Thursday 8 August 2024

Polémique, la Cène en scène sur la Seine ? « La parodie du religieux a toujours fait partie de la culture populaire française »

Le spécialiste du religieux et politiste Olivier Roy analyse la controverse qui a suivi la prestation de Philippe Katerine lors de la cérémonie d’ouverture des Jeux olympiques. Il y voit l’illustration de ce qu’il appelle la “sainte ignorance”.

 Alors, dernier souper ou mise en bouche? Cène ou mise en scène? Dieu ou Dionysos? Peu importe! La polémique révèle surtout le fossé culturel qui sépare ce qui reste de chrétiens croyants (ici tendance tradi) et la société française. Dans le banquet de la chair et de la bonne chère exhibé sur la Seine lors de l’ouverture des Jeux, les catholiques ont immédiatement reconnu la Cène et exigé un copyright sur une séquence religieuse qui est au coeur même de leur foi (l’incarnation). Ce faisant, ils refusent que la culture profane s’empare de cet événement fondateur, alors même que la parodie du religieux a toujours fait partie de la culture populaire française (que l’on songe aux carnavals).

Ils revendiquent désormais la séparation entre le religieux et une culture devenue profane, et donc assument un divorce qu’ils ont été les premiers à déplorer : la société française n’est plus chrétienne.De son côté, la culture profane semble avoir tout oublié de ses origines chrétiennes : si la dénégation des metteurs en scène fonctionne (« Nous n’avons pas voulu nous moquer du christianisme »), c’est sans doute que peu de gens dans le public savaient ce qu’est la Cène. Car pour se moquer, il faut connaître ce dont on se moque, ou du moins le reconnaître quand il se manifeste.

 C’est bien le temps de la sainte ignorance ! Le religieux rejette la culture dominante car païenne, et le païen est tellement païen qu’il ne sait même pas de quoi il lui faudrait se repentir. Mais ce qui est intéressant, c’est aussi la séquence suivante. Comment laver l’affront ?

On a vu se déployer deux registres : faut-il répare rune offense faite au croyant, ou bien expier un blasphème qui fait souffrir Dieu? Dans le premier registre, on demande à la justice des hommes de réparer la souffrance infligée à une communauté spécifique : les chrétiens pratiquants. Et voici que Jean-Luc Mélenchon entre en scène à son tour (1). Il condamne l’offense faite aux chrétiens. Serait-il devenu le Judas de la laïcité ? Va-t-il s’approcher de la Table consacrée ? Bien sûr que non. En fait il ouvre aux catholiques la porte de son club : bienvenue à la table des minorités souffrantes, des racisé·e·s, des LGBT et des musulmans. Bienvenue chez les victimes, les incompris, les invisibilisés. L’affaire des « Versets sataniques » n’est pas si loin : pour éviter la violence du fanatique, pourquoi ne pas écouter d’abord la plainte du croyant qui souffre. Un petit coup de « cancel culture » et on annule la cause de la souffrance ; on efface cette « appropriation culturelle » commise par une élite artistique aux dépens d’une minorité dont on interprète la foi comme une simple identité. La compassion est le stade suprême de la sécularisation. 

Mais il semble que la hiérarchie catholique ait senti le piège. Du film de Rivette « la Religieuse », en 1967, aux scandales de « Piss Christ » et « Golgota picnic »,en passant par « la Dernière Tentation du Christ » de Scorsese, toutes les tentatives de demander à la justice laïque réparation contre le blasphème ont été des échecs prévisibles, car Dieu n’est pas un sujet de droit. Si l’on veut éviter la violence qui transmuerait avec « les Versets sataniques », le seul moyen est d’offrir à Dieu la souffrance du croyant en expiation du blasphème et non d’en faire un marqueur identitaire.

(1) « A quoi bon risquer de blesser les croyants ? Même quand on est anticlérical ! Nous parlions au monde ce soir-là », a écrit sur son blog Jean-Luc Mélenchon, après la cérémonie.

Thursday 27 June 2024

Women are from Venus, Men from Mars (ideologies broaden or narrow the gap)


John Burn-Murdoch 

One of the most well-established patterns in measuring public opinion is that every generation tends to move as one in terms of its politics and general ideology. Its members share the same formative experiences, reach life’s big milestones at the same time and intermingle in the same spaces. So how should we make sense of reports that Gen Z is hyper-progressive on certain issues, but surprisingly conservative on others?

The answer, in the words of Alice Evans, a visiting fellow at Stanford University and one of the leading researchers on the topic, is that today’s under-thirties are undergoing a great gender divergence, with young women in the former camp and young men the latter. Gen Z is two generations, not one.

In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women. Tens of millions of people who occupy the same cities, workplaces, classrooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye.


In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up.

Germany also now shows a 30-point gap between increasingly conservative young men and progressive female contemporaries, and in the UK the gap is 25 points. In Poland last year, almost half of men aged 18-21 backed the hard-right Confederation party, compared to just a sixth of young women of the same age.

Outside the west, there are even more stark divisions. In South Korea there is now a yawning chasm between young men and women, and it’s a similar situation in China. In Africa, Tunisia shows the same pattern. Notably, in every country this dramatic split is either exclusive to the younger generation or far more pronounced there than among men and women in their thirties and upwards.

The #MeToo movement was the key trigger, giving rise to fiercely feminist values among young women who felt empowered to speak out against long-running injustices. That spark found especially dry tinder in South Korea, where gender inequality remains stark, and outright misogyny is common.

In the country’s 2022 presidential election, while older men and women voted in lockstep, young men swung heavily behind the right-wing People Power party, and young women backed the liberal Democratic party in almost equal and opposite numbers.

Korea’s is an extreme situation, but it serves as a warning to other countries of what can happen when young men and women part ways. Its society is riven in two. Its marriage rate has plummeted, and birth rate has fallen precipitously, dropping to 0.78 births per woman in 2022, the lowest of any country in the world.

Seven years on from the initial #MeToo explosion, the gender divergence in attitudes has become self-sustaining. Survey data show that in many countries the ideological differences now extend beyond this issue. The clear progressive-vs-conservative divide on sexual harassment appears to have caused — or at least is part of — a broader realignment of young men and women into conservative and liberal camps respectively on other issues.

In the US, UK and Germany, young women now take far more liberal positions on immigration and racial justice than young men, while older age groups remain evenly matched. The trend in most countries has been one of women shifting left while men stand still, but there are signs that young men are actively moving to the right in Germany, where today’s under-30s are more opposed to immigration than their elders, and have shifted towards the far-right AfD in recent years.

It would be easy to say this is all a phase that will pass, but the ideology gaps are only growing, and data shows that people’s formative political experiences are hard to shake off. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that the proliferation of smartphones and social media mean that young men and women now increasingly inhabit separate spaces and experience separate cultures.

Too often young people’s views are overlooked owing to their low rates of political participation, but this shift could leave ripples for generations to come, impacting far more than vote counts. 

Saturday 11 May 2024

Jürgen Klopp and the leading of Liverpool

 How did the German football manager cast such a spell over the city? There was much more to it than results, writes Lynsey Hanley

Lynsey Hanley is author of ‘Estates: An Intimate History’ and ‘Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide’  

The success of Jürgen Klopp’s nine years at Liverpool Football Club can be measured not in trophies, but in pies. Homebaked, a thriving community bakery opposite Anfield’s famous Kop stand, sells thousands of the ambrosial savouries each match day. Only two of its recipes are named after Liverpool managers. One — steak, bacon and mushroom — is The Shankly, in tribute to LFC’s legendary 1960s and 1970s coach Bill Shankly. The other — an umami-rich concoction of beef and German beer — is The Klopp.

To say that Klopp has a godlike status among many Scousers is almost to underestimate the German manager’s effect on their city. Since he arrived in 2015 he has shaped a team around values of unity, positivity and fist-pumping enjoyment, encouraging fans to believe in their power to change the course of matches through fierce support, loudly expressed.

How good were Liverpool under Jürgen Klopp? Simon Kuper and John Burn-Murdoch examine the data In January, his announcement that he would be leaving the club at the end of this season caused such misery that he was immediately obliged to explain himself in a 25-minute video interview. It was as if he’d had no right to go. His admirers seem caught between having the greatest respect for his decision and wondering whatever Liverpool will do without him.

I’ve been there, along with 750,000 others, when the team’s victory parades through the city have passed the bottom of my road in suburban south Liverpool. On these occasions, held to celebrate winning the Champions League in 2019 and the FA Cup in 2022 (Liverpool won the 2020 Premier League season by a mile, but the Covid-19 lockdown prevented a parade), he’s given Liverpudlians the feeling of being at once on top of the world and at the centre of the universe.

Klopp is everywhere here, in the form of giant murals; in cardboard cutouts in students’ windows; in Jürgen’s Bierhaus, a sports bar in the city centre; flashing his floodlit smile in ads on the sides of buses; and, more generally, in what can only really be described as a vibe. It can be felt as a sense that Liverpool itself has finally, and comprehensively, come back from the cliff edge of inexorable decline, just as football clubs can slog their way from the lower leagues back to the top flight.

I’ll try to pinpoint that description, in an attempt to explain how Liverpool feels about itself, and why the city so captures the hearts of those who, like me, have moved here from elsewhere. I arrived with my young family in 2012, just a few years before Klopp, and immediately felt more at home than anywhere I’d lived previously.

It wasn’t just that the city centre was buzzing with life when I’d remembered, from my first visit in the 1980s, threadbare and windswept precincts. Strangers treated me like they would a close relative. Sturdy nans outside Iceland pressed £2 coins and Mars bars into my children’s hands, passed me tissues when they saw me having a bad day, gave me the thumbs up as I crossed the road. I quickly learnt that it is a place of fundamental generosity, where hardship is taken as a fact of life and, as a result, the burden is to be shared.

Liverpool is about people: more specifically, about liking other people and finding them not threatening but inherently interesting and worthy of attention. Everyone who lives in the city is a potential contributor to the project of making it a better place to live.

From the outset, Klopp seemed to understand this, describing himself in his first press conference as “a normal guy . . . the normal one”, setting out his stall in apparent opposition to the then Chelsea manager José Mourinho’s self-description as the “special one”. Klopp also saw himself as “a romantic” about what football can do — and what he could do for football — pledging to bag Liverpool the Premier League title within four years (he did it in five). LFC fans quickly threw their weight behind him, which, in turn, seemed to lead the city into a new phase of confidence.

Joe Moran, a writer and professor of English and cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University, agrees. “Sport is about stories and characters,” he tells me. “Humans are meaning-making animals and fasten on meanings rather than just rational calculations of profit and loss. Klopp has given Liverpool fans a story that they can believe in, and what he says fits in with their values.”

Liverpool was already on the up when Klopp arrived: its population was growing after decades of decline, and since being anointed the European Capital of Culture in 2008 it has become one of the most visited cities in the UK. For locals, Klopp’s move to the city cemented, rather than created, that sense of a rebirth.

That’s not to soft-soap an often hard-bitten place. Liverpool is still the third most economically deprived local authority in the UK — out of 317. Some 20 per cent of its under-16s live in absolute poverty. The new wealth being created by Liverpool’s tourist, retail and culture economy isn’t being spread because people don’t earn enough money from the jobs available in those sectors. Premier League footballers and their managers can only buy so many designer T-shirts from Flannels, the flagship fashion store in town and, in any case, tend to live, like Klopp, in lush areas beyond the city boundary.

In this context, football, like music, truly matters in a city that has suffered economically for almost a century. Liverpool reached its commercial and demographic peak in the 1930s — at 486,000 residents, it now has one 18th the population of London — and yet in LFC and The Beatles it has conquered the world twice over.

It can be hard to square the fact that the city is recognised around the world on the back of these names with the knowledge that, elsewhere in England, Liverpool has for 40 years been the butt of jokes about poverty, crime and victimhood, not least from the mouths of senior politicians.

Without question, these tropes are out of date, recalling the time in the early 1980s when the city was in a desperate state following the automation of its shipping industry and multiple factory closures, and ministers in Margaret Thatcher’s government urged a policy of “managed decline”.

It endured the shame of LFC supporters’ involvement in the tragedy of the 1985 European Cup final, when 39 people died after a fight between Liverpool and Juventus fans at the crumbling Heysel stadium in Brussels led to the collapse of a wall on a section of terracing. Four years later, a crush at Hillsborough in Sheffield caused by police funnelling a crowd into an inadequate stand led to the deaths of 97 Liverpool fans.

“I really admire him as a person and he’s been the best Liverpool manager of my lifetime,” says Andrew Beattie, chair of Homebaked Community Land Trust, which is working to bring back into use the formerly derelict homes adjacent to the bakery, for affordable housing and local businesses. “In the past few years, I’ve noticed much more of a community spirit around the football club,” he says. “[It] lost that for a while, I think, before Klopp joined. I think the club is making more of an effort to connect with the community about being a better neighbour.”

This is a marked change from the mid-1990s, when the club began purchasing terraced houses around the stadium in order to expand its Main Stand, a project that left dozens of homes empty and boarded, or “tinned” up, for two decades, causing untold distress and decline in the neighbourhood. The long struggle to reverse that decline embodies the “other side” of Anfield — the everyday reality for most in this part of north Liverpool, rather than the fortnightly match-day high.

 Abi O’Connor is a longtime LFC fan whose work as an urban sociologist casts an unforgiving light on Liverpool’s harsh inequalities. She believes that, although “‘Klopp made us fall in love with supporting Liverpool FC all over again”, the club “have a lot to answer for with regards to the treatment of the community they’re situated in. Match-day chaos, traffic, queues and litter is normal here, so you may ask why one of the richest clubs in the country doesn’t place some of their profit aside to genuinely invest money to support these communities. I’ve lived here for over a decade and I’m yet to find a real answer to that.” 

While she doesn’t expect Klopp to have that answer, O’Connor is concerned that “saying he has changed the city for the better is to ignore these material realities” for many of the people who support his team — although, “considering his politics, I would be surprised if he didn’t agree”.

By contrast, football writer Dan Morgan credits Klopp not only with helping him to view his home city in a new, less jaded light, but with directly changing the course of his life, inspiring him to leave his job in the legal sector to become a contributor to publications including The Anfield Wrap, a website and podcast dedicated to LFC and its supporters.

“The memory he leaves will be ultimately a sense of effervescence and life, and the sense of a place being really alive,” Morgan tells me. “I think that marries really well with the complexities of Liverpool as a place. At the beginning it was like he said ‘you need me to help you so we can achieve this together, we can climb this hill our way.’ What I’ll always take from him is his ability to delegate and to insist that the responsibility is shared. That, to me, is the true essence of community.”

It is, but at the same time Klopp isn’t alone in his understanding that modern-day management is more about communicating well — and being seen to communicate well — than merely giving out orders. Gareth Southgate, while lacking Klopp’s high-wattage charisma, has refreshed the England football squad’s image in a similar way. Both have made an impression on people who aren’t necessarily big fans of the sport, through their articulacy, emotional intelligence and their ability to transmit authority without being authoritarians.

Klopp’s confidence in his own values, consistently expressed, has meant that he’s been able to reveal where he stands on certain issues without risking mockery from those who believe football managers should stick to football. Two years after Britain voted to leave the EU, he commented: “History has always shown that when we stay together, we can sort out problems. When we split, then we start fighting.”

Equally, when awarded the freedom of the city of Liverpool in 2022, Klopp noted that he and Scousers “care about similar things, have similar political views and we like to be very open, that’s how it is . . . people are really open, nice, kind and friendly. That’s what I want to be as well.”

Note that he said he aspired to be more like Scousers, rather than suggesting that they should be more like him. The magic inherent in Klopp’s leadership, then, has come not from concentrating his power, but by sharing it with people he assumes to have the same interests at heart, rather than simply winning every title going.

Shortly before Liverpool’s disastrous April derby, in which his team lost 2-0 away to its city rivals Everton and, in so doing, saw their chances of winning this year’s Premier League title wither away, he spoke plainly about the exhaustion that led to his upcoming departure: “I work all the time while you just watch the games. I’m constantly in it. Even when the game is over I can’t switch off. It’s not great to be in this situation all the time. Maybe other people enjoy that more than me. But that’s something I definitely will not miss.”

Good luck to him. He will go, but the Klopp pie, the Jürgen murals — though perhaps not Jürgen’s Bierhaus — will remain, as will that intangible yet energising feeling that when we work together, anything feels possible. For that, Klopp in Liverpool has meant more, so much more, than winning.

Monday 18 March 2024

Frantz Fanon, iconic freedom fighter: “What we want is to move forward all the time, night and day, in the company of man, all men”


Mr. Shatz is the U.S. editor of The London Review of Books and the author of “The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon.”

The shock of the new, in political life, often sends us back to the past in search of an intellectual compass. Amid the rise of Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Jair Bolsanaro and other authoritarian leaders, Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” published in 1951, enjoyed a surge of attention, and Arendt herself acquired a prophet-like status among liberals seeking to understand how their world had gone so wrong. The threat of illiberal nationalism hasn’t faded — on the contrary — but in an age consumed with racism, police violence and the legacy of European colonialism in the Middle East and Africa, Arendt’s popularity is increasingly rivaled by that of a man she both sharply criticized and grudgingly admired: Frantz Fanon.

Fanon, a psychiatrist, writer, and anticolonial militant, who grew up in a middle-class Black family in French colonial Martinique, was not merely a thinker; he was a political theoretician, a fiery spokesman for Algeria’s independence movement, the National Liberation Front (F.L.N.), which he joined while working as a psychiatrist in Blida, on the outskirts of Algiers. He captured, as no other writer of his time did, the fury engendered by colonial humiliation in the hearts of the colonized. He was also a startlingly prescient analyst of contemporary ills — the enduring psychological injuries of racism and oppression, the persistent force of white nationalism and the scourge of autocratic, predatory postcolonial regimes.

Fanon wrote at the height of the Cold War, but, with no less prescience, he regarded the East-West struggle as a passing sideshow, of far less consequence than the divisions between North and South, of the rich world and the poor world. If the colonial world was, in his words, “a world cut in two,” our postcolonial world seems scarcely less so. Just consider the starkly different responses to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza — or South Africa’s case against Israel, on the charge of genocide — in the global north and the global south.

Much of the writing Fanon produced in his short lifetime — he died at 36, of leukemia — was in the form either of psychiatric studies or propaganda dashed off for the purpose of revolutionary instruction. It gives off the heat of battles that haven’t ended, battles over colonialism and racial injustice. Not surprisingly, Fanon’s name has been invoked in discussions of everything from the precariousness of Black lives to the campaign to repatriate African art objects, from the refugee crisis to Hamas’s murderous attack on Oct. 7. It’s not as if his work ever vanished. But it hasn’t been cited with such frequency or urgency since the late 1960s, when the Black Panthers, Palestinian guerrillas and Latin American revolutionaries pored over copies of “The Wretched of the Earth,” Fanon’s 1961 anticolonial manifesto.

Back then, Fanon was a minor celebrity on the radical left. Today he is an icon, enlisted on behalf of a range of often wildly contradictory agendas: Black nationalist and cosmopolitan, secular and Islamist, identitarian and anti-identitarian. He’s the subject of two forthcoming biopics, and “The Wretched of the Earth” even shows up as a prop in an episode of “The White Lotus.” Left-wing artists, academics, activists and therapists hungrily rummage through his writings for catchphrases (and there are many) about the psychological effects of white domination, racist misrepresentations of the Black body, the meaning of the Muslim head scarf, the anger of the colonized and the exhibitionist violence of imperial powers. But the far right has also had a longstanding fascination with his work: both the writer Renaud Camus and the French politician Éric Zemmour, proponents of the racist Great Replacement theory, are readers of Fanon.

After the murder of George Floyd, protesters held up banners quoting Fanon’s observation in “Black Skin, White Masks,” a study of racism published in 1952 when he was 27 years old, that the oppressed revolt when they can no longer breathe. Since Oct. 7, he has been celebrated by pro-Palestinian students — and denounced by their critics — for his defense of violence by the colonized in the first chapter of “The Wretched of the Earth.” What Fanon’s contemporary admirers and detractors have in common is that many, if not most, of them appear not to have read past the first chapter, portraying this complex and challenging thinker as little more than a supporter of revolutionary violence by any means necessary — a Malcolm X for the French-speaking world. Or, more precisely, the caricature to which Malcolm X, like so many Black revolutionaries, has been reduced.

Fanon was born in 1925, a product of the colonial system. The first three words he learned to write were “I am French,” and when Martinique fell under Vichy tyranny, he escaped the island to serve in the Free French Forces; he was wounded in battle in France and won a Croix de Guerre medal.

But Fanon’s wartime experience stripped him of any illusions about the colonial motherland. Although he was considered an honorary European, like other West Indians in the resistance army, Africans and Arabs were treated as inferiors. Fanon responded to these early, harrowing experiences of racism by exalting his Black identity, before rejecting racial ideology in favor of a radical anti-imperialism.

Fanon was a child of the empire, who fought for France in World War II and then turned against it in Algeria, a secular West Indian in a Muslim-led liberation movement, a dashing and sophisticated intellectual who earned the admiration of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir — he had a life story as cinematic as Malcolm X’s. He also had a flair for provocative rhetoric, enriched by the cadences of the West Indian poetry he’d read as a young man. Fanon wrote some of the most memorable slogans of the national liberation struggles of the 1960s: “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World”; “the colonized liberates himself in and through violence”; “Come, comrades, the European game is finally over, we must look for something else.” But if these slogans have burnished his contemporary aura (and made him a favorite of French rappers), they have also lent themselves — like “the ballot or the bullet” in Malcolm X’s case — to an oversimplified understanding of his life and legacy.

Fanon, not merely a gifted propagandist, was both a champion of decolonization and one of its most incisive analysts. He was, to be sure, a proponent of armed struggle by the colonized. But the colonial system, he emphasized, was itself founded on violent and sometimes genocidal acts of dispossession and repression. The violence of the colonized was a counter-violence; it did not grow out of a void. As a psychiatrist, Fanon believed that armed struggle had therapeutic benefits, allowing the colonized to overcome the stupor, the paralyzing sense of hopelessness, induced by colonial subjugation, and to become masters of their own fate.

Yet Fanon did not regard all forms of anticolonial violence as equally legitimate: He criticized Algerian rebels who had committed atrocities with “the almost physiological brutality that centuries of oppression nourish and give rise to.” And in the last chapter of “The Wretched of the Earth,” titled “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” a series of haunting case studies about what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder, Fanon predicted that the “psycho-affective” effects of both colonial and anticolonial violence would weigh heavily on Algeria’s future. The soldier saw the gun as a necessary midwife of anticolonial history; the healer dreaded inner wars to come.

His views about Algeria’s European settler community were more textured than his admirers and detractors would have us believe — or than those expressed by Sartre in his incendiary preface to “The Wretched of the Earth,” which celebrated the murder of European civilians as anticolonial justice. As a psychiatrist, Fanon had no trouble grasping the desire for revenge among victims of colonial oppression. The colonized, he wrote, was a “persecuted man who constantly dreams of becoming the persecutor.” Nonetheless, he insisted that the anticolonial movement would have to reject the “primitive Manichaeism of the colonizer — Black versus White, Arab versus Infidel.” Some members of the colonized community, he noted, “can be whiter than the whites,” while some whites could “prove to be closer, infinitely closer, to the nationalist struggle than certain native sons.”

While the principal aim of Algeria’s struggle was to free the country from French domination, he argued that the F.L.N. should open its arms to anyone who embraced it, including Europeans of conscience. The identities of “settler” and “native” were not fixed, essential identities; they were identities created by colonialism itself and would disappear with colonialism. After independence, the colonized would discover “the man behind the colonizer” — and vice versa. “Hatred,” he wrote, “cannot constitute a program.”

The reality was less attractive. Only a tiny number of Europeans joined the independence struggle; most supported France’s continued rule, and considered the French Army’s brutal repression — including the forced relocation of two million Algerian villagers, widespread torture, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians — to be a necessary war against “terrorism.” This greatly diminished the prospects for Muslim-European coexistence in an independent Algeria. And, as Fanon discovered while serving as an F.L.N. spokesman in Tunisia, his progressive allies in the movement were a minority, outnumbered and outgunned by Arab nationalists and Islamic populists of a more authoritarian streak.

Even as he witnessed intolerance and violent score settling in the F.L.N., he remained a good soldier, echoing the official line. But in “The Wretched of the Earth,” he expressed his concerns that the impending liberation of Algeria and the African continent would not lead to true freedom for the oppressed, since an avaricious and corrupt “national bourgeoisie” stood in the way of a more sweeping social revolution. In his writing and in his work as a psychiatrist, Fanon advanced a rebellious vision of what he called “disalienation” — a commitment to collective and individual freedom that was in some ways a challenge to his own adopted cause. It is no wonder that he has found an admiring audience among young intellectuals in contemporary Algeria, who find themselves suffocated by their authoritarian regime, the “pouvoir,” the opaque power that still controls the country.

Although a revolutionary and a radical, Fanon was averse to the kind of identity-based politics for which he is often enlisted today. For all that he anatomized the destructive effects of racism on the psyches of the colonized, he considered projects of cultural reclamation to be inherently conservative and dismissed the idea of race itself. “The Negro is not,” he wrote. “No more than the White man.” While he acknowledged the role that Islam had played in mobilizing Algerian Muslims against French rule, he warned that it threatened to “reanimate the sectarian and religious spirit,” separating the anticolonial struggle from “its ideal future, in order to reconnect it with its past.” For Fanon, what ultimately counted was the “leap of invention,” which, for him, was inextricably linked with the leap into freedom.

Today, the idea of leaping beyond race, ethnicity or religion seems fantastical, and for some not even desirable. But Fanon believed that the prison houses of race and colonialism, in which millions of men and women had been confined, were made by human beings, and could therefore be unmade by them. No one evoked the dream world of race and colonialism — the ways in which oppression burrowed its way into people’s psyches — with such bleak force as Fanon. It’s an important reason he’s so popular today. But Fanon was also, paradoxically, and in decided contrast to many of today’s radical thinkers and activists, an optimist.

For the victims of slavery and colonialism, history had been cruel, but it was not, in his view, an inescapable destiny: “I am not a slave to the slavery that dehumanized my ancestors,” he declared in “Black Skin, White Masks,” adding for good measure that the “density of history determines none of my acts.” He placed his faith in humanity’s capacity for rebirth and innovation and in the possibility of new departures in history: what Arendt called “natality.”

As he bade farewell to Europe in the closing pages of “The Wretched of the Earth,” he dreamed of a new humanity, emancipated from colonialism and empire: “No, we do not want to catch up with anyone. What we want is to move forward all the time, night and day, in the company of man, all men.” It is Fanon’s insistence on the struggle for freedom and dignity in the face of oppression, his belief that one day “the last shall be first,” that imbues his writing with its stirring force.


Saturday 3 February 2024

What the world gets wrong about ‘civilisation’

Financial_Times_corporate_logo.svg - CORE 

Josephine Quinn is a professor of ancient history at the University of Oxford. Her book ‘How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History’

  

 Statues of, from left, the sixth-century Indian astronomer and mathematician Aryabhata; Greek goddess Athena; al-Biruni, an 11th-century Persian polymath; the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius

Everyone is worried about the west. For some it is under attack, from refugees, terrorists or wokery. For others the west is itself the problem, forever imposing its own values as a universal good. But no one is sure what it actually is — or rather, where it stops.

It was easier when there was an Iron Curtain, neatly dividing the communist and capitalist spheres. Then came 9/11, and a new rupture between the liberal democratic west and the Islamic world. Now the ground is shifting again, as “modern Arab countries” are invited to join Benjamin Netanyahu’s battle for “western civilisation” against Hamas.

It’s more common these days to hear politicians talking about civilisations in the plural, and in superficially pluralistic ways. In a speech last October to the Valdai Discussion Club, a Kremlin-associated Moscow think-tank, Vladimir Putin explained that “there are many civilisations, and none is superior or inferior to another. They are equal since each represents a unique expression of its own culture, traditions and the aspirations of its people.”

The most important one to him of course is Russia, an “original civilisation-state” that “cannot be divided”, and certainly not by what he presents in the same speech as an illegal coup in Ukraine in 2014. This “Foreign Policy Concept” is the historical counterpart to the “multipolar” modern world Putin advocates as an alternative to the western “rules-based order”.

In China, meanwhile, Xi Jinping has launched a new Global Civilisation Initiative, to celebrate the world’s “unique and long civilisations . . . transcending time and space”. As in Russia, the idea of a strong and unified national culture rooted in ancient history bolsters a political and moral claim: for Xi, the consistency of Chinese civilisation “determines on a fundamental level that the Chinese must follow their own path”. And this way of thinking about civilisations as equal but distinct has reached the moral heart of the west: four Greek and four Chinese universities partnered to launch a Centre of Ancient Chinese and Greek civilisations last year in Athens, whose ancient port of Piraeus is now owned by the Chinese state shipping line. 

The idea of a world of civilisations emerged in something like its modern form at the end of the cold war. In 1996 the Harvard political scientist Samuel P Huntington made a prescient case for conflict between civilisations as the defining feature of a new era, arguing that the most important distinctions between people were now cultural and religious rather than political and economic. 

He identified nine contemporary civilisations, including “Western”, “Orthodox” and “Islamic”, but he also projected civilisations themselves deep back into time: “Human history is the history of civilisations. It is impossible to think of the development of humanity in any other terms.” And no wonder, if you also believe, as Huntington did, that “during most of human existence, contacts between civilisations were intermittent or nonexistent”. 

Civilisational thinking of this kind depends on an idea of separate cultures growing like individual trees in a forest, with their own roots and branches distinct from those of their neighbours. They emerge, flourish and decline, and they do so largely alone. Growth and change are the result of internal development, not external connections. Civilisations might change their names on this model, but they don’t change their nature. 

However you explain them, civilisations may seem like natural facts about the world, so that the only interesting questions appear to be how some do better than others or why they clash. But they are a modern confection, invented by 19th-century scholars to emphasise the superiority of their own nations and the justice of their empires.

The word “civilisation” appears for the first time in France in the 1750s, introduced by the Marquis de Mirabeau. Contemporaries spoke of polite society, or civility, distinguishing modern Europe from its feudal past and accompanying the rise of commerce. But politeness was so often the face of superficiality, hypocrisy and corruption, and for Mirabeau, as Cambridge historian Michael Sonenscher has explained, true “civilisation” had a moral dimension that mere civility lacked. 

Wider adoption of the word over the following decades, then, was a product of Enlightenment ideals of universalism and historical human progress — from hunters to shepherds to farmers to merchants, for instance, as Scottish philosophers argued, or, according to the German philosopher Hegel, from fetishists to polytheists to Protestants. 

Civilisation in this sense was the ultimate goal of human flourishing, and in theory in reach of the whole population of the world — even if Europeans considered themselves best suited to achieve it. The idea helped to justify European imperial ventures in India and east Asia as a cultural mission to improve the lives and minds of the colonised. As the Scottish historian James Mill put it in 1810, “this English government in India, with all its vices, is a blessing of unspeakable magnitude to the population of Hindostan.” 

In the 19th century this singular concept disintegrated as scholars identified multiple civilisations tied to specific regions, separate and rarely equal. This “civilisational thinking” in the plural added a reassuring new element to notions of European cultural superiority: the idea of distinct cultures that were not only different but always had been — and always would be. Many had natural limits to their progress, it now seemed, just like the human “races” coming into scientific focus around the same time. Meanwhile, national imperial strategies entered a more straightforwardly exploitative and violent phase, culminating in the atrocities committed in the Belgian Congo.  

The intellectual historian Georgios Varouxakis has traced the phrase “western civilisation” back to the 1840s, and even then it was a slippery concept. In the middle of the 19th century, the “west” already marked a boundary with Russian interests for commentators on both sides of that border; by the end the focus from the western side extended to Islam. In 1891, Edward Freeman, regius professor at the University of Oxford, published a History of Sicily from the Earliest Times that invoked the same fundamental opposition between the island’s ancient Greek and Phoenician inhabitants as between its later Christian and Muslim ones: the central question, he said, that had to be fought out was “whether the central island of the central sea should belong to the West or to the East, to the men of Aryan or Semitic stock”. 

The roots of the west were murky too, but scholars came to agree that they were local, reaching back to the coasts of the classical Mediterranean, the German forests or the beleaguered European redoubt of medieval Christendom. 

As a classicist I’m conflicted. The place of Greece and Rome at the core of western civilisation has traditionally been central to the appeal of my field, and this isn’t going away: every year, applicants to Oxford still tell me that this is what has brought them to my course. They’re not misguided either. It is true that ancient Athenians were enthusiastic slavers and male supremacists. But the classical world can also provide inspiration for the modern west, with models for radical democracy or powerful dramas of refugee trauma and the horrors of war. 

As a historian, I know that civilisational thinking is simply wrong. Local and regional cultures come and go, but they are created and sustained by interaction. The encounters involved don’t have to be friendly. But it is those connections that drive historical change, from the boats that brought the African donkey and the Eurasian wheel to the Aegean in the third millennium BCE to the ships equipped with the Chinese compass that brought Europeans to the Americas 4,000 years later, to conquer them with Chinese gunpowder. 

My Greeks and Romans knew this too. They divided the world not by race, culture or creed but by climate and ecology. A Greek medical text written around 400BCE called “Airs, Waters, Places” explains that because in Asia the temperature is relatively stable and the climate mild, things grow well and everything is both beautiful and large, including the people. They are also gentle and affectionate, but they lack courage and endurance, enterprise and high spirits. Europeans, by contrast, are tougher, more courageous and more warlike — as well as wild, unsociable and passionate. 

 The claim is not that Asians or Europeans naturally behave in any particular way: it is that the environment encourages particular behaviours, both among those born in these lands and in visitors. Aristotle meanwhile located Greece itself between Asia and Europe, in the best of both worlds.  

Classical authors focused more in any case on connectivity. Romans emphasised the importance of encounters and exchange in a world in constant motion: the poet Catullus could imagine journeying with friends to India, Arabia, Parthia, Egypt and even “the Britons at the edge of the world”, while the elder Pliny, a polymathic scholar most famous for his death investigating the eruption of Vesuvius in 79CE, claimed that only the Indians never migrated. 

Greek legends, meanwhile, linked their own heroes by blood and travel to the queens, kings and gods of foreign lands: Phoenicians, Phrygians and Amazons. And Greek scholars acknowledged their debts: Plato has Egyptians invent mathematics, geometry and astronomy, while Herodotus explains that the Greek alphabet came from Phoenicia, and was known in Greece as Phoenician letters. 

 He was right on both counts, and the arrival of the alphabet was more revolutionary than it may sound. It is apparently more natural for humans to record syllables than individual sounds: there are many examples around the world of independently developed syllabaries, but all modern alphabets bar one go back to a single writing system developed by speakers of a Levantine language — a predecessor of Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic — almost 4,000 years ago. Via Phoenicia and Greece it reached Rome, and the modern west. Arabic took it from Aramaic. The only exception is Korean Hangul, the personal creation of Sejong the Great in the 15th century CE to improve literacy levels in his kingdom.

 What even Herodotus didn’t know is that Phoenician letters weren’t invented in the Levant itself. Instead, the first signs securely identified as alphabetic letters were found in the Egyptian royal turquoise mines in the mountains of Sinai, scrawled there around 1800BCE by Levantine guest-workers, adapting hieroglyphs they couldn’t read to record a language they hadn’t previously felt the need to write. Reading and writing in one’s own spoken tongue may seem natural today, especially to English speakers. But for many it is a relatively recent choice, and in antiquity it was unusual. Formal communication in the Levant happened in the languages of larger empires, above all Babylonian Akkadian, which was written down in a cuneiform (wedge-shaped) script with hundreds of signs for different words and syllables. 

Literacy was a niche skill, learnt with great labour and only by scribes, until the inventors of the alphabet devised a neat trick. Each of their “letters” was originally a little picture, signalling for them the first sound of the word for the item depicted. So the sign for “a” was the head of a bull, “alef” in the Levantine language, “b” was a schematic house or “bet”, and so on. Because the signs represented sounds, not syllables, there were far fewer of them. And you didn’t actually have to learn them anyway: you just needed to know the language, and the trick. 

It was living abroad that gave these Levantine migrants reasons to write things down for the first time, to communicate to each other and their gods, and it gave them new tools to do so: they borrowed their alphabetic pictograms themselves from the Egyptian signs they saw around them — if often written back to front or upside down.  

The alphabet wasn’t the only west Asian innovation to reach the classical Mediterranean in its formative phase: the Levant has always been a crossroads of cultural interchange. Semitic loanwords into Greek often concern business and trade, and Levantine entrepreneurs must have introduced Greek-speakers to west Asian financial technologies such as deposit banking, marine insurance and bottomry loans. 

 By contrast, the numbers used in the modern west bypassed Greece and Rome completely. Greeks counted with their new alphabetic letters, while Romans borrowed a basic tally system from their Etruscan-speaking neighbours. Our standalone numerals were invented in India around 250BCE, building on a much older Mesopotamian counting system that used different columns for numbers of different powers. Indian scholars kept this positional notation, which is why 11 now means eleven and not two, but they replaced the cuneiform wedges that Babylonians tallied in groups of 60 with individual numerals from 1-10, and then perfected the system with the invention of zero.  

These Indian numerals had reached Arabic scholars in Baghdad by the ninth century CE, replacing the use there too of alphabetic letters: as a result, numbers in Arabic are still written not from right to left, like the rest of the language, but as in India from left to right. By the 12th century, adventurous Christian travellers like Adelard of Bath were encountering these “Indo-Arabic” numbers in the Islamic kingdoms of southern Europe, but they took a long time to catch on: even in 1500 most Europeans were still using Roman numerals. 

Such histories may seem to have little to do with the rise of populist isolationism in the US and Europe over the past decade. But although that is often couched in nationalist terms, it is based in a larger concern about a unique western heritage, where ancient Greece and Rome are easily hijacked as a sign of European cultural or simply racial superiority which Greeks and Romans themselves would have found absurd. American white nationalists from the Texas Revolution in the 1830s to the Capitol in 2021 wave flags with the apocryphal words molon labe — “come and take it” — supposedly addressed by a Spartan king to Persian invaders (they did).  

First promoted by the French activist Renaud Camus in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement, the theory that the white or indigenous European population is being replaced by immigrants in a form of reverse-colonisation is now a staple of rightwing conspiracy theorists, white supremacists and mass shooters around the world. This poisonous rhetoric depends heavily on the idea of a distinct civilisation — French, British, western or white — that is under threat from different and alien cultures and especially from their children.  

But it’s the idea of civilisation itself that is the real problem, and in particular the notion that it is a zero-sum game, with higher cultures under threat from migrant, fecund foreign values. There has never been a pure western culture that is now under threat of pollution. No single people is an island, unless they’ve been there for a very long time and haven’t invented boats. And that’s a good thing: without new relationships between different people exchanging unfamiliar ideas, nothing much would ever happen at all.