‘Let’s stop giving in to fear and melancholy! If we think things are only getting worse, we are creating the conditions for things to get worse. When we allow ourselves to be inspired by optimism and fighting spirit, we create conditions for future prosperity.”
This heart cry, titled Pour une revolution de l’optimismewas recently published in the French newspaper Les Echos. The author is Rafik Smati (1975), an entrepreneur who came from Algeria with his parents as a child and grew up near the new Parisian district of La Défense. The futuristic buildings that arose there gave him the idea that he lived in a country that looked ahead, could overcome obstacles and embraced technological progress. But Smati, whose company sells e-cards (electronic greeting cards), among other things, notes that this belief in progress is under pressure in France. People complain that everything is getting less. That the state apparatus is sclerotic, climate change is destroying everything, social inequality is increasing and our addiction to growth makes us mice on a frantic capitalist treadmill.
so-called solutions
Politicians, he points out, are subservient to that idea of decline with the help of some media: if you feed people into their fears and then offer so-called ‘solutions’, they will vote for you. Smati has created a party, centre-right, but without the repopulation theories and hysterical security discourse of Les Républicains, which are now mainstreaming the far-right ideology of the Le Pen family. As a (no chance) presidential candidate, Smati had fierce debates with the (equally no chance) extremist Éric Zemmour, who also has a French-Algerian background but thinks differently about everything.
Right now we need politicians who say: setbacks are part of it
Is the glass half full, or half empty? Do we reason ourselves into the pit and focus too much on things going wrong? Or do we ignore problems and focus too much on things that are going well? There is nothing French about this dilemma. All of Europe is struggling with it. We saw it in practice in the European Parliament on Thursday: the deputies did not agree on whether we should press ahead with strict climate laws or hold back.
Outside, the plants withered at thirty degrees. Brussels, where you used to live permanently under a gray, leaking blanket, never had so many cloudless summer days. And inside people kept voting on amendments until time ran out and things had to be adjourned.
Pathetic shapes
Half full or half empty? According to the German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz, this dilemma is taking on pathetic forms in Europe. Not because we have more crises than before, but because we lose faith in progress and we no longer weigh up the pros and cons. Europeans, Reckwitz told the Swiss newspaper NZZ, believed firmly in progress after the Second World War. Everything just got better. That was true. During the trentes glorieuses – from 1945 to 1975, when many thought their children would be better off – not even the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the oil crisis broke that belief. There was always something exciting happening, from ‘1968’ to the fall of the wall. Around the turn of the century, things came to a head, with 9/11 and the credit crisis.
Reckwitz cites a university study from Bonn, which would show that 84 percent of Europeans do not believe that their children will be better off. The problem: we have become addicted to the idea that everything is getting better. “Staying the same is not an option in our modern thinking. That is called stagnation and is negative.”
The consequence we now see in Europe is that people see every setback or crisis as proof that everything they believed in for decades – democracy, the rule of law, and so on – was based on quicksand. And that they say: get rid of it. If politicians and media frighten them even more, they are confirmed in it.
Being a little suspicious isn’t a bad thing. But we must realize that the future has always been uncertain. Right now we need politicians who say: setbacks are part of it and we shall overcome. You don’t have to share Smati’s political ideas. But he’s right about one thing: being optimistic doesn’t mean denying problems. It means you have the confidence that we can solve those problems.
Caroline deGruyter writes about politics and Europe. She replaces Floor Russman.
A version of this article also appeared in the June 17, 2023 newspaper.