There are times of the year when I rediscover the virtues of silence. Moments when I no longer feel able to hear the din of public opinion, moments when I think there is too much noise.
Posted at 9:00 am
February is one of those times. As I suffer from seasonal depression as winter weighs on me, I try to take life on the bright side, find beauty where it hides, to bring a little light into my days. I ski, I rest. On social networks, I simply share photos of happy moments or quotes from my favorite authors. I watch the general commotion with a certain disbelief and wonder how people can so easily get carried away on an issue that has suddenly become a matter of life and death, only to forget it all almost immediately and become one the next day move on to a new topic scandal.
Stéphane Hessel, gray eminence of the anti-globalization movements, made this famous call for mobilization in the early 2010s: Be outraged! With his little pamphlet, Hessel wanted to shake up a society that he considered apathetic, irrelevant, demobilized. After a short detour on Twitter or Facebook, I wonder what Hessel, who died in 2013, would say about the current state of the discourse. I wonder what he would say to this festival of perpetual outrage, the spectacle of all these people fighting up close and as hard as they can, insults and horrors (“Racist! woke up!”) and loudly shouting about their virtue , all those trolls struggling to survive and spend their lives rotting that of others, I get the impression old Hessel would judge that he was misunderstood, that it wasn’t this outrage he had in mind.
Because the problem with outrage, as we express it on a daily basis, is that it rarely drives us to act. Most of the time we are caught in a logic of opposition that is less about affirming and building and more about saying no.
Therein lies the secret of the success of social networks: They are places of pure liberation, where outrage does not lead to action but to reaction. Reacting rather than acting means thinking about yourself and the world “against” someone else’s thought or project, as opposed to them. This attitude is more common than you think, both among ordinary people and among certain opinion pollsters who have built their careers on this single motive, which is surprisingly profitable.
Take the famous story of the appointment of Amira Elghawaby as “Canada’s special envoy to counter Islamophobia,” according to the Trudeau administration, a matter that by this point seems more or less forgotten, and yet scarcely one before a dozen days unleashed passions. The nomination itself was (and is) unwise for reasons I won’t go into here. Except that, as all too often, a debate about a substantive issue has turned into a semantic dispute. We fought over the words, our own and those of others, we watched our representatives to see if they agreed to utter them or not (just like with racism, systemic or not). But we hardly asked ourselves what happened to the people behind our words – I’m talking about our fellow citizens of Muslim faith or Arab origin, which are not necessarily the same – these people who wanted to name our words or make them forget.
Yet the questions that have plagued me since the “Elghawaby Affair” was forgotten are these: Aside from the words we accept or reject, what are we doing to forge connections with those in question be asked? When we affirm that Islamophobia exists, do we then actively seek to know and assimilate those we profess to defend, or content ourselves with those on the other side who don’t think like us (Muslims included) to denounce and clear our conscience )? And if we deny the existence of Islamophobia or judge that the word is poorly chosen, are we willing to suggest another word to acknowledge that some of our fellow citizens may be the object of contempt or intolerance? In short, when the noise and emotions have died down, are we ready to work to live better together? Do we want to build or do we just say “no”?
I address these questions to everyone, myself included. Because I don’t have the answers. And that I am afraid above all of making noise into noise by writing this text. Because I feel the compelling need for silence. No, because one must remain silent at all costs. Simply because in silence thoughts are born, in silence we stop reacting and finally find the opportunity to act.