“O muse, come and sing the anger of Achilles. » Thus begins Homer’s Iliad, thus begins the story, with an indignation that nothing appeases. It has long been believed that civilization is opposed to anger, that it is the negation of it. No doubt this faith was linked to the belief in progress: humanity was moving towards harmony like a sweet melody moving smoothly towards its peak.
The Great War of 1914-1918 brought the most painful denial. Today we are experiencing another negation of this hope, and with it renunciation – definitive? – to the idea of progress. The burning forests, the endless heatwaves, the thirsty soils, the animals destroyed in the flames, these visions of apocalypse have given us more the feeling of the end of a world than of the march of centuries towards prosperity.
Guilty inaction
But this is not a war, or else it is appropriate to take ourselves as enemies. What we are witnessing is the consequence of political irresponsibility: institutions did not think that they were responsible for changing the world and not for perpetuating themselves – the State, Parliament, political parties, schools and universities. The only policy pursued was to do as before, that is to say as if nothing had happened.
It is therefore not surprising that France, but undoubtedly also Europe more broadly, is prey to anger. It is the response to injustice, a modality of fear and sadness, but also, and this cannot be neglected, a vector of action. I admit I cried during the June heatwave, then in recent days seeing the charred trees, the evacuated populations, the horses fleeing the fire. Sadness is linked to loss: that of people no longer having a home, that of the woods gone up in smoke, that of innocence now impossible, of inaction now guilty.
Nothing can be the same as before, and we who love so much not to change our habits in any way feel distressed about it. Sadness has become anger, because this spectacle of the world on fire is an offense. To whom? To all living things, and even to the dead, to the generations that preceded us, to our history, to our humanity. Not feeling anger would be insensitivity to the violence of what is happening. It is therefore both a moral reaction – it says that what is happening should not be allowed – and a sensitivity to evil.
A dignified response to an indignity
Because, yes, what we have seen is a figure of evil: devastation, desolation, criminal acts, carelessness of those in power. Anger is not without reason, it is even the most reasonable reaction to take when reason is flouted. Not only science, that which has been warning about the effects of global warming since the 1970s, but reason, that which speaks to every man and which presides over decisions.
The anger is of no party. What we are currently going through calls into question humans, their aspirations and their responsibility. It is no longer even possible to do philosophy as before: seeing the world burn changes the way we think.
Anger is the dignified response to an indignity, the fact that we have continued to move blindly towards catastrophe. Some will never tire of criticizing “ecology”, of refusing to be alarmed by the alarmists. We will have to deal with them: the truth is no longer a value. It has become one option among others. Our time has even developed a new kind of pleasure: that taken in the false, in the transgression of all ethical and intellectual decency and coherence. But what is essential to take into account is that where political irresponsibility reigns, fear also reigns. And anger.
A question of political courage
It indicates that the representative principle of democracy, the pact which unites citizens with their leaders, is being called into question. All politics must be a response to anger, that born of injustice, of loss, of fear. Safety is not only to be ensured on the street; it must be preserved in minds. It is born from the assurance of a shareable future, from the conviction that responsibilities are assumed, that those in power know how to govern. Security is anchored in the solidity of the social contract which binds individuals to each other and to their representatives.
Ecological fear is a crisis of democratic representation. Climatic desolation is a political desolation, the one analyzed by Hannah Arendt, and which resides in the fact that we no longer have “the power to add something of ourselves to the common world” (The Origins of Totalitarianism). This is why in all anger there is sadness: that of seeing the world escape us and escape itself.
Reacting in a reasonable way means, to use his words again, “having been touched by the emotion” of anger. Because it is a condemnation of injustice – and there is always an injustice at the same time as a cowardice in doing as before – and a demand for action. Anger is healthy because it asks the only valid question: “What should we do?” »
I refuse to use the expression “ecoanxiety”, because it reduces the disaster we are experiencing to a psychological problem that must be overcome, when it is only a question of political courage. The one who obliges towards his fellow men but also towards the world, nature, culture, animals combined, past and future generations mixed together.
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