"We understand absolutely nothing about modern civilization if we do not first admit that it is a universal conspiracy against every kind of inner life," wrote Georges Bernanos in 1946 in his cult work, "France Against the Robots." The phrase has been so widely used that it has become a refrain. 80 years after the book's publication, it has lost none of its relevance. It questions our way of life, because if we see the different forms of inner life receding, overwhelmed by technosciences that arrogate all rights to all lives, it is difficult to know what drives this process and makes it inevitable. So? Can we still take refuge in our inner life, behave like rebels against this world that loves nothing but exteriority and its procession of emotions pushed to their paroxysm and that warps lives to make them all similar and ghostly.

These days, life is fraying into emotions. There's nothing else for them. Emotions rule the world. We must let them unfold, wait for them, carry them, understand them, appropriate them, respect them, and give them free rein. We live in the reign of emotion, which imposes itself as the only truth of a human being. The experts, who have become so omnipresent these days, encourage us to move in this direction. "It's good for you! You must free yourself from these chains! You must find calm amidst the storms that agitate you, let your emotions express themselves..." It is common these days to only see the symptoms without ever making the right diagnoses. This touches on a peculiarity of exhausted societies, weary of themselves, which will never know how to reform themselves; they no longer know how to question themselves. That would take them too far. They lower the measuring rod because they lack the courage. Omens edified us in this sense, we had to adapt: the saints no longer existed! Had they ever really existed? People keen on values, educated people, honest people (whose evocation makes the bobos smile ¹ ) were also at fault. We hounded the corpse of the honest man. We had found some who were not honest, and so we drew the conclusion that honesty brought nothing since one could no longer be honest or only to be less so, and also that this example could only push people to go astray. Exemplarity, in the pillory! For all these reasons, it was decided that we had to reject the dictates of education and decorum... We opened the ball to indifference, individualism, and communitarianism... The teacher of the 70s knew it: in his class, if there was a disruptive student, he had to be contained, because he led the others along with him. What we see as children shapes us. We all know people who impressed us when we were young. Because they dared more than us, because they spoke louder, being around them gave us a feeling of freedom. We let ourselves be guided by our emotions, which seemed to us to be the most formidable sensors of our inner being, and we endured a form of addiction to these people who dazzled us, who allowed themselves what we did not imagine possible... Bad example contaminates the herd. What we see creates us. Claudel spoke of "the listening eye." All the senses are alert in a world that gives them free rein. Our senses desperately search for meaning! Our belief collapses, our world, our universe, is mired. We begin to believe in the impossible. We persist in error, we pursue a kind of romanticism, when emotions stifle the soul and souls cry out their loneliness in a deafening silence.

What did Georges Bernanos sense when he wrote his prophetic essay and this terrible sentence accusing the modern world of plotting to eradicate the inner life? What does the writer mean by "inner life"? Silence, without a doubt. Freedom, its totem, too. Everything that opposes the often useless din of the surrounding world. Bernanos evokes an intimate and precious world where nature and culture refine and sharpen the singularity of each person. It is not a question of proscribing the emotions that open a door to the soul, and to deprive ourselves of them would deprive us of a part of humanity. In the past, education taught us to sift our emotions and discover those that were worthwhile, those that would strengthen the soul and allow it to encounter other souls. That was the whole point: knowing ourselves to better know others. "We thus find in civility three kinds of elements that you have not failed to distinguish: conventions to be known and respected in the name of custom alone; psychological conventions based on our natural feelings and on our relationships; finally, moral virtues permeating good manners and giving them their highest meaning," wrote the Reverend Father Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges in 1934 ² . He added that a "purely formalist" civility proved to be of no interest: "True civility is something else entirely; it is based on morality, and, in a civilization like ours, born of the Gospel, it is based on Christian morality." This precisely outlined the profound objective of education: to transmit and make loved what is transmitted. Father Sertillanges continued with the aim of bringing heaven and earth together once again: "A true saint cannot fail to be polite, because he is virtuous and he is wise; because he has the feeling of others and respect for himself. The supernatural, grafting itself onto nature, would like it to be perfect. It itself perfects it." All this morality, a science of discernment and will, set an infinite ideal for young people by limiting the path to be taken. Authority presided here ³ : it proved useful for "increasing" the young man. Rudyard Kipling's poem ⁴ gave a lyrical version of this. A science that did not proclaim itself as such, that used emotions as a means and not as an end in order to access the soul and repair it every day of a life, the only real issue. Our world has changed so much. But this modern civilization that Bernanos defines so well, had he foreseen that it would no longer have much of a civilization? When it renounced transmission and began to nip inner life in the bud. This civilization questioned itself, it doubted, what did it still want to say after two world wars? If moral values had not protected us from acting like animals, who would protect us? We should have thought differently, realized that war had always existed, that it was born from people who lacked or distorted moral values, and finally that our moral values had allowed us to survive such a hell. So our education, our civility, our moral values did not protect us against hardships and infamy? Because, already!, we dreamed of a world without hardships and without infamy! At the end of the 20th century, a French singer shouted: "For pleasure!" wanting to carry the crowd with him! Pleasure took over the square and under its angelic airs erased everything that existed. Thus, the reign of relativism opened. Everything was worth everything because what we were sold as absolute good had always failed. Good and evil intertwined in a frenzied dance. Moral virtues elevated the soul, pleasure would stifle values, dissuade it, blur the boundaries, and ultimately prevent growth. Forgetting the purpose of things glorifies the origin of the loss of meaning. Without good and evil, this delicious feeling that there are no more prohibitions, that everything is permitted, that we are like gods, free. This feeling of freedom that is not freedom, but which intoxicates, which intoxicates... This feeling of freedom that is in fact only power, a residue of power. The king of pleasure imposed its law, its justice, its mimicry... Little by little, it transformed everyone into everyone without anyone noticing. Under the pretext of allowing everyone to live their lives, it forced us to become an undifferentiated magma. Under the pretext of eliminating these old cartridge boxes that encysted our future, we created dizzying and useless novelties. A complete inversion of values. Civilization allowed us to achieve fulfillment by obeying common rules and a common culture; the new civilization inaugurated a new form of life where good and evil were no longer defined a priori and no longer expressed the truth of an act. Georges Bernanos had not seen this civilizational vertigo looming on the horizon, but as often, his exceptional intuition urged him to denounce the loss of inner life, which attacked and offended him, which could be fatal. Because a little humanity that disappears does not bode well. The Catholic sees the world with a unique perspective. Through his intimate relationship with Jesus Christ, he perceives God's ambition for him. This singularity gives him the legitimacy to grasp the world and take possession of it. The power that truth gives is embodied in those who claim it.

Education, good manners, elegance (in no way based on the cost of clothing), and care for one's world were all qualities found in a French person until recently, a few decades at most. As Father Sertillanges said, it was a matter of "building" men capable of exuding Christian moral values. These values or moral virtues continued well after the great anti-Catholic movements that struck this country. Even without God, these moral virtues grew on Catholic soil and could not escape it. But like a headless chicken, they now ran in all directions and without a goal. Until then, what went wrong was treated with tradition and empiricism; it was decided that only novelty brought improvement. Progress, that great contemporary myth, found here an unexpected and inalienable fuel. A perpetual and tireless novelty carried by advertising for masses of individuals all desiring the same thing or one of its variations. The great progress!, dreamed of by socialists and capitalists, found the alpha and omega of its project in the most absurd consumerism! By losing moral values, we lost the soul, because we no longer cherished it, we avoided it, we even came to no longer speak of it, it withered and no longer gave any sign of life. And since everyone acted in the same way, the habit was taken of thinking that it was good to act in this way. Individualism led to unbridled mimicry. Moral values obliged everyone to understand, appreciate and adapt to one another; we put ourselves in the feet of the elders which obliged us to humble ourselves; and in this lineage everyone found their place by distinguishing themselves, which came from a rooting. Now, we think we are "inventing" our lives. There is nothing left but novelty, at least what we put under this label, knowing that there are not many new ideas on earth, rather new vehicles for old ideas. The soul continues to be ignored as well as the singularity that represents its transmission belt. Social networks impose rules more restrictive than the old moral virtues and everyone rushes to adopt them because they are new and their incessant renewal makes them ever more attractive. Individualism there spreads codes and attitudes that are not based on any truth, but which spread at the speed of light and find their truth in the number of its followers, and we do not follow them for their truth once again, but to belong to a community. This behavior is becoming habitual, Generation Z cannot tolerate the slightest criticism, it only makes amends if it decides to do so, it gets heated over a yes or a no, it establishes procrastination as an art of living... Thus, one must complain in order to exist. Narcissism casts a new veil over reality. The victim replaces the hero, a product of patriarchy. It is increasingly forbidden to forbid. Many saints would be considered tormentors these days, because they forced people to go where they refused to go. When we tell you that saints no longer exist! Bertrand Vergely, the orthodox philosopher, defines this trauma: "This generation needs to rely on fundamentals, but the fundamentals have not been respected. The bases on which they rely are not clear and this generates fear."

It is not difficult to understand that mimicry destroys freedom by substituting free will with the goodwill of influencers whose independence remains to be proven. Without freedom, there will soon be no more love. It is already disappearing. It can still be heard in the mouths of men and women, but it no longer vibrates, it no longer sparkles, it flattens, it shrinks… Like many words used by this modern civilization, it will even end up saying the opposite of the meaning that men have given it for centuries. Controlling emotions will become the key to all politics instead of the common good. Modern civilization will proceed as it has long known how to do: it will push people to express their emotions, to reveal themselves, in order to constrain and damage them. We will control emotions by defining what deserves to be desired. We already control consumerist desires by creating useless or futile objects. The uprooted will swallow whatever is offered to them since no traditional culture will challenge their tastes anymore. This society, which has only the word diversity on its lips, watches without reacting as nearly half of the languages spoken in the world disappear, and hears the French spoken today in schoolyards and even universities sound more like pidgin than an original language. It doesn't care, it uses words as advertising devices, one word for another, one word for any other. Words, like everything else, must become ever newer. Nothing is fixed. Everything is fluid. We no longer have time to get used to them, much less to take root, because speed and novelty reign supreme. Father Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, whom some consider one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century, considered moral virtues to be stable and habitual dispositions that orient man toward good in his daily actions. They enriched human faculties to enable them to act in accordance with reason enlightened by faith. These virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, through their practice, the discipline they impose, and the joy they offer in return, satisfied the soul, which was strengthened, and offered a tutor in the trials of life. For the Dominican, moral virtues could only be conceived as supported by the theological virtues. God's help in adversity and the gratitude addressed to him in the euphoria of jubilant periods rest on these moral virtues, which are based on the theological virtues.

The true death of the soul occurs when we live on the surface of ourselves. An idiot or a poor person laden with moral values is neither idiot nor poor ⁵ Abbé Hamon, parish priest of Saint-Sulpice in the 19th century, described two kinds of moral storms: "These storms come sometimes from without, sometimes from within. Storms from without: these are the affairs that preoccupy, the setbacks that overwhelm, the bad examples that shake, the contradiction of tongues, the clash of wills and characters, embarrassments of all kinds. Storms from within: these are the passions, pride, lust, avarice, which destroy souls without their being aware of it; the senses that revolt, the desires that torment, the imagination that goes haywire, the mind that dissipates itself in useless thoughts, in chimerical fears or in vain hopes. » Learning to dig into one's deepest desires requires incessant practice that prevents one from making mistakes, but the experience gained will console one for failure and allow one to pull oneself together. In a world vibrating to the rhythm of the addictions it constantly creates, which uses virtues to reverse them, which changes the meaning of words so that they are emptied of their substance, it is important to stay "awake" (not to be confused with woke deviance, new proof of what Chesterton called Christian virtues gone mad). We have the door to our soul that we open or close according to our free will. "What then creates this greed and this impotence in us, if not that there was once in man a true happiness, of which now he has only the mark and the completely empty trace, and which he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking from absent things the help which he does not obtain from the present, but which are all incapable of it, because this infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, by God himself ⁶ ." This infinite space is within us and we must venture into it. What is the use of observing the universe if we never savor our inner life? There is the place where we know ourselves in truth ⁷ . No one can forget it once they have been there. It is our duty to show this infinity so that it may germinate in each one. We must no longer seek outside what resides within. If we must live, it must be as a rebel, for we must always keep a wary eye on this world that challenges our inner life with its taste for noise and vulgarity. To ensure that Bernanos's fear is not realized, the need to rediscover moral virtues is essential. To no longer surf on the foam of our lives.