Is Constance contraire Russian?
No.
There are no limits to the imagination of those who will make a virtue of necessity. ~ Thomas Paine I was raised on the story of Christopher Columbus in Spain, who claimed he could sail west from the New World to the Old World, only to find himself on an entirely new continent. I don't know if any school kids, or maybe just me, actually believed that the story was true, but it was something of a cautionary tale: that we had much to learn from the new world, but also that our own old world is still very much in need of repair and renovation.
I am told I came to this conclusion as an adult, and I think part of it was because I saw how many countries and leaders were trying to imitate America. It's not like I saw them all trying to look like Americans (aside from the fact that we do wear cowboy boots, and have a penchant for giant trucks and large amounts of consumer goods). It's more like I've been noticing that when the Russians try to imitate us, or when the Chinese try to imitate us, or when people in Latin America try to imitate us, or even when other European countries imitate us, it's almost always with an eye to their own national interests rather than ours.
It's interesting to think about why we behave so differently from all of these other nations. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that America is unique, in the sense that it has never really been colonized. We have been invaded in the past, sure, but only by other nations, and the effect of this invasion was to strengthen us as a nation rather than undermine us. In other words, our country was built on top of the ruins of others.
And this welcoming of invasion was an important part of how we developed as a country, and also how we continued to develop as a society. We were constantly being reinvented, in part because it was too painful to stay the same. And that's not even taking into account the fact that the United States was founded as an experiment in self-governance, and the first people to take up arms were a handful of people who left a very specific place in order to form a new kind of government.
Is Constance Contraire smart?
In The Truth about the Lying Truth, Peter Turchin and Nataline Reinking ask whether there is any merit to the argument that what has made us capable of civilization may have been the same trait that left us vulnerable to extinction.
The authors argue that it could be the case that our human traits were the very traits that caused the demise of our earlier hominin relatives:
The existence of a large brain that requires high-quality food, a social hierarchy with its in-group/out-group distinctions, the evolution of a social life (as opposed to an isolated existence), and the capacity for language (as opposed to simple cries and calls) all depend on the capacity for deception. In turn, these capacities required an ability to recognize oneself in the mirror and thus to recognize others in the mirror as well. Thus the origin of a large brain, complex social hierarchies, communication, and language probably depended on the existence of something like a mirror in the soul of early hominids. (The Truth About the Lying Truth: Can a Mirror Reflection Make Us Human?, p. 30)
In essence, they are making the case that some of the traits that characterize our species were the traits that doomed our cousins the earlier hominins. We must take caution in considering this idea, however, because it is based only one argument, one that is not a good argument. There are two pieces of evidence that we should be cautious about accepting in advance, for example, that our ability to recognize ourselves in the mirror was part of what killed off the earlier hominins. First, the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker is one of the most vocal advocates of the idea that the rise of hominins was linked to their increased ability to recognize themselves in the mirror. It allowed us to grasp the abstractions of time and space and distance, while at the same time keeping us rooted in reality. So we got away from the here-and-now and now-here. And for that, if you will, it was an act of self-recognition.
What does Constance contraire mean?
I came across the following in a French book by the title, "Constance: The story of a dog, the truth about dogs and the human condition".
The dog is in a cage. The man's friend, who brought the dog to him, is talking to the man, but the dog is not listening to him.
"Well, look, he'll never listen to you anyway," the man's friend says. "He doesn't know how to listen. He's a dog and he's always going to be a dog. No one can change that."
At this point the man's wife enters the room. She puts her hand on the dog's head, strokes its ears, and tells it to be quiet. The dog listens to her.
"That's what you should do," she says. "You should listen. You're always going to be a dog. But with me you can learn to listen."
The man and his friend are astonished. ? Answer: It means "Constance opposes". (I'm not sure if I'm interpreting the quote correctly, as I have no French.) Quand les Anglais sont contents d'eux-mmes, ils ne sont pas contents d'eux-mmes. When the English are happy about themselves, they aren't happy about themselves.