Conclusion

I believe I have shown the spirit and the manifestations of the simple life clearly enough to give a glimpse of the whole forgotten world of strength and beauty it holds. It could be conquered by those who had enough energy to free themselves from the harmful superfluities that encumber our existence. They would soon realize that by giving up a few surface satisfactions and a few childish ambitions, we increase our capacity for happiness and our power for justice. These results bear as much on private life as on public life. There can be no doubt that by struggling against the feverish urge to shine, by ceasing to make the satisfaction of our desires the aim of our activity, and by returning to modest tastes and to true life, we would be working to strengthen the family. Another spirit would breathe through our homes, creating new ways of living and a setting more favorable to the education of children. Little by little our young men and young women would feel themselves directed toward an ideal both higher and more attainable. In the long run, this inner transformation would exert its influence on the public spirit. Just as the solidity of a wall depends on the grain of its stones and on the firmness of the cement that binds them together, so the energy of public life depends on the individual worth of its citizens and on their power of cohesion. The great desideratum of our age is the cultivation of that social element which is the human individual. Everything in the present organization of society brings us back to this element. By neglecting it, we risk losing the benefits of progress and even turning our most persevering efforts against ourselves. Amid tools that are constantly being perfected, if the worker happens to decline in worth, what good are the machines at his disposal? They serve only to make worse, by their very excellence, the faults of the one who handles them without discernment or without conscience. The gears of the great modern machine are infinitely delicate. Malice, incompetence or corruption can produce far more formidable disorders in it than in the more or less rudimentary organism of the society of former times. We must therefore watch over the quality of the individual who is called, in whatever measure, to contribute to the working of this machine. Let this individual be at once solid and sociable, and draw inspiration from the central law of life: to be oneself and to be brotherly. Everything within us and outside us is simplified and unified under the influence of this law, which is the same for all and to which each of us must bring our actions back; for our essential interests are not opposed, they are identical. By cultivating the spirit of simplicity, then, we would succeed in giving public life a stronger cohesion.

The signs of decay and dilapidation that we observe in it can all be traced to the same cause: lack of solidity and lack of cohesion. It can never be said often enough how far the triumph of the petty interests of caste, clique and parish, and the grasping pursuit of personal well-being, run counter to the social good and, by an inevitable consequence, destroy the happiness of the individual. A society in which each person cares only for their own well-being is organized disorder. No other lesson emerges from the irreconcilable conflicts of our unyielding selfishness.

We are too much like those people who claim kinship with their family only to ask it for advantages, never to do it honor. On every rung of the social ladder, we go about making claims. We all present ourselves as creditors; no one acknowledges being a debtor. Our dealings with our fellow citizens consist in inviting them, in an amiable or an arrogant tone, to settle their debts to us. Nothing good comes of that spirit. For at bottom it is the spirit of privilege, that eternal enemy of the law common to all, that endlessly reborn obstacle to brotherly understanding.

In a lecture delivered in 1882, Monsieur Renan called a nation a spiritual family, adding: "The essence of a nation is that all its people should have many things in common, and also that all should have forgotten many things." It matters to know what should be forgotten and what remembered, both in the past and in everyday life. What divides us crowds our memories; what unites us fades from them. At the brightest point of memory, each person preserves a sharp, vivid sense of their secondary identity: being someone of consequence, a farmer, industrialist, scholar, official, proletarian, member of the middle class, or follower of a political or religious faction. Yet their essential identity, being a child of their country and a human being, is pushed into shadow. They scarcely retain more than a theoretical notion of it. Consequently, precisely what separates us from others occupies our minds and directs our actions, leaving almost no room for the spirit of union that is like the soul of a people.

Another consequence is that we chiefly sustain bad memories in the minds of our neighbors. People moved by a narrow, exclusive, haughty spirit wound one another daily. They cannot meet without awakening a sense of their divisions and rivalries. Slowly, a store of mutual ill will, mistrust, and resentment accumulates in memory. All this is the wrong spirit with its consequences.

We must root it out from among us. "Remember, forget!" This is what we should say to ourselves every morning, in all our relationships and duties. Remember the essential; forget the secondary! How much better we would fulfill our duties as citizens if the humblest and the highest alike were nourished by this spirit. How we would cultivate good memories in our neighbor's mind by sowing kind actions there, sparing them the treatment of which they cannot help saying, with hatred in their heart: "That, I shall never forget!"

The spirit of simplicity is a great magician. It smooths roughness, builds bridges over fissures and chasms, and brings hands and hearts together. Its forms in the world are countless. Yet it never seems more admirable than when it breaks through the inevitable barriers of circumstances, interests, and prejudices, overcoming the worst obstacles and allowing people whom everything seems to divide to understand, esteem, and love one another. This is the true cement of society, and with this cement a people is built.