File - “We are in a hurry, pressurized. Life goes fast wherever you live, "sang Jacques Dutronc in 1969. Since then? We accelerated, my good lady! And now, how is it that you brake?
The planet is struck by a terrible evil, that of speed. Always faster, higher, further and ... always less well thought out. But why did "quick fixes" take over work, political action and our daily lives? And how to fix it? The actors of the “slow” philosophy are paving the way for what may be the major thought of our turbulent century. We caaaalme…
“Cold, silence and loneliness are states that will be negotiated more expensive tomorrow than gold. On a crowded, overheated, noisy Earth, a forest hut is the Eldorado. From the outset, the first pages of In the Forests of Siberia by Sylvain Tesson (see the bibliography above) shed light on the reasons for his success in bookshops. This almost quadra voluntarily tasting the solitude coite of a log cabin posed in the middle of the taiga, it is all that we all dream of without having the courage: to find the rhythm of the seasons, the thickness of the silence, the sense of the passing of time… A very understandable fantasy of a civilization which looks more and more like an episode of 24 hours flat.
Because yes, our society is going fast, too fast. What the political scientist Pierre-André Taguieff calls "bougisme" agitates the institutions, customs and everyday life of more and more inhabitants on Earth. We eat too fast, we sleep too little, we botch more and more and we savor less and less. And that goes beyond the clock: the era of emergency carries with it stress of course, but also ugly, ill-conceived, standardized, superficial, energy-consuming, pollutant ... Fast-food equals junk food; disposable singers equal indigestible pop; laws laid down in the urgency of a news item equals flawed text and often referred to by the Council of State…
Twenty years ago, the Neolithic
Try an experiment if you are in your thirties and a child: take stock of the incredible quantity of ordinary objects from the 1980s and 1990s that he will never know: TV without remote control, cars with non-electric windows and without car radio, music on disc, cartoons on cassette, telephone without keys and with wire, life without Ipod, without Internet, without laptop and even without computer… You do not come from the Neolithic era! And the worst, writes the Catalan philosopher Joan Domènech Francesch in his Praise of Slow Education, is that "increasing speed does not save time, but increases the feeling of lack". But where does this accelerating fever come from? And since when has it hit us? “Without question since the years 1990-1995, points Nicole Aubert, sociologist and psychologist. In my interviews with employees, suddenly, the obligation to respond urgently to orders from the hierarchy took up a huge place, which did not exist before. "
The author of the Culte de l'urgence sees in it the meeting of two factors: "On the one hand, the arrival of new technologies - e-mail, cellphones and more recently, the smartphone - these '' la patte '' which follow us everywhere, and demand instant answers even in the private sphere. On the other hand, the major place taken by the financial markets, which imposed their short-termism and their demand for immediate gain on employees. "
For the essayist Gilles Finchelstein, author of The dictatorship of urgency, it is still a geopolitical question: “Globalization has put our old economies into competition with those of emerging countries. And who says competition says obligation to step up the pace. He also points to the disappearance of the great beliefs, Marxism and Christianity, "which made us work for future generations. Today, there is only one life to achieve, which is both progress, but can be very anxiety-provoking. "
Expos, cities and TF1
Of course, nostalgia with blinders must be avoided: if in the West it takes infinitely less time to cook and if the lifespan of couples has shortened, it is also because women are less riveted to the stoves and less financially dependent on their spouses. If we have the feeling that films, exhibitions and books are parading in our lives, it is also a sign that the cultural choice has never been greater. And who can sincerely deplore that Twitter and Facebook are alternatives to the high mass of the 20-Hours of TF1? Still, this generalized shallot race has found an antidote: the slow movement. It is no coincidence that he was born under the pen of a food critic. The Italian Carlo Petrini, who was fed up with fast food, invented slow food in 1986. Thirteen years later, his city - Bra - and three others decided to apply the slow philosophy to cities, inventing the movement of "Città slow" (slow cities), which today brings together close to a hundred municipalities.
Slow then contaminated new areas: design, education, gender (see primer)… Here again, it is less a question of slowing down the tempo than of rehabilitating the qualitative, the sober, the durable, the non profitable, delicate, relevant and sometimes unnecessary - let's just say beautiful.
"Second career"
And in fact, in many areas, things are going in the right direction: fathers today take their paternity leave; the chosen part-time and teleworking - which ward off the “metro-work-dodo” syndrome - explodes; in their forties, more and more executives are opting for a "second career" in bed and breakfast or rehabilitation of old furniture, not because they are on the move, but to regain the sense of time. Garage sales, those places where the old and inexpensive are preferred to the new supermarket, are enjoying furious success.
Quarterly "magazine books" are born, like XXI or Feuilleton, betting on the length and quality of the articles, refusing the kiosk for the bookseller's table. And no need to return to the box of organic markets and Amap (Associations for the maintenance of peasant agriculture) where we let ourselves voluntarily impose seasonal fruits and vegetables - even, in winter, not to be seen in painting Brussels sprouts ! So many paths that allow, in its corner, to begin a journey at the end of the slow. And to put into practice the amazing slogan of May 68: "Enough acts, words! "-
Read to slow down
The way of Edgar Morin (Fayard, 2011)
The path of hope by Stéphane Hessel and Edgar Morin (Fayard, 2011)
The Method of Edgar Morin (Seuil, 1981)
The Cult of Emergency by Nicole Aubert (Flammarion, 2009)
Praise of slow education by Joan Domènech Francesch (Silence - Chronique Sociale, 2011)
Living slower, a new way of life by Pascale d'Erm (Ulmer, 2010)
The dictatorship of the emergency of Gilles Finchelstein (Fayard, 2011)
Accelerate, a social criticism of the time of Rosamunt Hart (La Découverte, 2010)
The right to laziness by Paul Lafargue (A Thousand and One Nights, 1880)
The good use of Pierre Sansot's slowness (Rivages Poches, 2000)
In the forests of Siberia by Sylvain Tesson (Gallimard, 2011)
Source: http://www.terraeco.net/All-you-need-is-slow,19887.html
