The hubris of Christophe Béchu, “minister of the planet”

This article comes from “Figaro Magazine”.

For a long time, omniscience was only a divine predicate. This time is no more. “I am, if I dare say, the minister of the planet,” Christophe Béchu recently declared. “If I dare say so”! It was indeed necessary to dare.

Nothing is too big for the demigods who govern us. They only move in absolute knowledge. In the understanding of the global to which all local must be subordinated or disappear. Hence the compassion due to them. Because great is the suffering of these celestial intelligences confronted with the obscurantism of Earthlings chained to their particularities, differences and identities. Great is the weariness of these bearers of light tested by beggars lost in their dark finitudes.

It will be objected that the minister's ambition as expressed is less. That he never claimed to guide humanity towards the light nor to be “the spirit of the world on horseback” (Hegel speaking of Napoleon). That he limited himself to talking about a “planet”. So of a “non-luminous celestial body revolving around a sun”. But, if this is the case, what is the point of such hubris in the service of next to nothing?

Because what gives the Earth its unique meaning and what makes it its truth is that it is first and foremost the home of man. And incidentally, a planet such as Mars or Mercury. Precedence is therefore essential. As Olivier Rey rightly says: “We don’t plant the dead, we bury them.” It is therefore not the planet that must be saved, but the man who inhabits it and who makes it his land. Then he will stop devastating her. Only then.