Spectacle and Substance: The Curious Rituals of Modern Tribalism

The Televised Republic of Letters

In what passes for intellectual life in our benighted age, the French still manage—barely—to maintain the pretense that conversation can be elevated to art. Léa Salamé’s “Quelle époque!” represents that peculiarly Gallic insistence that television need not entirely abandon its potential for something approaching substance. Her assembly of Louane, Garou and the magnificently acidic James Ellroy creates a simulacrum of the salon, that most French of institutions, where entertainment and reflection perform their awkward mating dance for public consumption.

One can imagine Voltaire watching with a mixture of horror and recognition. The form continues, though the content has been necessarily diluted to accommodate the attention spans of viewers raised on the digital equivalent of sugared cereal. The discussion of Louane’s Eurovision ambitions with “Maman” stands as perfect evidence of our collective cultural regression—a contest originally conceived as a healing balm for post-war Europe now reduced to a pageant of calculated sentimentality and cynical cultural diplomacy.

Blood Sport for the Bourgeoisie

Meanwhile, across the digital divide but united in Paris’s algorithmic consciousness, Alexander Volkanovski and Diego Lopes engaged in that most ancient and honest form of competition—simply attempting to render each other unconscious through the applied sciences of wrestling, striking, and submission. Their contest for the UFC featherweight championship offers a stark contrast to the manufactured politesse of Salamé’s television program, yet both spectacles satisfy the same primal human craving for hierarchy, excellence, and the identification of superior specimens.

The irony should not escape us that Volkanovski’s victory via the bloodless mechanism of the judges’ scorecards (that delightful contradiction, “unanimous decision”) represents a civilizing of even our most barbaric entertainments. We want blood, but we want it regulated; we crave violence, but demand it be circumscribed by rules, referees, and the pretense of sportsmanship. The scorecards reading 49-46 and 48-47 in Volkanovski’s favor represent our modern compromise: we can indulge our ancestral bloodlust while maintaining the fiction of our enlightened evolution beyond it.

The Politics of Distraction

What does it tell us about the people of Paris—and by extension, the wider democratic publics of the West—that these trivialities command their collective attention? The French, who once took to the streets over matters of genuine consequence, now consume Garou’s promotion of his album “Un meilleur lendemain” (A Better Tomorrow) with the same appetite they might once have reserved for the manifestos of political movements promising the same.

The simultaneous fascination with both Salamé’s curated conversations and the controlled violence of UFC 314 reveals our growing comfort with contradiction. We want our cultural consumption to feel consequential without demanding actual stakes. We prefer our competitions to be fierce but ultimately inconsequential, our discourse to be provocative but not genuinely challenging.

The Coming Cultural Regression

These trends portend a continuing retreat from the public square of substantive debate to the comfortable arena of spectator sports and celebrity gossip. When Paddy Pimblett’s dominant TKO win over Michael Chandler commands more attention than policy debates affecting millions, we witness democracy’s slow asphyxiation. The oxygen of serious attention is being steadily depleted from our shared atmosphere.

The celebration of achievement in entertainment and sports is not inherently corrupting, but when it displaces rather than complements engagement with matters of genuine public interest, it heralds a troubling phase in our political development. We are creating citizens who can recite Volkanovski’s fight statistics but remain ignorant of their own nation’s constitutional foundations.

A Faint Hope Amid the Spectacle

Yet even within these trending trivialities, there exists a persistent human quality worth preserving. The narratives of comeback, perseverance, and excellence that accompany Volkanovski’s return after a 14-month layoff speak to values that transcend mere entertainment. Similarly, the cross-cultural conversations facilitated by programs like “Quelle époque!” maintain at least a vestigial connection to the Enlightenment values upon which modern democracy was founded.

Perhaps there is a case to be made that these seemingly frivolous cultural phenomena serve as training wheels for more significant civic engagement. The ability to analyze a UFC match might eventually translate to scrutinizing political debates; the appreciation for the dynamics between Salamé’s guests might foster understanding of complex social interactions.

But I remain unconvinced. More likely, we are witnessing not the prelude to renewed civic engagement but its substitution—a comfortable distraction that provides all the emotional rewards of participation with none of the intellectual demands or consequential outcomes.

In Paris, as in all our modern capitals, the gladiators still fight and the poets still sing, but increasingly, they do so in service of nothing greater than their own celebrity and our passive entertainment. If there is a political development to be predicted from these trends, it is the continued retreat from citizenship to spectatorship, from participation to consumption.

And that, dear reader, is an époque we should regard with considerably more alarm than celebration.