There are times, in both public and private life, when people let themselves slide towards the abyss. Not because they want to, but because they’ve stopped wanting anything else; out of weariness, out of resignation, out of that mixture of powerlessness and fascination experienced by someone leaning on a balustrade, overcome by vertigo and seeing no other way out than to let themselves slide; as if the void, because it stretches out its arms, becomes more reassuring than the effort to resist it. It is this vertigo of emptiness, this strange complacency with fate, that seems to govern so much of our collective behavior today. And, all too often, our most intimate behaviours too.
On a planetary scale, we have long known where our frantic race is leading: towards ecological collapse. We know the causes, we know the remedies, and yet we do almost nothing. We continue to burn, to pollute, to destroy, as if the whole of humanity were hypnotized by the spectacle of its own disappearance, fascinated by the morbid beauty of the fire that is starting.
On a European scale, the same vertigo is setting in. We see empires behaving towards us as if we were nothing more than prey. We see the Brussels machine frozen in its own ponderousness. We see continental political balances dissolve into minimalist compromises, constantly called into question by extremes that patiently weave their webs and draw peoples’ anger and fears towards them.
On a French scale, the same vertigo is looming, even more visible and just as cruel. It’s as if we had collectively accepted that the far right’s only adversary would be the far left, and that it would soon be in power. As if, on the other hand, we had accepted the inferiorization of certain women in certain communities, where men see themselves as inferiorized by the rest of society; and as if we were resigned to the fact that young Jews can no longer go to university without being attacked, and that Jewish artists can no longer perform in French theaters.
The political spectacle does nothing to distract us from this vertigo: the extreme left, anti-Semitic by calculation, obsessed with the rejection of all that is successful, prefers to frighten rather than unite; the government parties, which not so long ago carried projects and ideas, have “self-pulverized” into a dusting of egos; with leaders more numerous than their militants, ambitions larger than their visions. Parliamentary debates, all too often derisory and screaming, reveal a political class at the end of its rope, incapable of imagining a way to bring the debt under control other than through unbearable taxes.
All this is doing is paving the way for the extreme right to come to power, followed by a major financial crisis, itself followed by an extreme austerity plan, which will, as always, hit hardest those who work and still believe in the Republican promise. Already, many of them, rich or not, are thinking of leaving; and when, in a country, the working elites are thinking of exile, it means that this country has already begun, in its subconscious, to give up control of its future.
The media, often unaware of it, amplify this attraction of emptiness; they more often give the floor to those who expose suffering and catastrophes than to those who explain how to prevent them; they glorify complaint and victimization, and make work, merit and success invisible. Misfortune becomes a spectacle, misery a ratings factor. Every evening, the screens paint a portrait of a fractured, exhausted, frightened and bitter France, watching itself age in the distorting mirror of its own renunciations. A France frightened by illegal immigrants, besieged by doubts, incapable of defending its secularism, withdrawn into an identity it no longer knows, because we’ve stopped teaching it.
Should we resign ourselves to this? No. The attraction of emptiness is not inevitable.
First of all, we need to stop looking into the abyss, and look upwards; to stop confusing the margins with the norm; to give more prominence to those who build than to those who destroy; to admire the grandeur and beauty of work well done, the nobility of public service, the pride of the craftsman and the researcher, the value of the teacher, the carer, the engineer, the inventor, the farmer; to show their faces, too often invisible. We also need to listen to all the young people, often from neglected neighborhoods, who create, undertake, integrate and dream of a sustainable, harmonious and united future. We need to give the good news its rightful place: scientific discoveries that fill people with wonder, inventions that alleviate their suffering, and social progress. All of these announce that pain can be reduced, that misery is not eternal, that the climate can be regulated, that agriculture can become regenerative, that food can become healthy, that villages are not doomed to be emptied of their inhabitants, and that barbarism, even the most atrocious, is not irreversible.
As long as we continue to glorify complaint, mock success, scorn effort and deny success, emptiness will gain ground.
Hope is not naïveté: it is first and foremost a method of survival. Politics is not just the art of power: it is, first and foremost, the art of storytelling. People move forward not out of fear of the abyss, but out of the promise of the summit.
So we urgently need to rewrite a common history in which every citizen will find his or her share of light; a history that tells us not what we are resigned to losing, but what we can gain. This history will not be born of a providential man, but of an awakened nation. It’s not too late.
Image:The Call of the Void by Gretchen Andrew, 2018.