Interesting article, I would like to comment two parts > The French fondness for abstraction appears in its most paradoxical (and perverse) form in the absence

Interesting article, I would like to comment two parts > The French fondness for abstraction appears in its most paradoxical (and perverse) form in the absence of precise statistical information about their Maghrebi minorities, as it is illegal to collect data about ethnicity and religion in France I don't think that's the reason at all. My guess would be it's a scar of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Tulard#The_Tulard_files_.28fichier_Tulard.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Tulard#The_Tulard_f... > an over-reliance on abstraction, and a fetish for semantics There is a domain where this is and has been a good thing: science. There is still a strong french mathematic (and more recently computer science) tradition going on, with specific fields pioneered and developed mostly in france. Our ministry of education is actively trying to kill all that with the latest school reforms, though....