Each week, Olivier Babeau deciphers the times for FigaroVox. He is president of the Sapiens Institute and, moreover, professor of management sciences at the University of Bordeaux. He recently published
The New Digital Disorder: How Digital Is Exploding Inequalities
(Buchet Chastel, 2020).
FIGAROVOX.
- The year 2020 was of course marked by the health crisis, we will come back to it, but with the exception of this extraordinary epidemic, what major news item will you take away from this year, and why?
Olivier BABEAU.
- Like tectonic movements, the most important events often take place at low noise, until the evidence of the ruptures they produce becomes evident.
These are two recent technological advances that deserve to be noted: first of all the announcement by researchers from Shanghai of progress towards quantum computing, which allows a calculation speed 100,000 billion times faster than 'with today's best computers.
Then, the record broken in nuclear fusion, with the maintenance of a plasma of 100 million degrees for 20 seconds by a South Korean reactor.
The two technologies, when they are developed, are the bearers of incredible revolutions.
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Olivier Babeau: "Eclipse of freedom"
It is significant that these latest advances come from Asia.
Because it is basically the great event of this year: the indisputable shift in the balance of the world towards the East, and the evidence of a form of economic and political decline of marginalized Western powers on the scene of the History.
We do not understand the tragedy that this prepares for us: we can no more have the social system of a developed country with the competitive advantages of third world countries than it is possible to pay for a palace suite with the budget for a one-star hotel room.
As a columnist, you have dealt with many topical subjects, all very varied, but is there among your columns one in particular that seems essential to you, on the subject of a debate that seems decisive for the years to come? ?
I see each of my galleries as so many small touches which, together, offer a picture of our time.
I try to interpret the immediate news as so many signs of underground movements whose unity does not appear immediately, but of which it is important to be aware.
It is absolutely necessary to distinguish the EELV party, with its ideological options and its contradictions (...) and the ecological question itself
In the long run, the two great combined shocks of demographic imbalances and climate change will of course be the central problems that humanity will face.
In the medium term, the big stakes are those that I formulated in my interview concerning my last work.
We will have to answer an essential question during this decade: how to prevent the triple social, economic and political polarization, the result of which would be violence, misery and chaos?
In France, a major political event was the rise of the EELV party, in the media and at the polls.
Does the political debate on ecology seem badly posed to you?
How can we speak intelligently about the climate issues that are of increasing concern to the French?
This rise of the green vote in municipal elections is in fact the effect of a rise in abstention, it will eventually ask to be confirmed during the next elections.
But as far as the “
share of voice
” in the media is concerned, the success is undeniable, which above all shows an ability to use them skillfully.
This is the real phenomenon to read: as always in history, the weakening of political institutions favors the rise of active minorities with a more or less accepted revolutionary program.
The power hungry are attracted and excited by the breakdown of the existing system.
It is absolutely necessary to distinguish the EELV party, with its ideological options and its contradictions (in particular as regards the relation to nuclear, GMOs or intensive agriculture, which are objective tools in the fight against CO2 emissions), and the question ecological itself.
The whole trick of EELV is precisely to postulate the confusion between the two, suggesting that the second should only be considered through the self-proclaimed clergy he embodies.
Just as the left did not have a monopoly of the heart, the environmentalist party cannot have a monopoly on green.
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Olivier Babeau: "The desertion of the elites"
Ecology is at the confluence of many complex disciplines.
It would be necessary to be able to give scientifically based discourse their true place so that a quality debate is possible and that the information of citizens is not biased.
Right now, it's possible to say just about anything on the subject in the media without being contradicted.
Science always suffers when it is put at the service of a political project which sorts, in its results, the good and bad ideological news.
In the United States and then in France, the question of the memory of slavery or colonization sparked major social movements, which led to a questioning of the universalist model of the Enlightenment.
Will you continue to defend it?
Why?
I will continue to defend universalism because it is the only acceptable model in my eyes, quite simply.
The new puritanisms which seek to impose themselves are prodigious forces of exclusion and balkanization of society.
They are carriers of everything they denounce: essentialization, classification of people into impermeable social groups, spirals of social injustice, promotion of hatred to the rank of fundamental political principle.
Most French people gaze dazedly at the overbidding of progressivism zealots: inclusive writing, debunked statues ...
There is nothing more distressing than to see with what success these evil phantasmagorias manage to gain ground, thanks mainly to media which open their doors to them, out of weakness, incompetence, fear or complicity.
The reality is that the neopuritan speculations in question are the work of very small groups of fanatics and that the overwhelming majority are far removed from it.
Most French people gaze dazedly at the outbidding of the zealots of progressivism: inclusive writing, debunked statues, names yesterday venerated and now victims of damnatio memoriae, etc.
It is never the strength of the enemies of freedom that we must fear, but the weakness of its defenders.
Let us come to the health crisis now: without falling into chimerical speculations about the world after, are you still learning positive lessons from this epidemic?
The crisis will have been an apocalypse, in the etymological sense of “
unveiling
”.
The hidden programs, the obsessions of many small groups have come to light.
The masks have fallen and the game is clear: we will have to choose between those who believe that innovation, as it has allowed for millennia, will continue to provide men with the solutions for their survival, and those who, on the other hand, plead for a return to an (illusory) golden age of frugality and non-mechanized work.
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Olivier Babeau: "Never in our history has life had so much value"
The pandemic will have seen the triumph of globalization (for the first time, we collectively faced the same problem at the same time) and scientific research.
It will have accelerated the determination of young regimes, sure of themselves and domineering.
And cruelly reveals the fragility of democracies which conceive of themselves as kinds of immense rest homes.
Our old developed societies have a problematic relationship with risk: assumed everywhere else as the springboard for progress, it has become a scandal with us, an anomaly that laws must eradicate.
You are passionate about the issue of freedoms.
For once, the French took an interest in the role and functioning of the Council of State, mobilized to defend constitutional freedoms, and debated at the table the arbitration between security and freedom, the rightful place of State ... Surely you are delighted?
This is another notable unveiling that took place: if we could still doubt it, we could clearly see the shortcomings of our bureaucratic apparatus, the inability to anticipate, the heaviness of our organization, the inconsistencies of decisions. .
We will have missed the three major trials of this pandemic: that of masks, that of tests and that of vaccines.
The election of Emmanuel Macron fundamentally represented the takeover of power by the senior administration over politics
The French understood that they did not have any for their taxes.
I am not sure, however, that this is enough to put an end to this vicious circle by which we demand more intervention from the state as it reveals its inability to continue the countless tasks it claims to take on.
"
If the State is strong it crushes us, if it is weak we perish
", said Paul Valéry: we manage to have both at the same time, cumulating the disadvantages of its absence and its omnipresence.
The State, precisely, which you have repeatedly crushed in your chronicles, should it be rethought differently in the light of the lessons of this crisis?
The election of Emmanuel Macron fundamentally represented the seizure of power by the upper administration over politics, discredited and deprived of valuable personnel.
The administration has therefore done what it is programmed to do: plug the breaches, protect and above all protect itself.
It surrounded the French with the comfortable cotton wool they demanded, and made the machine to produce standards and prohibitions work at full capacity.
The mandate will not have seen, it is significant, no real reform of the state machine, all the attempts having failed (including the pseudo-reform of the ENA).
This is all the difference between operational and strategy: the first manages the existing, the second opens the paths of the future.
We have one, but not the other.
To read also:
Olivier Babeau: "It is more reassuring to believe in plots than to recognize the chaos which governs us"
In the absence of policies capable of courageously asserting a non-contradictory vision of the France project (the “
at the same time
” having revealed itself, as one might fear, “
everything and its opposite
”), a public sector remains essentially metastasized. focused on how to obtain the means for its sustainability.
In practice, power has deserted the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré to exercise in the fortress on the banks of the Seine, in Bercy.
Finally, what would you wish your readers to prioritize for 2021?
After this annus horribilis, I wish (and hope) despite everything an annus mirabilis, a miraculous year.
If we defeat the virus, take advantage of its lessons to modernize ourselves and have the courage to reaffirm our project of civilization, we may be back in a few months on the paths of prosperity.