Food for Thought – Happy Sobriety

An idea, a book, a concept, a “food for thought” that we share with you to open reflection, discover new topics, and lead you to (re)think from another angle.

The 6th IPCC Report (10,000 pages), which has just been adopted unanimously in Interlaken, Switzerland, mentions for the first time since 1990, in its short version aimed at policymakers from 195 countries and their major economic decision-makers, sobriety as an imperative “if humanity does not want to definitively close the window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.”

Sobriety is therefore the new horizon, perhaps the only one, of our modernity and our common future.

The concept comes from far away, from Greek wisdom. Solon, Cleobulus, Thales, Aristotle, and later the Epicurean and Stoic schools did not speak of sobriety but of just measure, temperance, and moderation as essential and truly human virtues. At the time, no one was yet worried about the exhaustion of our planet’s resources. “Nothing too much,” these three words appeared on the front of the Temple of Delphi.

French moralists of the 17th century saw man as an animal prone to all excesses and all prides, a disproportionate animal in a way. “Temperance in drinking and eating,” notes the great Littré dictionary as the first definition of sobriety, before recounting how the word became – in a figurative sense – synonymous with restraint, reserve, discretion. “Perfect reason avoids all extremes and wants one to be wise with sobriety,” writes Molière in The Misanthrope. Jules Renard, for his part, notes delightfully in his Journal: “It is fasting that makes the saint and sobriety the man of good sense.” No one is required to holiness, but everyone is required to sobriety, as the first opposite of general drunkenness whose unlimitedness, previous concept analyzed here, is our modern variant.

Last autumn, the French President called for “voluntary sobriety” to limit the effects of the energy crisis following the war in Ukraine: this mainly consisted, in the presidential statement, of asking citizens to lower air conditioning and heating so that the entire country would save energy. A restrictive and forced sobriety which signals the end of abundance and carefreeness, a sobriety of necessity therefore, far from a sobriety of virtue, a thousand times more promising and more exciting. For it is indeed a sobriety of virtue and not of necessity, or sobriety as a new private and public virtue, that our modernity needs if it wants to remain capable of thinking about the future, of making it possible even, as the very recent IPCC report reminds us.

And this is the great merit of the book at the origin of the concept of happy sobriety, written in 2010 by Pierre Rabhi, founder of the Colibris movement and father of agroecology. To possess less to be more or at least learn to possess less, no longer accumulate, only take what is necessary, make tools last through a new intelligence of industrial maintenance, put an end to the culture of greed, pride, predation and mimetic rivalry… these are the foundations of happy sobriety. “True power lies in the capacity of a human community to be content with little and produce joy,” notes Pierre Rabhi forcefully. Or with more humor: “Observe the lion in nature: does it need to have warehouses in the savannah or a bank of antelopes to meet its needs?”

Also in 2010, ATD Quart Monde President Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld conceptualized frugal abundance by revaluing relational time and spiritual time in addition to purely material production time, and proposes to civilize capitalism by calling on each citizen of developed countries to distinguish clearly between the essential and the superfluous.

It is also in 2010 that Jean-Marc Jancovici founded The Shift Project, which aims to free the economy and growth from the carbon constraint. In 2004, engineer Frédéric Bordage already founded the Green IT collective, anticipating the explosion of the ecological footprint of digital technology, which today represents 4% of greenhouse gas emissions, more than the fashion industry, i.e., an ecological footprint in the world equivalent to five times that of the French car fleet.

François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Bank of France, forecasts for 2023 a growth of our GDP of 0.6% with inflation at 5.4%, and recalls in an interview given to Le Monde dated March 21, congratulating France for potentially escaping recession, that “the real French challenge is to strengthen our productive capacity by successfully achieving three transformations: the ecological and energy transformation, the digital transformation, and the transformation of work.” Not a word about necessary sobriety, not the sobriety of necessity regularly pulled out by politicians and decision-makers as a last-resort solution to respond to energy or climate crises, but indeed this sobriety of virtue as a lever for a new and vital cultural, economic, and social revolution. And if the real French, even global, challenge passed through there?