Believing in an idea you cannot prove: the question comes almost every time, always with the same delicacy, as though people feared hurting me: “But do you… do you really believe in it?” It takes me a moment to answer. Not out of embarrassment: the question is wrongly put.
A question only new ideas attract
Nobody asks an engineer whether he believes in his bridge. They ask whether it holds. The question of belief arises only in front of what does not yet exist, and it betrays a discomfort: not yet knowing how to judge the thing, we fall back on judging the person carrying it.
There is nothing hostile in it. It is even fairly sensible: when a proposition cannot be verified, examining the sincerity of whoever advances it is a reasonable shortcut. But it is a shortcut, and it moves the conversation. We stop discussing the idea and start discussing me, which is considerably less interesting.
Belief is not a working verb
Here is what I answer when I have time to answer properly. Believing, in the sense the question intends, describes an inner state: a confidence, an adherence, something felt. That is not what has got me up in the morning for twenty-two years.
What made me work was something else: the conviction that the question deserved to be posed correctly. That is not the same thing. One can spend years formulating a problem without holding the slightest certainty about its solution. It is, as far as I can tell, how most serious things get done.
A building site is not run on faith. It is run on calculation, verification, and the acceptance that things will be discovered along the way. I spent too many years on building sites to confuse impulse with method.
What I am sure of, and what I am not
Since the question deserves it, let me be precise.
I am sure of the diagnosis. That our systems produce results which successive reforms fail to correct is not an opinion: it is an observation anyone can make, and which many make without daring to follow it through. On that I have no doubt, and never have.
I am reasonably sure of the coherence of what I propose. Not because I think myself infallible, but because I hunted for its flaws for years, and those I found I either addressed or flagged.
I am not at all sure it will come about. Neither in my lifetime, nor at all. A coherent proposition is not a prophecy, and history is full of sound architectures nobody built. If I am asked whether I believe this will happen, the honest answer is: I do not know.
Doubt is not the opposite of work
There is a stubborn confusion that makes doubt the enemy of commitment. In my experience it is the reverse. Those who do not doubt stop verifying, and those who stop verifying end up defending instead of thinking.
Doubt is the tool that keeps an idea from hardening. It forces you back over what you thought settled, to hear an objection before filing it away, to reformulate when the formulation no longer holds. Twenty-two years of work without doubt would have produced a dogma. I would not have wanted that book, and nobody should have wanted it either.
There is, incidentally, a simple way to recognise someone who has stopped doubting: they never change a word again.
What I answer, in the end
So no, I do not believe in it, not in the sense the question intends. I hold no inner conviction that the world is about to turn, and I would be suspicious of myself if I did.
What I have is more modest and more solid: the certainty that what is named becomes arguable, and that what stays unnamed goes on acting without anyone being able to take hold of it. My work was never to convince. It was to name with enough precision that others could do something with it, or refute it, which would already be progress.
“Do you believe in it?” expects a man who gets fired up. All I have is someone who worked a long time, and who would rather the work were examined.
That is what the book is made of: a proposition open to argument, not a conviction anyone is asked to share.
Yannick Costechareyre