would come.
In a similar fashion President Barack Obama echoes the same spirit, as a man of change, hope, and responsibility, of this kindred soul:
"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."