Striking figures to produce emotion is the engine of selective indignation, notes Father Pierre Vivarès, parish priest of Saint-Paul in Paris. How to distance oneself to return to reality?
In our society, we absolutely want to measure everything: we need numbers, percentages. This bulimia of measured knowledge is necessary for us in order to be able to judge everything. Clinging to a rate of inflation and the rising percentage of interest rate hikes, we bounce on the parity between the euro and the dollar before lamenting the number of people who are starving in the world and the area in hectares of forest burned this summer. If I have a number, I know; if I know, then I can speak and give my opinion, and my opinion is true since I know the numbers. But the figure is not summoned to first offer knowledge: it is proclaimed in order to produce an emotion. It is an astonishing paradox that is born then; the raw, cold and mathematical truth of a measurement generates emotional consequences often disproportionate to the stated mathematical truth. The number will give reason to the truth of our emotion that we will then be able to calmly inflict on others.
The choice of numbers
This emotional reaction will be linked to our sensitivity regarding the number received: I will, for example, be more sensitive than another to the number of churches desecrated in France in 2021, because I am a Christian and because I am a priest. But what will be the consequences of this emotion? The stronger it is, the more I will act for or against this number received. Thus, if you want to rally the greatest number of followers to your cause, you will have to tirelessly strike figures that will create emotion in order to push people to react, even if these figures occupy all the media space to the detriment of others, just as important, even much more serious, but relegated to the background because national emotion has taken hold of a reality.
We need to have selective emotions, because we cannot be emotional about everything all the time. Thus, we will follow the information hour by hour concerning a poor beluga stranded on a Normandy beach by participating in the collective emotion while thirty migrants who died drowned the same day in the Mediterranean will only make a paragraph. A political party will tell us all day long about the — real — drama of women who are abused in their marriages to the point that we forget that fifty children are raped every day in France or that 6.7 million people have died of hunger since beginning of the year.
Overcome your emotions
When working with teenagers, we often work on emotion: it is the age of indignation, of reaction, often of militant action. It’s beautiful to see and hear, it’s fascinating to discuss with them and to see their thoughts support each other, contradict each other, their emotions on edge and their confusion in the face of our adult passivity. But in fact, isn’t educating them — that is to say leading them upwards — allowing them to criticize their emotions and not letting them make them the alpha and omega of truth? , action and necessity? Our adolescent society remains emotional long after the age of acne, as some use this spring to advance their societal or economic interests.
Catholic spirituality has always been critical of emotions: without denying them, which would be a negation of our humanity, we must overcome them through willpower, memory and intelligence.
Catholic spirituality has always been critical of emotions: without denying them, which would be a negation of our humanity, we must overcome them through willpower, memory and intelligence. It is also good news, therefore a liberation, to allow our contemporaries to distance themselves from emotion to return to reality, as it really is and not as it is served up to us. We will certainly not be fashionable, but that is not our vocation.
