Pass the Helm, Keep the Watch

Two countries, same problems

We have for too long mistaken experience for an entitlement, age for clear-sightedness, memory for lucidity. Our generation, and the one before it, steered the world to the point of friction we now inhabit, then persuaded itself that a further dose of self-regarding expertise would correct the course. We must look at the facts. We are no longer made to decide. We are made to advise, to transmit, to protect. The helm must pass to other hands. The watch remains ours.

Modern politics imposes a tempo we dislike and too often endure rather than master. Tocqueville reminded us that mores shape democracy as much as laws. The mores have changed. The public sphere is no longer limited to an Assembly or a House of Commons. It is an open sea where authority is earned by immediate proof. Let us make this operational. Set age ceilings for certain executive offices. Renew ministerial and advisory staffs so that a majority of principals are under forty. Publish monthly objectives, indicators and corrections so that action keeps pace with reality. Limit any executive function to two full terms. Open oversight commissions to randomly selected citizens whose expertise can be verified. Leave to us the ethics committees and the custody of precedent. Leave to them the daily arbitration and the direct responsibility.

The economy is being rewritten before our eyes. Schumpeter named the creative destruction. We refined above all the art of committees, of meetings, of the illusion of importance. The digital sphere, energy, biology, space and defence, quantum technologies and artificial intelligence have imposed a cadence that will not tolerate our reverences. Place capital in the hands of those who live the uses. Create capital allocation committees led by the next generation, empowered to start and to close projects without pilgrimage to the altar of the past. Entrust to elders the audit and the discipline of risk. Measure the time from concept to market and publish it each quarter. Require that any decision above a defined financial threshold be accompanied by a replication protocol and an exit plan, reviewed every one hundred and twenty days. Elegance consists in no longer confusing tutelage with transmission.

Diplomacy has shed its old partitions. Bismarck spoke of the art of the possible. We have made of it the art of precaution. Yet the possible today is forged in shifting coalitions, open forums, platforms we too often misunderstand. Establish thematic coalitions led by diplomats of the next generation. Open digital embassies that emit signals in real time and answer within hours rather than weeks. Link careers to tangible results. Agreements concluded. Crisis mechanisms activated. Partnerships delivered. Keep for us the archives, the symbols and the memory of red lines. Let us cease turning heritage into a padlock.

War has changed in texture. It is capillary, digitised, saturated with sensors, drones, code and the electromagnetic. Decision loops close in minutes. We must accelerate the promotion of younger officers who master these dimensions and delegate explicitly to those ready to carry command. To the elders belong formation, the schools of command and the exploitation of feedback on short cycles. Let a single commander guide our imagination. Foch united speed and depth. His formula remains a lesson in initiative. “My centre is giving way. My right is retreating. Situation excellent. I attack.” That spirit holds in an operational cycle where telemetry, electromagnetic warfare, logistical vulnerability and the moral state of units must be read almost at sight.

Our heaviest burden is moral responsibility. We have allowed a self-satisfied inculture to settle in and an intellectual facility that mistakes itself for courage. There is the enemy. We do not fight religion. We do not fight colour. We fight the laziness of the mind, the ready-made thought, the automatic indignation, the cowardice that dresses itself as relativism. This fight is serious. It begins in the schoolroom, continues in the media, is decided in the institutions. Condorcet knew it. A democracy is defended by instruction far more than by oaths. We have deferred this plain duty too many times. We must take up the work again with the quiet inflexibility of builders, outside all partisan or activist considerations.

Education and the media, therefore. Make instruction both exacting and hospitable. Exacting through frequent evaluation, mastery of fundamentals and the apprenticeship of rigour. Hospitable through differentiated paths, real remediation and the reopening of social ascent by merit, and by merit alone. Condition a share of public funding for news media on verifiable indicators. Corrections published. Sources traceable. Effective editorial independence. Reward argued contradiction. Sanction the manufacture of cheap certainties.

Institutions must be organised to promote quickly and correct quickly. For every public policy set a measurable objective, a clear time limit, a named responsible officer and a mandatory independent audit. Publish deviations rather than diluting them. Generalise review clauses. Make personal responsibility visible and not dilutable. We, the elders, must accept to serve as assessors, not presidents of everything. This renunciation is not abdication. It is simple decency.

Now the call. A call to civil arms. Let us protect the democracy for which so many died and which our children must learn to master and to understand. It is neither totem nor rent. It feeds on the discipline of facts, the vigour of debate and the assumption of responsibility. It requires young leaders held to account by results and by reality. It requires elders who are dignified, silent when silence is due, intransigent when it is necessary, never tempted by flattery. It requires citizens who read, who verify, who doubt, who learn throughout their lives. Let each take his part. School. Enterprise. Media. Institutions. Let no comfort conceal the intellectual laziness now fashionable in the throwaway line on air and the lapidary yet hollow formula.

Our generation has too often seen itself as proprietor. It is only usufructuary. Let us return the common house in better repair than we received it. Entrust conduct and government to those who will inhabit this century longer than we shall. Keep for ourselves memory, the courtesy of forms and usages, the restoration of civility and the knowledge of precedents. Demand of them useful audacity, speed and accountability. If we are honest, these are the standards we failed to impose upon ourselves. Demand of us restraint, service and transmission. Then, perhaps, contrition will become work accomplished and memory will become promise again.

I do not idealise youth. I arm it. I do not humiliate the old (me included). I raise them to their proper place. This is now the only fitting hierarchy. Elders in vantage, sober and exacting. The younger in responsibility, judged by results and worthy of the confidence we shall have granted without trembling.

Thus we may look upon our children without shame and upon our passage through history without vanity.