Many of those dismayed by the events on the French or US campuses lately reassure themselves that the activists are only a minority, that they are not representative of the student body, and that their actions can therefore be overlooked. This is a profound mistake. Social change is always the work of a determined minority. We ignore this reality at our own peril.
On June 16, 2014, a roundtable was held in the wake of a parliamentary inquiry to draw lessons from the attack on the American embassy in Benghazi, Libya, by jihadists two years earlier, in which the American ambassador was killed. The affair caused quite a stir in the United States. During the roundtable discussion, a question was asked by a young woman who identified herself as a Muslim and asked that Muslims not be stigmatized – the majority of whom, she said, are largely peaceful.
The peaceful majority is irrelevant
The very lively response of one of the panel members, Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese-American journalist, is quite interesting. After thanking the young woman for her question, here’s what she said, in extenso. “There are about 1.2 billion Muslims in the world. Of course, the majority of them are peaceful people! There are at most 15 to 25% radicals among them. But that leaves between 180 and 300 million people dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization. Why should we care about the radicals? Because it is the radicals who kill. If you look at history, most Germans were peaceful, but the Nazis dictated the agenda, and the result was that millions died. The peaceful majority was irrelevant. If you look at Russia, most Russians were also peaceful. Yet the Russians were able to kill twenty million people. The peaceful majority was irrelevant. If you look at China, most of the Chinese were also peaceful. Yet the Chinese were able to kill 70 million people. The peaceful majority was irrelevant. If you look at Japan before World War II, most Japanese were also peaceful. Yet Japan was able to massacre twelve million people in China and Southeast Asia, mostly with shovels and bayonets. The peaceful majority was irrelevant. On September 11, 2001, there were 2.3 million Arab Muslims living in the United States. It took only 19 radicals to bring America to its knees, destroy the World Trade Center, damage the Pentagon, and kill nearly 3,000 Americans that day. The peaceful majority was irrelevant.”
Gabriel isn’t much for nuance, and her numbers are sometimes incorrect, but the message is clear: never underestimate the impact a determined minority can have. It is they, and they alone, who count. The majority is largely passive. All autocrats have understood this.
Even if it’s a minority, the determined minority will have a major impact. The consequence is that this impact may not reflect at all what the majority wanted. The vast majority of Germans, like the French, had been traumatized by the First World War and didn’t want a second. That didn’t stop it. Hence the important question for democracy: what can a peaceful majority do to get what it wants, or to reject what it doesn’t want? The danger, of course, is that if it doesn’t answer that question, another will will be imposed by an active minority.
One of the reasons for the passivity of the majority is a moral view of social change. The influence of a minority can be seen as unfair: “But they’re only a minority!” The implication is: “They shouldn’t count.” The mental model that only the majority should count is a denial of reality. It is based on what should be, not what is. The danger here is that what is seen as unfair is often seen as improbable. The “It’s unfair” reflects another mental model, which is: “Since it’s unfair, it won’t happen.” This leads to the conclusion that since activist students are in the minority and “the vast majority of students just want to study”, things will calm down, but this reasoning doesn’t hold up historically. It’s because they are in the minority and determined that they can have a real impact, while the majority will remain silent and therefore passive, like the Germans in the 1930s.
The context of Brigitte Gabriel’s answer, that of terrorism, makes her evoke only the negative aspects of this social fact, but fortunately the influence of a minority can also be positive. This was the case, for example, with the legalization of abortion or the abolition of the death penalty in France, ideas that were not in the majority. It can also be positive in an organization when a small group of determined and motivated innovators succeeds in proposing new ideas to transform it, even though they were initially in the minority or even heretical. But at least in these situations the minorities don’t resort to violence.
The democratic challenge
Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that when we study a social phenomenon, we must guard against naivety. We must look at what is, not at what should be, according to our own morality. Here, as elsewhere, magical thinking leads to disaster. If change is brought about by activist minorities, the real question is how to reconcile the actions of these minorities with democracy.
🇫🇷 A version in French of this article is available here.
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