In early 1943, Simone Weil began work on The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind (L'Enracinement: prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l'être humain). Later that year, she died due to a host of ailments, including, controversially, poor nutrition in the wake of a bout with tuberculosis. She was just 34 years old.
Ambiguity clouds Weil’s untimely death. Some say that she was depressed, others that she was merely limiting her food intake out of solidarity with the poor, particularly those in German-occupied France. To be sure, as a member of La Résistance, Weil’s mind was constantly on the plight of her homeland. As a matter of fact, The Need for Roots was commissioned by La France Libre as a plan for the restoration of Europe once Nazism had been defeated—an eventuality that was still in doubt as Weil labored on the manuscript. D-Day was still a year away.
The Need for Roots is divided into three parts. Broadly speaking, the first has to do with the “obligations” that each person requires in order to thrive, the second with how “uprootedness” (déracinement) threatens these obligations, the third with how “roots” might again develop in the world. The book as a whole is compelling, but I think Part II, simply entitled “Uprootedness,” is especially apposite today. Weil begins by trying to describe what it means to be rooted:
A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community, which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw wellnigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which forms a natural part.
To be uprooted, then, is to have these natural relationships disrupted, whether by “military conquest, money-power [or] economic domination.” In other words, when one is uprooted, one loses connection to a particular people and/or place and, as a result, is increasingly starved of the psychological and spiritual nourishment essential for happiness.
Weil goes on to analyze this problem in two overarching contexts, namely, in “the towns” and in “the countryside.” It is, unsurprisingly, a wide-ranging discussion, so I will limit myself to her comments on education, which take up the bulk of her attention on town life. First, Weil laments that modern Western culture has come to prioritize “technical science” at the expense of both Greek antiquity and local-cum-national traditions. Thus people learn concepts and skills that have global application, but they are “entirely deprived both of contact with this world and, at the same time, of any window opening on to the world beyond.” While this may make for a streamlined approach to education, it is also dehumanizing. Those who are “cultured” treat education as a means to the end of social prestige. In contrast, those who aren’t cultured come to see their work as intrinsically deficient, good for only making a living. In both cases, Weil argues, “the desire to learn for the sake of learning, the desire for truth” is absent.
Once education is viewed as a privilege reserved for elites—an entrée to a social club—it can no longer teach people to love things. They will either “fall into a spiritual lethargy” or “hurl themselves into some form of activity necessarily designed to uproot.” Both are exceedingly dangerous, though Weil notes, with special concern, that the desire to uproot becomes “self-propagating.” Just as the Roman Empire divested “the Mediterranean peoples of their individual manner of life,” so does Nazism, itself a product of the dispossession effected by the Treaty of Versailles, seek to subject other cultures to German dictates. Marxism, she adds, fares no better, as it is disseminated by “only very ordinary middle-class intellectuals” who tender an ostensibly objective doctrine for “popular consumption.” With this in mind, Weil arrives at her second key point: “Whoever is uprooted himself uproots others. Whoever is rooted himself doesn’t uproot others.”
According to Weil, one can learn a great deal by observing where uprootedness discloses itself. In her view, it is found wherever the future takes precedence over the past—a trait that she finds in a number of economic and political systems that emerge from “European colonial methods,” including capitalism and Marxism. Later in The Need for Roots, she traces these methods back to Roman imperialism—so déracinement indeed has Western origins—but in modernity it is very much an adjunct to science and technology. As she argues, “technical research” is effectively a matter of maximizing profits for the producer at the cheapest cost to the consumer. There is no thought “concerning the effect of machines upon the moral well-being” of the people who use them. She even adds that scientific education should incorporate study about what a given technology actually does to those utilize it. But this is, alas, almost impossible, given the separation of culture and work. We have, in short, consigned “culture” to a group of people who, in truth, prefer to hoard it, thereby stripping both the cultured and the working classes of “roots.” From a monetary perspective, this arrangement may nevertheless seem to work. But inevitably “uprootedness” manifests itself in misery and violence. This is because human beings want “dignity” above all else, and work without dignity denies a crucial value of the “spiritual order.”
As I consider Weil’s insights, I can’t help but think about the unspeakable tragedy that unfolded in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday. I don’t need to rehash the details at this point—it’s a story that has garnered world headlines—but I want to underline that the Uvalde shooter’s intentions were very much bound up with his involvement with technology and social media (especially Instagram, Facebook, and possibly TikTok). Just 18 years old, the Uvalde shooter was said to spend most of his time alone, playing video games and posting on social media—technologies that, quite literally, uproot one from one’s immediate environment, even one’s own identity. Moreover, the Uvalde shooter did not graduate from high school, and his employment prospects were meager at best. Disconnected from his education, he opted for work at a global fast-food chain, looking merely for money to purchase guns, ammo, and other gear.
Doubtless gun control is a pivotal issue that demands further attention and debate. Yet, if Weil were to comment on this cataclysm, I suspect she’d insist that déracinement cannot be ignored either, both with regard to the Uvalde shooter himself and to the larger society that produced him. After all, “uprooted” is a painfully apt term to apply to a person who has turned murderous against his own family and, in horrific and deadly fashion, against his own community.
When we consider the cultural and political tectonic shifts all over our world right now, we have no idea what the future holds. We do know, however, that kingdoms come and kingdoms go. FB, Instagram, and TikTok may hasten this fact of history for all of us. Uprootedness may just be one of the dangers of social media. Most likely, there are many others.
"According to Weil, one can learn a great deal by observing where uprootedness discloses itself. In her view, it is found wherever the future takes precedence over the past—a trait that she finds in a number of economic and political systems that emerge from “European colonial methods,” including capitalism and Marxism."
Thought-provoking. I take this as something along the lines of, the future that is anticipated as an end of a chain of reasoning: in order to gain that [anticipated future end,] I will do [whatever it is] regardless of the environment, people, relationships I'm rooted it. By contrast, you could say that "for the sake of" my community, relationships, integrity with values passed on from tradition, the environment in which I'm rooted, I will not do [whatever it is that would gain a future end]. That's the sense I'm trying to understand the point about the danger of when the future takes precedence over the past.
The reason I say this is to work out just how paradoxical it is when you try to think about how the very technical means that seem to be the key to gaining a desired future that you anticipate (technology) end up robbing everyone of a future worth believing in, when they grow as determinative of everything as what they've now become.