The strength of indignation

“Indignez-vous!” (Be indignant!): the short book (translated into English under the title “Time for Outrage!”) by Stéphane Hessel (born German, but who became a naturalized French citizen, diplomat, politician and writer, and a combatant in the French Resistance and who was deported to Buchenwald) has met with astonishing success. The spontaneous demonstrations in Madrid, Paris and Brussels last weekend are a result of it. They recall those of May 1968, but on a quite different wavelength. The former partisan published, shortly after – did anyone know it? – another pamphlet called “Be Committed!”. And here, fresh from the press, is a “Political Credo” signed by Éric de Beukelaer. Yet another European voice raised to jolt us out of our torpor! The former spokesman of the bishops of Belgium dares to revive the ancient Jewish Christian conviction according to which life is a constant “passover”, a succession of deaths to be better reborn, in the absence of which life sinks into the empty nostalgia for the past or the empty happiness of mere consumerism. We need, as a matter of urgency, to listen to this pressing appeal to pass from the short term of immediate interest and easy enjoyment – the famous “carpe diem” – to the long term of the future of our humanity, of our Europe and of our planet, since these latter are inseparably intertwined.Be indignant! Be Committed! Therefore, believe, but without translating this verb “believe” exclusively in religious terms. It’s what Jean-Claude Guillebaud (journalist, author of “How I became a Christian again”) called “the strength of conviction”, the only strength that can move mountains, and, God knows, how high those mountains seem today!For to defend civilization, our democratic rules are not enough. Let us not forget that they brought Hitler to power. A “state of mind”, an inner conviction, is also needed. Only a “faith” in the dignity of man will permit a plural and polychrome civilization – a “cross-bred” civilization – to be built, overcoming our fear of difference. Both Stéphane Hessel and Éric de Beukelaer, moreover, make reference to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Give me a point of support and I will lift the world, said Archimedes! This point is to be found inside each one of us. It is interior: a word that is not synonymous with the private dimension to which so many would like to relegate our convictions. The time has come for a new social contract, in which the first place is no longer reserved for the anonymous and interchangeable individual of our trade statistics, but for the person and his inalienable dignity. In Europe too we have excessively reduced the citizen to a mere consumer! Let us be indignant about that and find our strength of indignation in a new civic spirituality.