Interview with Jean-Luc Martin-Lagardette: Full Transcript

Jean-Luc Martin-Lagardette has been a journalist since 1975. A graduate of the École supérieure de journalisme in Lille, he was notably editor-in-chief of the monthly Décision Environnement. He is also, together with the Alliance internationale de journalistes and his colleague Yves Agnès, one of the originators of the Association de préfiguration d’un Conseil de presse (APCP), which works for the creation in France of a body for press ethics and mediation. The author of several works on journalism and the environment, and an essayist, he is also a professor of journalism. On his site (jlml.fr) he explains the necessity, for every citizen and still more for the press, of never abandoning the concern for truth nor that for the general interest (la démarche véritale). He is currently editor-in-chief of the online magazine Ouvertures.

In this interview, he gives us his informed perspective on the anti-cult campaign and the role of the media.

A CICNS interview, October 2009.

Jean-Luc Martin-Lagardette: “I have been a journalist since 1975, a graduate of the École Supérieure de Journalisme in Lille. I then worked in the local press, at a major regional daily, before coming to Paris to work in the trade press — at first for a magazine for local-government professionals, and then, at the time of its creation, I joined the magazine Décision-Environnement. After that I was a freelancer for ten years. All the while I also worked as a journalism trainer. Then I wrote a few books — practical guides and more philosophical works of reflection — and for the past two years I have been editor-in-chief of the online magazine Ouvertures, which is accompanied by a quarterly newsletter we send to our subscribers free of charge, and which is the portal of the honest man of the twenty-first century.

The fight against dérives sectaires seems to me indispensable. To my mind, it is legitimate for the government and for certain institutions to see to it that charlatans — on the question of natural or alternative therapies — do not run rampant and do not abuse the credulity of the public. Likewise, it is important that within the groups that may form, whatever they may be, there be no practices by which the most vulnerable people are prevented from flourishing freely and are steered toward being exploited. The idea seems excellent to me, and that France should have a policy in this area — I approve. I think that is very good. The problem is the way it is applied, because in fact, despite what is said, it is not at all a fight against dérives sectaires, but a fight against cults.

We are fighting, in fact, against spiritual minorities. What we call “cults” barely exists in France. In fact, there are various groupings whose approaches differ from one another but which, for the most part — the very great majority, as far as I have been able to observe, because I have gone and looked here and there — most of them have spiritual aims, aims of inquiry, aims of clearing new paths by which their members, or those who may sympathise with these approaches, will discover other ways of behaving, of thinking, of acting, of feeding themselves and of caring for themselves.

The fight is conducted by amalgamation, so as to lump all of those approaches together under the term “cults”. If it were a matter of fighting dérives sectaires, well then, we would fight dérives sectaires everywhere — not fight dérives sectaires only when spiritual movements are involved. That is therefore manifest proof that there is a hatred of cults, a fear of cults, a phobia of cults in France, which makes the whole file completely rotten.

I would not say, as Emmanuelle Mignon did — the famous phrase uttered by Mr Sarkozy’s adviser — that the problem of cults was a “non-problem”. I would say that the problem of cults is a very badly posed problem, and one that would be far simpler to resolve if we were willing to look at things coolly and to be far more objective about the situation.

This whole story of cults is a construction that no longer has any reason to exist. These are clichés that prevent thought. So we must now reason with the understanding that, if we continue with this system, anyone can be labelled a cult — and that we all carry this schema in our heads. Even if you are not in a cult — and even if you are in one — you will think that the other person is in a cult and that the other is dangerous; and yes, it is true that there are risks, but never in my own house — it is always at the other’s. And from that, as the policy is currently conducted, it is impossible to escape.

The MIVILUDES is unconstitutional in its approach — I say so very clearly. The Constitution says that we cannot condemn someone without having heard them, without having offered them a fair trial, and without having first granted them the presumption of innocence. That is why France is singled out by many countries abroad; and what she does not understand — she says she is always at the forefront of an extraordinarily positive mission of fighting cults, and that she is the only country in the world to have understood everything — but in fact, what she is reproached for is not fighting cults: it is the way she goes about it; it is that she does not respect the constitutional rules, the sacred rules of our democracy. True experts — that is, people capable of weighing the parties against one another, of studying matters impartially and professionally — hardly exist in France.

We have a few sociologists who investigate, who try to see things on the ground; those people are immediately demonised, since they have had dealings with the cult, since they have entered the cult, they have analysed it — and so, necessarily, they are being manipulated.

We must manage to get out of this, through information, through listening to the opposing arguments present. The MIVILUDES has never accepted the adversarial principle — never; the ADFI likewise, the ADFI: “We do not talk with those people because they are so clever that they will bamboozle you.” The MIVILUDES’s great hobby-horse now is to say that the cults that want to make money have seen that in the field of training there was a pile of cash to be made, and so they have piled into it. It is amusing to see that among the criteria the MIVILUDES defines for raising the alarm about cult risk there is, for example, self-knowledge, reflection on the meaning of life, everything to do with personal development, everything to do with the study of one’s own behaviour. So the person who becomes a cult risk is the one who questions himself and who does not fall into line, who does not follow the directives of society as a whole and of the particular society in which he works. Since entering the School of Journalism in Lille, I have taken an interest in the ethics of the profession — in other words, in the conditions under which the profession is practised. A few of us students were very strongly critical of the fact that this school was training us to fit into the mould of the media as they were, without producing any fundamental reflection on the role of information in a democracy.

Most of the major media are owned by captains of industry, who are therefore very close to those in power, whose interests converge with those of the authorities — and so who do not censor journalists; it is more a self-censorship on the part of the journalist, who can no longer really say what he sees, what he wants to say, because he knows perfectly well that such-and-such an idea, such-and-such an observation, could not get through in the columns of his own press. The Convention Collective Nationale des Journalistes — that is, the document governing labour relations between journalists and their employers — does indeed stipulate that the journalist has total freedom of expression, insofar as that freedom of expression does not run counter to the interests of the media owner.

More and more media are heavily dependent on advertising, since they live more off advertising than off readers, off their readership’s support through subscriptions and purchases, which decline year on year. So it is a real problem, since the press is losing its credibility more and more; it is a snake biting its own tail, because the more it loses its credibility with readers, the more it is obliged to resort to advertising — and the more advertising more or less directly steers the content of articles. I have spoken of self-censorship; it is something that operates a great deal.

The French journalist has long known that truth is not attainable, and so he no longer seeks the truth. But he has replaced it with nothing; he simply says: “I undertake to be honest.” That throws everything up in the air, because if one does not seek the truth, one has one’s honesty relative to one’s beliefs, relative to one’s convictions — and no longer relative to what is.

As a journalist, I know that I am a professional manipulator: give me any fact at all and I will draw something positive out of it for you, or I will draw something negative out of it for you. I need only decide; I will find as many elements to prove the one as the other. All my colleagues know perfectly well that when they investigate something, they can just as well destroy as build. It depends on their point of view. At present, journalists’ point of view is: destroy the cults.

Here I address my colleagues, the press: start by taking your information from a range of sources; do not settle for what the ADFI or the MIVILUDES tells you when cults are at issue, nor the Council of the Order of Physicians. It would already be enough for there to be neutral and objective reporting based on the available evidence — we would see journalists investigate, for example, the ADFI: find out who the ADFI’s members are, what its budget is, the exact number of victims. Give me precise statistics, so we know who the victims of cults are. Are the methods for determining who is a cult and who is not scientific? If we seek to understand — and, moreover, not to demonise those who do not deserve it — because as for the list of cults, all the political leaders who followed it closely — apart from a small clique of deputies who are genuinely fanatical against cults — apart from those, most acknowledge that the guide is full of movements that do not deserve to be in it.

When we think “cult” — a terrorist or quasi-terrorist movement that lives only to exploit people — it is not true. There are plenty of people who could speak differently, who could say that things in France have reached a completely aberrant point in this anti-cult policy. But no — ease and laziness, the two principal failings that Kant highlighted in his famous essay What Is Enlightenment?: what are men’s principal failings with respect to enlightenment? They are cowardice and laziness. The properly spiritual aspect of man — what I call the soul — must be defended; that is why I have just written a book called Les droits de l’âme, pour une reconnaissance politique de la transcendance. Here we are, wanting to frighten people, saying: “Watch out, do not go into all these novelties, be careful of all these groupings” — which we name cults precisely in order to sow fear and alarm the public, and to say that they are manipulators who will take your money and your life — without seeing that behind them there are individuals: men, women, children, families, friends, people, human persons who have convictions — yes, strong ones, sometimes.

So, who is right? The person who searches honestly does not find a calm environment in which he can make his choice in full knowledge of the facts, in which there could be a sort of marketplace of spiritualities where everyone stands equal and defends his vision with his own means. Here we are in France: there are the good and the bad; it is very Manichaean. There are the good — the great recognised religions — and then there are the bad: all the little newcomers. In Le Figaro of 11 September 2009: “When we lose our capacity to engage in civil conversation with one another about matters of real importance, we do not only lose our capacity to meet great challenges — we lose something essential about ourselves.” I find that a very fine sentence; it was uttered by Mr Barack Obama in connection with the debate on his health-care system.

But I find that France, if she is not capable of talking with those of her children who live in somewhat different contexts, who have strange thoughts — if she is not capable of listening to them and wants only to exclude them, to demonise them — then not only will she fail to meet the challenge of the cohabitation of different ways of thinking but, what is more, she loses part of her soul: the soul of democracy, the soul of enlightenment, the soul of human rights, which says that every person has the right to be heard and to defend his case under fair conditions.”

Jean-Luc Martin-Lagardette has published several works: Vrai comme l’info, in 2001; l’Information Responsable, in 2006; Comment va Youri, in 2007; Vademecum de l’Eau and Les Droits de l’Ame, in 2008; and finally Le Guide de l’écriture journalistique and Evolution et finalité, Darwin, Monod, Dieu, in 2009.