3183. As Macron Prepares New Repressive Measures, Yellow Vests and Red Unions Strike Together

By Richard Greeman, February 10, 2019

CGT trade unionists demonstration in Paris, February 5, 2019. Photo: Gerard Julien, AFP. 

On Tues, Feb. 5, as the Macron government pushed harsh repressive laws against demonstrators through the National Assembly, the Yellow Vests joined with France’s unions for the first time in a day-long, nation-wide “General Strike.”

At the very moment when in Paris the lower house was voting to implement Macron’s proposed laws designed to suppress public demonstrations (a legal right protected in both the French Constitution and the U.N. Human Rights Declaration) tens of thousands of their constituents were out in the streets all over the country demonstrating and striking against Macron’s authoritarian, neo-liberal government. The demonstrators’ demands ranged from better salaries and retirement benefits, restoration of public services, equitable tax codes, an end to police brutality, and banning the use of “flash-balls” on demonstrators, to Macron’s resignation and the instauration of participatory democracy.

Deaf to the angry people’s legitimate grievances, unwilling to deal with them, Macron has given himself no other choice than to legislate new repressive legal restrictions to suppress their continued free expression. This resort to open repression can only serve to discredit the government’s handling of a crisis largely of his own making, treating a spontaneous social movement among the 99% as if it were a terrorist or fascist conspiracy. The unpopular President’s repressive tactics will inevitably backfire on him. The French are extremely jealous of their liberties, and Macron’s monarchical arrogance can only remind them of how their ancestors dealt with Louis XVI.

Moreover, the Yellow Vests, who have been a painful thorn in Macron’s side since last November, were now demonstrating together with the French labor unions, whom he thought he had tamed last Spring. This convergences came in response to a call for a one-day “General Strike” issued by the CGT and Solidaires, who for the first time invited “any Yellow Vests who felt like it” to join. In the event, quite a few did feel like it, despite the CGT’s previous hostility to the Yellow Vests and despite their own fundamental suspicion of all “representative” structures, like established parties and unions (whom the Yellow Vests justifiably fear would attempt to coopt them, speak in their name, and sell them out).

                                    A Day of Action and Convergence

For a “first date” the one-day Strike came off very well, somewhat to the surprise of both parties. And if this tentative Red-Yellow alliance continues to solidify (and there is every indication that it will) France will likely become ungovernable and the ruling classes will be up against the wall. What might happen next rich in possibility, for the French, with their long history of popular revolutions, have been singularly inventive in coming up with new political arrangements. For now, let us look more closely at what may in retrospect be an historic day.

The Strike began at exactly midnight when a rowdy crowd of 200-300 demonstrators near Paris blocked the giant Rungis produce market (which replaced Les Halles, the legendary “Belly of Paris), cutting off food to the capital with trucks lining up outside. You can see the Yellow Vests among the Red flags of the CGT in this video from Le Parisien.[1] They even set up a barricade. In the early hours there were also blockages at the airport of Nantes and at the University there, at a key toll-gate near Toulouse, while in Grenoble transport was perturbed all morning.

All told there were demonstrations in at least 160 different localities, all different in size and conduct, mostly improvised by people on the spot at the last minute. There were big ones in the Channel ports Le Harvre, Rouen and Caen. In Strassbourg about 1500, in Lyon 5000 including 500 Yellow vests. In Marseille the Yellow Vest march converged with the CGT at the Stock Exchange, a shift of targets for the Yellow Vests from government to finance capital.

In Paris, instead of the usual union march through the popular quarters from the Bastille to Nation, the CGT-led strikers invaded the fancy Right Bank territory, violently contested for twelve weeks by the Yellow Vests, marching boldly up the Rue de Rivoli with its luxurious shop-windows (and construction sites with bricks lying around). They then held an impromptu rally at a major intersection, tying up traffic and baffling the police.[2]

Here in Montpellier, as elsewhere in France, the crowd was big, but no bigger than some of the previous Saturday Yellow Vest demos – as was the case all over France. But this Tuesday it was largely a union crowd. On the other hand, after weeks of gassing peaceful protestors, the police presence was extremely discrete, and one Gendarme was filmed explaining to the Yellow Vests protestors that the Gendarmes had “nothing against them,” that his family supported the movement, explaining that they were soldiers and sworn to obey orders (the Gendarmerie is under the military). They Yellow Vests answered that they “had nothing against the Gendarmes either.” See amazing video.[3]

When I arrived at the gathering point, the loudspeakers of the CGT sound-truck were blaring out a long boring speech – complicated stuff concerning the Euro. No possibility of conversation much less convergence. Next up the line came a contingent of CGT people, quite a number of whom were wearing yellow vests with bright red CGT emblems on them. This “dual” identity underscores the naturalness of the convergence of the two movements of working class people who have nearly identical economic goals and all the same enemies. Like the Red-Yellow CGT activists, nearly every Yellow Vest has by now personalized her/his attire, inscribing slogans on them like: “End of Month/End of World: Same Combat,” “Macron Resign!” “Down with Capitalism” and the very popular “Government of the People, By the People and for the People” (The French haven’t a clue they’re quoting Lincoln, an American!)

At the front of the column, after the CGT banner, were the Yellow Vests, perhaps 200 strong behind our banner and singing aloud. I was a little disappointed by the low turnout of Yellow Vests. Also that they didn’t go back and fraternize and mingle with the union folk, as one woman proposed and I attempted, in spite of the loud recorded CGT music. At the end of the march, our Montpellier Yellow Vest had planned to hold an open-mike speakout, but that didn’t come off either. But as comrades kept reminding me, it was an important first step, and we’ll be back. We make our road by walking.

                                      Who Are these Yellow Vests?

Since Nov. 17, 2018, the popular, nation-wide, self-organized Yellow Vests movement has been keeping up the pressure on the neo-liberal Macron regime with daily protests at traffic circles and weekly demonstrations in dozens of cities. It is made up of average, lower middle-class French people, mostly provincials, whose lives have gotten worse under neo-liberal policies. They are mostly “little people” who are struggling to make ends meet and are tired of being ignored and humiliated by France’s elites.

Last November, they began to turn off their TVs, come out of their houses, join together at traffic circles and toll booths, get to know each other, grill sausages and feel empowered, rather than isolated and helpless. They thus humanized these “noplaces” or non-places created by the automobile civilization that had stripped their villages of post-offices, bakeries and cafés forcing them to spend two hours every workday in their cars.

The Yellow vests represent a demographic cross section of France– naturally minus the top 2% or 3%. And, unfortunately, for the moment, minus the 10% (?) of France’s doubly oppressed, discriminated immigrant communities. The Arabs, Berbers, Black Africans and other immigrants who do most of the dirty jobs, who are rarely seen in civil service jobs, and whose youth riots in the Banlieues (Projects) seriously challenged President Sarkozy in 2005. (Partly due to my suggestion, the Montpellier Yellow Vests are starting to reach out to the immigrant communities.)

Coming from many different backgrounds, the Yellow Vests wisely chose to put aside their political differences and party preferences, avoid pointless arguments, and focus on the struggle that unites them, each speaking for her or himself (alternating genders to maintain parity). As the weekly protests continued, the Yellow Vests were slowly refining their goals and tactics and discovering how to organize themselves while retaining their autonomy. After more than two months, on Jan. 25-27, delegates from 75 local Yellow Vest Assemblies came together in the town of Commercy (Lorraine) for their first “Assembly of Assemblies” and wrote a democratic, egalitarian, anti-racist Declaration (discussed below) which soon achieved a consensus around the country. So a functioning federation with common goals is now emerging.

Remarkably, the Yellow Vests’ rebellion has persisted week after week despite a government campaign of brutal police repression – including thousands of injuries (some serious), several deaths, a thousand arrests, and routine tear-gassing of peaceful groups. The Yellow Vests have persisted despite being constantly vilified by the government and media as fascists, violent terrorists, “a hate-filled mob” (Macron) etc. Yet, amazingly, according to the latest polls, 77% of French people at large think their mobilization is “justified” (up from 74% in January.)

Most remarkable of all, they have wrung some actual concessions from Macron, who, after disdainfully declaring he would “never” give in to an unruly mob, was forced to rescind the tax on Diesel fuel that the movement had originally crystalized around, and promised a raise in the minimum wage and a cut in taxes on retirement income (both of which turned out to be shams on close examination).

These practical victories, won by an autonomous group that refuses to anoint leaders or to negotiate, have deeply embarrassed the French labor movement and particularly the “militant” CGT (General Confederation of Labor, historically affiliated with the French Communist Party) which, after months of stop-and-go strikes last Spring, failed to block the implementation of Macron’s neo-liberal “reforms,” which took away many benefits won by French labor during the great struggles of the past.[4]

The defeated strikers returned to work last Sept. with their tails between their legs, simmering mad; and it was out this void of active opposition to Macron’s ongoing neo-liberal offensive that the Yellow Vests spontaneously emerged and spread across the country, with their spectacular direct action tactics. Many union members, more or less disgusted with their leaders, joined the Yellow Vests from the start. The Yellow Vests organized themselves via Facebook pages, socialized in traffic circles and parking lots and grew into an autonomous social movement. They stood up for themselves and for the rest of France’s working poor, unemployed, single mothers, and retired people. They spontaneously organized mass civil disobedience, successfully opposing Macron’s economic program of taking from the poor and giving to the rich (from whose soft white hands the wealth will theoretically “trickle down.”)

                                                The CGT

The immediate response to the rise of the Yellow Vests on the part of the CGT and its leader, the unsmiling, mustachioed Martinez (picked by Central Casting for the “tough-guy” part) was suspicion (‘petty-bourgeois fascists?’) and hostility. Martinez and the other union bureaucrats could not help seeing the Yellow Vests as competitors, and thus as a threat to their own hegemonic status as official representatives of the workers – especially after Macron’s “concessions.”

After shocking reports of police violence unleashed by Macron’s government against the Yellow Vests’ third Saturday demonstration, and in direct response to an appeal for calm from Macron, on Dec. 6, the leaders of the CGT and all the other labor federations except for Solidaires, signed a Déclaration of solidarity – not of solidarity with the injured and arrested demonstrators, but with the Macron government, the alleged representative of the “peaceful republican order!”[5] In return for what many described as a “betrayal,” the labor movement’s clique of professional negotiators accepted Macron’s invitation to “resume the social dialogue” – that is to allow them to sit at the table with him and negotiate more give-backs of workers’ rights.

The union leadership’s pledge of allegiance to the neo-liberal flag did not go down well in the union ranks. And so the very next day, Martinez and the other union leaders spun in the wind like weathercocks, started acting militant, and called for a national labor demonstration (legal) on Fri. Dec 14. The union leaders’ strike demands covered the same basic economic demands as the Yellow Vests. The event was to be a demonstration of power, a public-relations leadership challenge, and it was pointedly planned for Friday, not Saturday – the Yellow Vests’ demonstration day (the only free day for many of them, for example single parents, workers in offices and small businesses who don’t have strike pay or legal rights to strike). The Friday Dec. 14 union demonstrations were hardly imposing compared to Saturday’s Yellow Vest evens, so the ploy fizzled.

Two months later, the CGT’s issued another call for a one-day “General Strike” on Feb. 5 (a Tuesday). It seemed like a replay of the same ploy, but in a gesture toward the more and more obvious need for “convergence,” Martinez opened a crack for Yellow Vests “to join if they wished” (as he said the day before the Strike). However the next day, blowing with a different wind, he changed his tune and actually made some sensible remarks about convergence:

“People have been saying for more than two months that we must talk and find common demands. We have them. There is no reason we shouldn’t march side by side, the ones behind the others. What is important is to have a successful first day of action together, because I find that the bosses have been let off easy [by the Yellow Vests – Ed.] and it is time to bring to account the big bosses of this country.”

Martinez remark about needing to attack the big bosses was both pointed and to the point. The Yellow Vests, given their broad and varied social composition, have naturally focused on the consumer issues they have in common as working folk struggling to make ends meet: high prices, unfair taxes and declining social services, directing their anger at the government, the media and the political elite. Their signs often denounce “capitalism,” but as a group they have no direct relationship with big industry and finance in whose interest Macron rules. Yet clearly, only with the active participation of France’s organized workers can this broad popular movement succeed – for example through an unlimited general strike with occupations of workplaces and public spaces as in 1968.

                        The Opening of  Chapter Two in the Movement?

More encouraging, Martinez’ co-organizer of the Feb. 5 strike, Cécile Gondar-Lalanne, whose union Sud-Solidaires has been supportive of the Yellow Vests from the start, declared: “if today works out, we must look forward doing it again, to constructing a common movement.” To this observer, such a convergence of the Reds with the Yellows, if it develops, might release a revolutionary power greater than anything we have seen in modern history.

The Yellows, composed of a cross-section of the common people in the provinces already have the support of the vast majority of French people. They have held off the government for thirteen weeks and show no sign of relenting. The Reds, meaning the organized workers, have the power to strike and bring a halt to France’s major industries, transportation, energy and all public services, as they did in 1936 and 1968.

United, the Reds and the Yellows have the potential to change the system, and many of the Yellows clearly have system-change on their agenda.

System-change is definitely not on the agenda of Martinez and the other union bureaucrats, whose social status, like that of the members of the National Assembly, depends on their role as the official “representatives” of their constituents within the existing system. Given the pressure from below, Martinez has no choice but to play at “convergence” with the Yellow Vests today, but it is only to outmaneuver them and secure his official status as labor’s representatives. This is precisely what the Yellow Vests feared from the start when they founded their movement on autonomy – perhaps remembering the dismal role played by the CGT in ending the general strike and popular uprising that shook up the De Gaulle regime in 1968 (and whose 50^th anniversary was being celebrated all over the media all last year).

So Red-Yellow convergence is taking place in a conflictual context pitting the traditionally hierarchical, vertical discipline of the CGT and other French labor organizations against the innovative, horizontal self-organization of the proudly autonomous Yellow Vests. The presence, observed in Montpellier and on the videos of the Feb. 5 event, of demonstrators with big red CGT badges on their Yellow Vests, is already significant. The fact that these Red-Yellow (Orange?) activists dare to openly display their independence within the tightly organized culture of the CGT is a sign of cracks opening in that bureaucratic structure through which imaginative wildcat initiatives may emerge.

Convergence is also developing from below, through mutual understanding. According to the investigative journalism site Médiapart (whose coverage of this event was superb) “a not very militant” CGT member who has been out with his Yellow Vest on the roundabouts and demonstrated every Saturday remarked that “there are lots of employees who can’t strike, who work in small shops and whose relations with their bosses are too direct. But they understand that the problem is big capital.”

In Paris, a young man up from Lognes with his wife (who had never before demonstrated) and his Yellow Vest group held out a CGT flyer showing a red arm and a yellow arm holding each others hand. He concluded: “Today may be the beginning of Chapter Two of our movement. We must all converge!”.

Two railroad workers on the Paris-East line share his hopes. “The CGT has always been a fighting union, we’re on the side of labor, not capital. Before taking a definite position on the Yellow Vests, we needed to wait to see how this movement was going to clarify its outlook. Now, their discussions and demands are interesting, indeed attractive, rather leftist,” they judged. “This movement has evolved on the ideological plane, the Yellow Vests have become conscious through their struggle. It’s time to converge, to join together.”

                                    Yellow Vests’ Self-Education in Action

Over time, the Yellow Vests’ objectives have indeed deepened, as evidenced by the evolution of the home-made signs at demonstrations, by lists of progressive demands from various local groups, and finally, at the end of Jan. 2018, by a Declaration (reproduced below) voted by a “General Assembly of General Assemblies” attended by Yellow Vests mandated by some 75 different local groups. A second Assembly, bringing together many more groups, is being prepared as the Yellow Vests structure themselves in a loose federation and learn to represent themselves through delegates selected (always one woman and one man) with limited mandates and subject to recall (the system of the Paris Commune of 1871).

The Commercy Declaration defines their goals as “dignity,” an “end to inequality,” “free public services,” “higher” salaries, retirements, etc., taxing the super-rich to pay for them and the restructuring of France as a participatory democracy through referendums. At the same time, in response to charges by Macron, the media, and any number of groups on the far Left, The Yellow Vests Declaration declares: “we are neither racist, nor sexist, nor homophobic, we are proud to come together with our differences to build a society of solidarity.” Although this radical Declaration is not a binding program, it expresses a consensus and has been quickly adopted by many Yellow Vest groups, who are looking forward to a larger nationwide Assembly of Assemblies in two months.

The investigative site Médiapart sent two reporters up to Commercy after the Assembly of Assemblies and filmed their conversations with a couple of dozen local Yellow Vests, giving us an intimate view of how this diverse group interacts and makes decisions – a long process of patience, respect, tolerance, and conscious self-education. They explain how each individual brings pieces of the truth from her/his knowledge and experience, from which a consensus is achieved. (Or not achieved, on subjects where they are not ready to decide and sweep under the rug until they are).

The atmosphere is one of trust and comradeship and active listening. Interventions are short and to the point. Viewing the video, I was struck by the contrast between the locals’ discourse and that of the two academic sociologists, both charming and well intentioned, who tended to go on and on and talk over each other, adding very little. The local Yellow Vests, whatever their education levels, have all learned to express themselves in public succinctly, and some have become quite eloquent. Linked by common struggle, pooling their knowledge, they are tapping into “the Wisdom of Crowds” long known to socialists and recently studied by psychologists.

They also have fun and laugh a lot. For example, here in Montpellier, the first report on the Agenda of last Sunday’s General Assembly was on the question of how to curse and insult the “forces or order” (cops). The rapporteur went through a whole list of insults which, like “cocksucker” are offensive to gays, or women, or sex itself. It was both hilarious and instructive. He the proposed a number of really nasty, but politically correct insults, and his report was approved by the group. This Saturday we are going to demonstrate wearing masks, to mock the government’s vicious liberticidal anti-demonstration laws which criminalize covering your face.

                                                Macron’s Throne Is Shaky

As for Macron, his popularity hovering around 22% thanks to his regal pretentions, inflexible neo-liberal orthodoxy, methodical use of violence to suppress the expression of legitimate citizen grievances and criticism, and his contemptuous way of talking down to his angry subjects. This figure is slightly above the 18% of the 2017 Presidential vote he got on the first round, before being elected as the only alternative to “the fascist LePen.” Compare this with approval of the Yellow Vests, which stands at 77%. The French hate nothing worse than being talked down to and taken for jerks, and Macron is his own worst enemy, for example when he declared that the presumably lazy French had “lost the taste for effort” – when more than half of them are breaking their backs just to survive.

Macron’s latest ploy is the “Great Debate,” a public-relations charade designed to counter the Notebooks of Grievances being circulated by the Yellow Vests in imitation of the Cahiers de Doléances of the 1789 Revolution. The “Great Debate” consists of a serious of programmed meetings between Macron or one of his Ministers and the elected Mayors of a region. Hardly democratic considering how many mayors are the tools of local real estate interests and political mafias. Nonetheless, some mayors are actually honest and sincere, and at the very first televised “Debate,” the first mayor to take the floor made a searing critique of Macron and his handling of the crisis. Now questions are filtered in advance. Whom does Macron think he’s fooling?

Curiously, the French public intellectuals and philosophers, who occupy a much larger space in the media than their American counterparts, have mostly turned a cold shoulder to the Yellow Vests. If I’m not mistaken, only two have seriously take up their defense: the popular libertarian philosopher Michel Onfray (author of 100 books) and the historian-anthopologist-essayist Emmanuel Todd. They alone carry on the contrarian tradition of Voltaire, Zola and Sartre into the 21^st Century, our epoch in which the mediatized intellectuals, like the media personalities, the media owners, the politicians and the labor leaders have all become integral parts of what the French call “the political class.”

Meanwhile, Macron is traveling outside of France and playing a role in international affairs to deflect from the intractable crisis at home, while the media keep up a business as usual façade, respectfully reporting the Great Debate and reducing the Yellow Vest insurrection to a weekly tally of the number of demonstrators (aren’t they declining yet?), the number of arrests and of cars burnt. I suppose that like frightened little kids, the French elites think that if they hide their eyes all these angry little people will go away, but they won’t. What will Act XIII (or Chapter Two) reveal?

APPENDIX:

Call from the First Assembly of Assemblies of the Yellow Vests

We, the Yellow Vests of the roundabouts, of the parking lots, of the squares, of the assemblies, rallies and demonstrations, have gathered on January 26 and 27, 2019, as an "Assembly of Assemblies," bringing together a hundred delegations, in response to a call by the Yellow Vests of Commercy.

Since November 17, from the smallest village, from the rural world to the largest city, we have risen up against this deeply violent, unjust and unbearable society. We will no longer let ourselves be pushed around! We are rebelling against the high cost of living, precariousness and poverty. For our loved ones, our families and our children, we want only to live in dignity. It's unacceptable that 26 billionaires own as much as half of humanity. Let's share the wealth and not the poverty! Let's put an end to social inequality! We demand an immediate increase in wages, social minima, allowances and pensions; the unconditional right to housing and health, to education; and free public services for all.

It is for all these rights that we are occupying roundabouts on a daily basis, that we organize actions and demonstrations, that we discuss everywhere. With our yellow vests we retake the floor, we who have never had it.

And how has the government responded?  With repression, contempt, denigration. Many dead and thousands wounded, massive use of firearms that mutilate, blind, injure and traumatize. More than 1,000 individuals have been arbitrarily detained and sentenced. And now the new "anti-wrecker" law is applied to stop us from demonstrating. We condemn all such violence against protesters, whether from the police or violent gangs. None of this will stop us! To demonstrate is a fundamental right. End impunity for the police! Amnesty for all the victims of repression!

And what a dirty trick is the so-called great national debate - in fact it's just a government propaganda campaign that manipulates our desire to debate and decide! True democracy, as we practice it in our assemblies, in our roundabouts, is neither on television nor in the fake roundtables organized by Macron.

After having insulted us and treated us as less than nothing, now he points to us as a hateful fascistic and xenophobic mob. But we are quite the opposite: neither racist, nor sexist, nor homophobic, we are proud to come together with our differences to build a society of solidarity.

We are strengthened by the diversity of our discussions. At this very moment hundreds of assemblies are developing and proposing their own demands. These concern real democracy, social and tax justice, working conditions, ecological and climatic justice, and the end of discrimination. Among the claims and strategic proposals that are the most debated, we find: the eradication of poverty in all its forms, the transformation of institutions (citizen's initiative referenda, constituent assembly, abolition of the privileges of elected officials ...), the ecological transition (energy injustice, industrial pollution ...), the equality and the taking into account of all regardless of their nationality (people with disabilities, male/female equality, an end to the neglect of popular neighborhoods, the rural world and the DOM-TOM [overseas territories] ...).

We, the Yellow Vests, invite everyone to join us with their own means and abilities. We call for continuation of the acts of protest (act 12, against police violence at the police stations; acts 13, 14 ...), to continue the occupations of the roundabouts and the economic blockades, to build a massive strike starting on February 5th. We call for committees to be formed at workplaces, at schools and everywhere else so that this strike can be built from the bottom up by the strikers themselves. Let's take things into our own! Do not remain alone - join us!

Let's organize ourselves in a democratic, autonomous and independent way! This assembly of assemblies is an important step that enables us to discuss our demands and our means of action. Let us federate to transform society!

We urge all Yellow Vests to circulate this call. If as a group of Yellow Vests you agree, add your signature and send it to Commercy (assembledesassemblees@gmail.com). Do not hesitate to discuss and formulate proposals for the next "Assemblies of the Assemblies," which we are preparing for right now. Down with Macron - power to the people, for the people and by the people!

3182. The Global Synamic of Obesity, Undernutrition, and Climate Change: The Lancet Commission Report

By Prof Boyd A Swinburn, MD Vivica I Kraak, PhD Prof Steven Allender, PhDVincent J Atkins Phillip I Baker, PhDJessica R Bogard, PhDHannah BrinsdenAlejandro CalvilloProf Olivier De Schutter, PhDRaji DevarajanProf Majid Ezzati, FMedSciProf Sharon Friel, PhDShifalika Goenka, PhDRoss A Hammond, PhDProf Gerard Hastings, PhDProf Corinna Hawkes, PhDMario Herrero, PhDProf Peter S Hovmand, PhDProf Mark Howden, PhDLindsay M Jaacks, PhDAriadne B Kapetanaki, PhDMatt Kasman, PhDProf Harriet V Kuhnlein, PhDProf Shiriki K Kumanyika, PhDProf Bagher Larijani, MDTim Lobstein, PhD Michael W Long, PhDVictor K R Matsudo, MDSusanna D H Mills, PhDGareth Morgan, PhDAlexandra Morshed, Patricia M Nece, JDProf An Pan, PhDDavid W PattersonGary Sacks, PhDMeera Shekar, PhDGeoff L SimmonsWarren Smit, PhDAli Tootee, PhDStefanie Vandevijvere, PhDWilma E Waterlander, PhDLuke Wolfenden, PhDProf William H Dietz, MD, The Lancet, January 29, 2019 

Geography of obesity

Geography of malnutrition

Abstract. Malnutrition in all its forms, including obesity, undernutrition, and other dietary risks, is the leading cause of poor health globally. In the near future, the health effects of climate change will considerably compound these health challenges. Climate change can be considered a pandemic because of its sweeping effects on the health of humans and the natural systems we depend on (ie, planetary health). These three pandemics—obesity, undernutrition, and climate change—represent The Global Syndemic that affects most people in every country and region worldwide. They constitute a syndemic, or synergy of epidemics, because they co-occur in time and place, interact with each other to produce complex sequelae, and share common underlying societal drivers. This Commission recommends comprehensive actions to address obesity within the context of The Global Syndemic, which represents the paramount health challenge for humans, the environment, and our planet in the 21st century.

For the full text click here. 

3181. Bees Can Do Basic Arithmetic

By Science Daily, February 6, 2019

Building on their finding that honeybees can understand the concept of zero, Australian and French researchers set out to test whether bees could perform arithmetic operations like addition and subtraction.

Solving maths problems requires a sophisticated level of cognition, involving the complex mental management of numbers, long-term rules and short term working memory.

The revelation that even the miniature brain of a honeybee can grasp basic mathematical operations has implications for the future development of Artificial Intelligence, particularly in improving rapid learning.

Led by researchers from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, the new study showed bees can be taught to recognise colours as symbolic representations for addition and subtraction, and that they can use this information to solve arithmetic problems.

RMIT's Associate Professor Adrian Dyer said numerical operations like addition and subtraction are complex because they require two levels of processing.

"You need to be able to hold the rules around adding and subtracting in your long-term memory, while mentally manipulating a set of given numbers in your short-term memory," Dyer said.

"On top of this, our bees also used their short-term memories to solve arithmetic problems, as they learned to recognise plus or minus as abstract concepts rather than being given visual aids.

"Our findings suggest that advanced numerical cognition may be found much more widely in nature among non-human animals than previously suspected.

"If maths doesn't require a massive brain, there might also be new ways for us to incorporate interactions of both long-term rules and working memory into designs to improve rapid AI learning of new problems."

There is considerable debate around whether animals know or can learn complex number skills.

Many species can understand the difference between quantities and use this to forage, make decisions and solve problems. But numerical cognition, such as exact number and arithmetic operations, requires a more sophisticated level of processing.

Previous studies have shown some primates, birds, babies and even spiders can add and/or subtract. The new research, published in Science Advances, adds bees to that list.

A school for bees? How the honeybees were trained

The experiment, conducted by PhD researcher Scarlett Howard in the Bio Inspired Digital Sensing-Lab (BIDS-Lab) at RMIT, involved training individual honeybees to visit a Y-shaped maze.

The bees received a reward of sugar water when they made a correct choice in the maze, and received a bitter-tasting quinine solution if the choice was incorrect.

Honeybees will go back to a place if the location provides a good source of food, so the bees returned repeatedly to the experimental set-up to collect nutrition and continue learning.

When a bee flew into the entrance of the maze they would see a set of elements, between 1 to 5 shapes.

The shapes were either blue, which meant the bee had to add, or yellow, which meant the bee had to subtract.

After viewing the initial number, the bee would fly through a hole into a decision chamber where it could choose to fly to the left or right side of the maze.

One side had an incorrect solution to the problem and the other side had the correct solution of either plus or minus one. The correct answer was changed randomly throughout the experiment to avoid bees learning to visit just one side of the maze.

At the beginning of the experiment, bees made random choices until they could work out how to solve the problem. Eventually, over 100 learning trials that took 4 to 7 hours, bees learned that blue meant +1, while yellow meant -1. The bees could then apply the rules to new numbers.

Scarlett Howard said the ability to do basic maths has been vital in the flourishing of human societies historically, with evidence that the Egyptians and Babylonians used arithmetic around 2000BC.

"These days, we learn as children that a plus symbol means you need to add two or more quantities, while a minus symbol means you subtract," she said.

"Our findings show that the complex understanding of maths symbols as a language is something that many brains can probably achieve, and helps explain how many human cultures independently developed numeracy skills."

Journal Reference:

1. Scarlett R. Howard, Aurore Avarguès-Weber, Jair E. Garcia, Andrew D. Greentree, Adrian G. Dyer. Numerical cognition in honeybees enables addition and subtraction. Science Advances, 2019; 5 (2): eaav0961 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aav0961

3180. Fish Appear to Recognize Themselves in the Mirror

By Science Daily, February 7, 2019

A species of fish, the cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus), responds to its reflection and attempts to remove marks on its body during the mirror test -- a method held as the gold standard for determining if animals are self-aware. The finding, publishing on February 7 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, suggests that fish might possess far higher cognitive powers than previously thought, and ignites a high-stakes debate over how we assess the intelligence of animals that are so unlike ourselves.

The study's researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology (MPIO) and Osaka City University (OCU), say that their results provide clear evidence of behaviours that appear to pass through all phases of the mirror test, but that the interpretation of what these mean is less clear: Does a 'pass' mark in the mirror test demonstrate that fish possess self-awareness -- a cognitive trait thought only to be present in primates and some other mammals? Or can the mirror test be solved by very different cognitive processes than previously thought?

"The behaviours we observe leave little doubt that this fish behaviourally fulfils all criteria of the mirror test as originally laid out. What is less clear is whether these behaviours should be considered as evidence that fish are self-aware -- even though in the past these same behaviours have been interpreted as self-awareness in so many other animals," says Dr Alex Jordan, senior author on the study.

The ability to perceive and recognise a reflected mirror image as self (mirror self-recognition) is considered a hallmark of cognition across species. To test for this phenomenon in fish, the researchers applied the classic 'mark' test to the cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus) -- a marine fish best known for its behaviour of "cleaning" external parasites from client fish -- by placing a coloured mark on fish in a location that can only be seen in a mirror reflection. In order to gain a 'pass', the test requires that the animal must touch or investigate the mark, demonstrating that it perceives the reflected image as itself. This is clearly a challenge for animals such as fish that lack limbs and hands.

The researchers observed that fish attempted to remove the marks by scraping their bodies on hard surfaces after viewing themselves in the mirror. Fish never attempted to remove transparent marks in the presence of a mirror, or coloured marks when no mirror was present -- suggesting that marked fish were responding to the visual cue of seeing the mark on themselves in the mirror. Further, unmarked fish did not attempt to remove marks from themselves when interacting with a marked fish across a clear divider, nor did they attempt to remove marks placed on the mirror itself -- suggesting that fish were not innately reacting to a mark resembling an ectoparasite anywhere in the environment, for instance due to hard-wired feeding responses.

Dr Jordan acknowledges the controversial nature of the study, saying: "Depending on your position, you might reject the interpretation that these behaviours in a fish satisfy passing the test at all. But on what objective basis can you do this when the behaviours they show are so functionally similar to those of other species that have passed the test?"

The PLOS Biology editors also recognized the potential for controversy, and commissioned an accompanying commentary from Professor Frans de Waal, a leading primatologist at Emory University who has studied mirror self-recognition in mammals. While de Waal finds the fish study intriguing, he urges caution in interpreting it. In doing so, he calls for less black-and-white approach to animal self-awareness. "What if self-awareness develops like an onion, building layer upon layer, rather than appearing all at once?" asks de Waal. "To explore self-awareness further, we should stop looking at responses to the mirror as its litmus test. Only with a richer theory of the self and a larger test battery will we be able to determine all of the various levels of self-awareness, including where exactly fish fit in."

Journal Reference:

1. Masanori Kohda, Takashi Hotta, Tomohiro Takeyama, Satoshi Awata, Hirokazu Tanaka, Jun-ya Asai, Alex L. Jordan. If a fish can pass the mark test, what are the implications for consciousness and self-awareness testing in animals? PLOS Biology, 2019; 17 (2): e3000021 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000021

3179. After the Storm: Progress and the Demented Quest for Historical Purity

By Ben Ehrenreich, The Baffler, February 2019

American Progress by John Gast, 1872, Library of Congress. It depicts Manifest Destiny. 

Late in November 1939, Walter Benjamin an unemployed Jewish writer who had been residing in Paris, was released from a makeshift prison camp for German nationals housed in a disused chateau near the city of Nevers, in central France. He had been confined there for nearly three months since Hitler had invaded Poland, leading France to declare war on Germany. Influential friends were able to secure Benjamin’s release. He returned to his one-room, seventh-story flat in Paris and, as Europe tumbled into war, began writing what would become his final work, the twenty paragraph-length fragments that together form the “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”

The “Theses” is an essay of lasting strangeness, dense and elliptical, intended, per Benjamin’s biographer, Bernd Witte, “as a fundamental consideration of the essence of historical time.” Yet for all its abstraction, much of it feels depressingly topical. In one fragment, Benjamin expresses scorn for the “current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century.” As if to prove his point, well into the twenty-first, with fascism on the creep from Washington and Brasilia through the capitals of Europe, we find ourselves astonished once again: How can this still be happening? 

Then as now, Benjamin would argue, the problem—one of them anyway—was and is an unexamined faith in a highly irrational notion, one that blinds us to facts and conditions that would otherwise be obvious—and that, against all evidence opposing it, continues to inform the shape of our thoughts and the contours of our political discourse. In short, we are in thrall to the fetish of progress: the belief that history has a direction and a purpose, the faith that humankind is ascending a steady if circuitous route to greater and greater perfection.

Against this creed, Benjamin posed a curious interpretation of a then-obscure drawing by Paul Klee, one he had splurged to buy in 1922 and had hung like an amulet on the wall of every apartment in which he lived. It depicted an angel. Its wings were spread, its head spun all the way around so that it stared backward at the viewer. Thus, Benjamin wrote, was the “angel of history” propelled into the future while facing the past: “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” The angel is pushed onward, he went on, by a terrible storm. “This storm is what we call progress.”

By 1940, when Benjamin was forced to flee his last apartment in Paris, the notion of progress had for more than a century provided the dominant narrative that allowed Europeans to understand themselves. The always imperiled edifice of Western civilization—the far-right’s fears today are not so different from the far-right’s fears 80 or 160 years ago—is unimaginable without it. Progress described for Europeans their past, their position on the path that carried them into the future, and their relation to everyone else on the planet. It created an easy hierarchy into which every time, every place, and every people could be slotted. By the mid-nineteenth century, faith in progress was already so ubiquitous as to be largely invisible to its adherents, whether they counted themselves revolutionaries or traditionalists and whether they lived in Europe itself, in the rapidly expanding settlements in the Americas and Australia, or in colonial outposts in Africa and Asia. To question it with any seriousness was to marginalize yourself as a crank, a heretic, or a fool. In the European imagination—which increasingly operated in racial terms, understanding itself as white—progress defined the world.

The Flouring of Humanity

Despite its pretensions to cosmic immutability, the idea of progress in the West has a legible history—one bound from the outset to conquest, and to fantasies of racial dominance. Its first explicit articulation is generally agreed to have appeared in a speech delivered in 1750 by the brilliant political economist Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, then just twenty-three. It is surely no coincidence that an early evangelist of economic liberty—“All branches of commerce ought to be free, equally free, and entirely free,” he wrote in 1773—would also be the first to lay out the ideology that would everywhere accompany the spread of capitalism.

Turgot would have ample opportunity to test his economic theories, if not his conviction that mankind was destined to shed its every flaw. In 1774, serving as the controller-general of finances under Louis XVI, he issued an edict abolishing all restrictions regulating the trade of grain in France. That year’s harvest was poor. Merchants, freed from laws that had outlawed stockpiling, hoarded wheat to drive up prices. Famine ensued. Riots broke out. In an uprising that later historians would view as a prelude to the French Revolution, crowds, many of them led by women, forced landowners and merchants to sell their grain at prices they deemed reasonable. The Flour War, as it would be known, ended with a fierce repression. The government called in twenty-five thousand troops. By 1776, court intrigues would lead to Turgot’s dismissal, and his reforms were soon reversed. Perhaps he was lucky. Turgot died a private man, of gout, twelve years before the monarch met the guillotine.

His quiet demise, at any rate, makes for a dramatic contrast with his quasi- millennial visions of the prospects for human improvement—so long as the humanity in question was white and European. At the very beginning of the lecture in question, “A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind,” Turgot made a surprising move. Once he’d laid out the key difference between the sort of time that governs humankind and that which governs nature—unending fealty to the cyclical rule of death and regeneration in the latter case, while human events succeed one another in a linear and “ever-changing spectacle” as the species lurches from “infancy” to “greater perfection”—he evoked the specter of “the Americans.” They put in their appearance on the second page. He was not thinking of the well-armed citizens of the current American polity, but of the original inhabitants of the hemisphere, whose presence posed something of a problem. If history was to be narrated as the story of the growing perfection of mankind, how to explain all those who seemed to lag behind, the tribes of so-called primitives scattered across the jungles, plains, and desert wastes?

We might think that progress is a way of thinking about history, and hence about time, but very nearly the first thing Turgot did was transpose time onto space by summoning the Americas as the place of the past. He explained the apparently uneven development of humankind and the anachronistic existence of the people he regarded as savages as a result of naturally occurring inequalities: “Nature, distributing her gifts unequally, has given to certain minds an abundance of talent which she has refused to others.” Differing environmental circumstances allowed those original talents to develop at different rates, “and it is from the infinite variety of circumstances that there springs the inequality in the progress of nations.”

We the Supreme

Before it was anything else, progress was a doctrine of supremacy—a fresh new faith for a rising era of unchallenged European dominance, a way of celebrating European hegemony by anchoring it in time, and rendering Europe, and specifically Bourbon France, the very apotheosis of human achievement. In a parallel move three quarters of a century later, Hegel would claim that same honor for the Prussian monarchy. “World history travels from east to west,” he declared, “for Europe is the absolute end of history, just as Asia is the beginning.” One-and-a-half centuries after that, thinkers like Francis Fukuyama would advance much the same claim for an empire still further to the west—American liberal democracy in its most aggressively capitalist guise in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. As an ideology of over-confident elites, progress would prove itself remarkably resilient.

It’s worth recalling, though, that even in their earliest, most self-regarding rhapsodies, the initial prophets of progress had to ignore an enormous share of countervailing evidence. The first Europeans to lay eyes on the great cities of the Americas, for example, did not see them as Turgot did. Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru, wrote to King Charles V that the Inca capital of Cuzco, which Pizarro plundered and largely destroyed, “is so beautiful and has such fine buildings that it would be remarkable even in Spain.” Cortés apologized to the same monarch that he did not have the literary skills to adequately describe the marvels of Tenochtitlán, built across Lake Texcoco, its temples and wide causeways rising from the water, with fragrant gardens and great public squares and markets filled with endless riches. Cortés’s soldiers, his lieutenant Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote, “had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople, and all over Italy, and in Rome,” but they had never seen anything so wondrous as the Aztec city. “I stood looking at it, and thought that no land like it would ever be discovered in the whole world,” Díaz wrote. “But today all that I then saw is overthrown and destroyed; nothing is left standing.”

Issue Forth, Europe!

Just this past March, a team of British and Brazilian archaeologists published a paper about their discoveries of the remains of villages, roads, and fortified settlements long concealed by foliage in the Amazon, traces left by as many as a million people who nearly all disappeared at the same time—roughly when Europeans arrived on the continent. “Diseases traveled much faster than people,” the lead archaeologist told the Guardian. The Amazon’s population may have been largely wiped out before the Portuguese ever reached the area. Genocide helped too. The indigenous population of the Americas likely would fall by some 90 percent in the first 150 years after the conquest.

It’s a good trick, really, so seamlessly clever that Turgot and many millions since didn’t see it as a trick at all: allow biological agents to help you conquer half the world, slaughter and enslave whoever the microbes let live. You can then declare the hobbled remnants of the civilizations you have destroyed primitive and savage and interpret the degraded manner in which many of your victims survive as evidence of your inherent superiority, your right to rule over them and to continue to exploit them under cover of civilizing motives. As an ideology that put European culture at the pinnacle of human history and consigned everyone else to time’s lowland wastes, progress would function at once as an explanation of European dominance and a rationale for the slaughter and pillage on which it depended, and continues to depend. 

Turgot went on to sketch out a narrative that, with some modifications, would soon become widespread: the mantle of civilization passed from the once-great civilizations of Egypt, India, and China, all strangled by their own despotism, and onward, via the Phoenicians—in themselves mere “agents of exchanges between peoples”—to Greece and then Rome. This latter empire, a victim of its own descent into tyranny, “at last suddenly collapses” under the attacks of opportunistic hordes. The rise of Islam merited brief condemnation, almost parenthetically, as “a raging torrent which ravages the whole territory from the Indian frontiers to the Atlantic Ocean and the Pyrenees.” The glories of Baghdad and al-Andalus were passed over without comment, though Turgot acknowledged that Islamic scholars did perform the service of transmitting Europe’s past to its future by disseminating “the feeble sparks” of Greek wisdom that they had managed to preserve. That was all it took. “The treasures of antiquity, rescued from the dust . . . summon[ed] genius from the depths of its retreats. The time has come,” Turgot enthused. “Issue forth, Europe, from the darkness which covered thee!”

His discourse concluded with a paean to the king—not the one Turgot would later serve and who would still later lose his head in the Place de la Concorde, but his predecessor, also named Louis, who died in his bed in the palace at Versailles, of smallpox. “O Louis, what majesty surrounds thee!” Turgot crooned. “Century of Louis the Great, may your light beautify the precious reign of his successor! May it last for ever, may it extend over the world!”

God’s Perfect Children

It is now such a reflex to consider past civilizations stupid and superstitious—or stupider at least than we are—that it’s hard to imagine the relief that thinkers of Turgot’s era must have felt on unburdening themselves of the past, launching themselves into a limitless future. Previous generations of human beings on nearly every patch of the planet had regarded their ancestors with veneration—and what a drag it must have been to have to lug those old farts and all their dumb ideas everywhere, and always with a smile. Turgot’s jubilation broke through in his punctuation, and in the impatience of his syntax: “What ridiculous opinions marked our first steps! How absurd were the causes which our fathers thought up to make sense of what they saw! What sad monuments they are to the weakness of the human mind!”

The first thing he hastened to toss over was the notion that all things are alive and infused with divinity. This idea—then still pervasive in the animistic beliefs of conquered and not-yet-conquered peoples across the globe, in the folk beliefs of Europe and in the more pantheistic strands of its esoteric theologies—was, by Turgot’s reckoning, one of “those delusive analogies to which the first men in their immaturity abandoned themselves with so little thought.” Like children, Turgot explained, they imagined that all the things they perceived that “were independent of their own actions were produced by beings similar to them, but invisible and more powerful.” Thus, they supposed, superstitiously, “All objects of nature had their gods.” Against this, he allied himself, if only half-heartedly, to a sterile monotheism, nodding to the Christian deity later in the lecture, but only in passing, and without a shred of the enthusiasm that he brought to subjects such as Reason, Europe, and France. But the task of denuding the natural world of agency and divinity was apparently an important one, and could not be neglected. For the grand procession of progress to march, the stage had to first be cleared of rivals. All the world must be dead, and man alone alive, rushing to the glory of his fate.

This odd notion would show up again, and with even greater force, in the work of Turgot’s friend and biographer, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, better known as the Marquis de Condorcet. An ardent republican, Condorcet served during the early years of the Revolution as secretary of the Legislative Assembly until that body was dissolved, and the king dethroned, in 1792. In those days, surely, the world must have felt like it was ending, or beginning again. Condorcet welcomed its rebirth. He was at odds, though, with the Revolution’s most radical factions, and was sharply critical of the constitution drafted in June of 1793 by Robespierre and Saint-Just. In July, a warrant was issued for his arrest.

Condorcet would spend the next nine months in hiding, cooped up in a house on a small Parisian street just north of the Luxembourg Gardens. Three months into his confinement, he would be condemned to death in absentia. The Terror had begun. Despite these pressures, Condorcet continued to work on the text for which he would be best known, a book-length treatise of astonishing optimism entitled Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind. “The perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite,” he wrote in the introduction, and “the progress of this perfectibility . . . has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has placed us.”

He would not live to see the work published. Early in April of 1794, informed that his capture was imminent, Condorcet fled Paris. Two days later, bleeding from a wound on his leg, dirty and bedraggled from sleeping in the open, he walked into an inn in a village just outside the city. He ordered an omelet. When the proprietor asked how many eggs he wanted, Condorcet, who had presumably not eaten for days, aroused the suspicion of his host by answering, “a dozen”: only an aristocrat would presume to order an omelet of a dozen eggs. He was dragged to the prison in the commune of Bourg-la-Reine, which at the time was known as Bourg-l’Égalité, or, roughly, Equality-ville. Accounts vary, but either the following morning or the one after that, the Marquis de Condorcet was found dead on the floor of his cell.

While still in hiding in Paris, at work on the Outlines, confined to the rooms of the small house on Rue Servandoni, his country at war against most of Europe, hearing frequent news of the beheadings of friends and colleagues, Condorcet surely must have suspected that his own death, and not a pleasant one, was likely near. He nonetheless remained convinced, with a fervor that can only be described as ecstatic, that there was no other path for humankind than that of ever-increasing perfection. The final chapter of the text was devoted to forecasting the outlines of that bright future. Everyone on the planet, he predicted, would “one day arrive at the state of civilization attained by those people who are most enlightened, most free . . . as the French, for instance, and the Anglo-Americans.” This would mean an end to “the slavery of countries subjected to kings, the barbarity of African tribes, and the ignorance of savages.”

Condorcet was serenely confident that Europe held exclusive title to reason, peace, and justice despite the conflicts that had wracked the continent over the previous century—a seven- year war that had killed nearly a million just three decades earlier, the wars over the Austrian and Spanish successions that between them killed another million and a half—and despite the conflict into which it had recently been thrown. Europe had lit the way for humanity thus far, and so the continent was likewise destined to cut through all remaining darkness, leading the scattered people of the earth to a future without war or oppression or discrimination based on sex or tribal prejudice. Sanitation would improve, and nutrition, and medicine. Human lifespans would grow longer. One universal language would spread across the earth “and render error almost impossible.” Except for the language bit—English functions well enough—this is still the faith that fuels contemporary neoliberalism and the logic of “development”: the global extension of European ways, meaning open markets and liberal institutions, will spur technological improvements and improve the lot of all, indefinitely. One day the natives will thank us. It’s a powerful and alluring vision—at least for those who’ve appointed themselves as its lead administrators. Little wonder that Condorcet clung to it even as the world he knew was being washed away with blood.

The Biography of Races

Of course, there are blood sacrifices along every stage of the progress myth—though some stand out in especially high relief. In volume three of his monumental Black Athena, Martin Bernal wrote of the surprising discovery, in 1978, at Knossos, of ceramic pots, likely more than 3,600 years old, containing the dismembered remains of children. Their bones were scarred with knife marks. They had been butchered and, apparently, cooked. Nearby, archaeologists found pottery and amphorae decorated with shields and the head of a Gorgon, images associated with Athena. Others would be more cautious, but for Bernal the find confirmed that Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, “was associated with human, and especially child, sacrifice.”

In that volume, which is largely concerned with presenting linguistic evidence for the African and Asian heritage of ancient Greece—Classical Greek, by Bernal’s estimate, owes as much as 40 percent of its vocabulary to the Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic languages—Bernal also argued that Athena was a descendant of the Egyptian goddess Nēit and a near cousin to the Canaanite deity ’Anat. All three were powerful figures—bloodthirsty warriors “of renewable virginity,” as Bernal put it. All three were associated with weaving and birds of prey: Nēit with vultures, ’Anat with eagles, Athena with the owl. Plato and Herodotus both attested to Athena’s identity with Nēit. Inscriptions in Cyprus, where Athena and ’Anat shared a temple, equated the two deities.

“There are no simple origins,” Bernal cautioned. It is never a question of a direct and singular genetic inheritance, of roots leading up a trunk and bifurcating into branches. Human history, he suggested, is more like a river, splitting off into tributaries, merging and diverging again and again. Or perhaps like a crowd, joining arms and letting go, splitting into smaller groups that at times reach out to clasp hands with one another. The worship of Nēit would be largely subsumed by a cult to Isis, the veneration of whom would in turn be transferred to the Virgin Mary. ’Anat, whose worship may have involved the sacrifice of virgins, was in northwest Syria regarded as the sister and sometimes the consort of Ba’al, one of the primary gods in the Canaanite pantheon, who was alternately adored and rejected by the ancient Israelites. Archaeological evidence uncovered on the Nile island of Elephantine, in the contemporary Egyptian city of Aswan, suggests that an isolated community of Jewish mercenaries living there in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C. worshiped ’Anat as the “Queen of Heaven” and the consort of Yahweh, who was regarded by other contemporary Jews as the one and only god. Behind and beside any One there is always an other, and behind each of those wait many more.

Bernal’s larger argument was not about ’Anat or Athena or even language, but about the making of history itself. (Black Athena, it should be said, sparked a furious controversy. Many of Bernal’s etymological claims have been discredited, but his broader historiographical argument has held up quite well and, in some cases has been confirmed by the outsized fury of his conservative critics.) Until the early nineteenth century, he proposed, there was little controversy about the debts Greek culture owed to Africa and to points farther east. During the Renaissance revival of Greek thought, “no one questioned the fact that the Greeks had been the pupils of the Egyptians.” Throughout the Enlightenment, too, European intellectuals were openly fascinated by Egypt.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, though, a new paradigm took hold of Europe. It arose, not coincidentally, as European economies reconfigured themselves around the by-then steady flow of wealth from the Americas, most of it procured through the labor of African and indigenous slaves. This wealth, and the quick pace of technological change that followed in its wake, only served to validate the ever-deeper conviction in the superiority of European civilization. All that exploitation had to be justified somehow; or if not justified, disguised. History was reconceived, in Bernal’s words as “the biography of races,” a narrative subject to the laws of something called progress.

If Europe represented the mature stage of human development, it would need a lineage. Since the genealogically obsessed tend to favor purity, it would help if its ancestry suffered as little admixture as possible. Greece—whose natives were unquestionably European, famously clever, and passably fair-skinned—would be elevated. The Greeks would be reinvented to match the most flattering self-image that Europeans could muster: a people supremely rational and wise, with the stubborn independence of a noble race, uniquely capable of self-governance, and mercilessly strong when justice and necessity demanded it.

That this image would not have been recognized by either the Greeks’ contemporaries or by the inhabitants of the continents being mowed under by “Western civilization” was irrelevant to the larger project of historical reclamation. Plato and Aeschylus became the heritage of the English, the Germans, and far-flung white Americans. Greek joined Latin as an indispensable part of the education of the European elite. Classics emerged as a discipline. By the early nineteenth century, wrote Bernal, it had become “increasingly intolerable that Greece—which was seen by the Romantics not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood—could be the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites.”

Egypt, until recently the object of admiration and awe, would now be “flung into prehistory to serve as a solid and inert basis for the dynamic development of the superior races, the Aryans and the Semites.” As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the Semites, too, would be tossed out in a hurry. All Phoenician and Canaanite influence on Greece, and any evidence of substantive cultural exchange with the cultures of Mesopotamia and the Levant, which had until recently been considered uncontroversially obvious, would become suspect. Except to the undeniable degree to which Christianity was inconceivable without them, the Jews would also be largely crowded out. Thus was established what the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand calls “the mythology of white continuity.”

One more thing about Athena. Homer customarily followed her name with the adjective glaukopis, which is usually translated as either “bright-eyed” or “grey-eyed” and holds a range of meanings from bright and flashing to blue, light grey, or even green. The point would likely have been lost on most early twentieth-century lovers of the classics, for whom fair eyes were an indicator of racial superiority. But for the Greeks, Bernal wrote, blue eyes were associated with ferocity, and with misfortune. “The paleness of Athena’s eyes,” he concluded, would have “added to the terror she inspired.”

The Hermetic Vanishing Trick

There is another way to think about the origins of progress. In the mid-1960s, the British historian Frances Yates began to document the influence of the Hermetic tradition on Renaissance thought: Hermetic as in Hermes Trismegistus—the mythic figure associated with the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth—to whom the varied writings grouped together as the Corpus Hermeticum were for centuries attributed. The god Hermes, whom the Greeks considered identical to Thoth, was a mediator between gods and mortals, a guide to the paths that stretch between us and the heavens. Hermes/Thoth was the messenger, the patron of travelers, thieves, and seekers. In his more ancient form, as Thoth, he was the scribe of the gods—at times depicted with the head of an ibis or the head of a baboon, or with the face of a dog on a baboon’s body. It was Thoth who brought hieroglyphs to humanity, and with them astronomy, medicine, botany, mathematics, gifts of all the many forms of knowledge of the cosmos.

His supposed heir, Hermes Trismegistus, or “Thrice Great Hermes,” was likewise a sort of gateway between divine wisdom and human ignorance, passing on wisdom that had been lost for generations, and illuminating the secret pathways that access the divine. In The City of God, Augustine wrote that Hermes Trismegistus lived “long before the sages and philosophers of Greece,” and was a grandson of the god Hermes and hence a distant cousin of Prometheus, who stole fire from Zeus and presented it as a gift to mankind, just as Thoth had given us writing. The actual Hermetic texts are a diverse bunch, and not nearly as old as Augustine supposed, though Cosimo de’ Medici did not know that when, in about 1460, he had them brought to Florence from the monastery in Macedonia where his agents had discovered them. Cosimo ordered Marsilio Ficino to translate them as quickly as possible into Latin. He already had Ficino working on a translation of the complete works of Plato. Put that aside, he told him, and do this one first. Cosimo was old, and wanted to read the fabled Hermes Trismegistus before he died; Plato mattered less.

The texts themselves were likely composed by several different authors from the middle of the first to the end of the third century A.D. They were written in Greek but were likely composed in Egypt. In them theology, cosmology, magic, and the seeds of what we would now call science—astronomy, medicine, botany, mathematics—are inseparably linked. Together, Yates argued over the course of her career, they form a hidden and much-repressed current that in various ways informed many of the great minds of the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment: from Bruno, Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola to Bacon, Leibniz, and Newton. In other words, the proudest treasure of what we persist in calling Western Civilization, its tradition of empirical and critical reason, was until the eighteenth century in fruitful and more or less constant conversation with esoteric works of Egyptian, gnostic mysticism attributed to the grandson of a trickster god.

In the years that followed, this lineage would be meticulously erased. The strands of thought and belief with which it had fruitfully intersected—Jewish and Christian mystical traditions, Paracelsian alchemy, Neoplatonist philosophy—would be marginalized and mocked. Just over a decade after Newton’s death, the German historian Johann Jakob Brucker published a monumental and influential history of philosophy, the first of its kind, in which he characterized the Hermetic texts—as well as Kabbalah and Neoplatonism—as Philosophia Barbarica. They were, to Brucker, corrupt, pagan superstitions that stood opposed to the eminently rational history of Christian, European truth-seeking. Many of the entries in Diderot’s Encyclopedia would be cribbed straight from Brucker, whose ideas were smuggled hence into the heart of the French Enlightenment.

This was the same historical moment when the grand narrative of progress, that glorious arc of Reason that had traveled to Paris and London from Athens and Rome, was beginning to take shape—as well as the critical interval at which, as Bernal documented, the Greeks were being elevated and all traces of Africa erased. Brucker’s work had been published in Latin by 1744, the Encylopedia beginning in 1751, Turgot’s “A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind” in 1750. For most of the next two centuries, the texts of the Hermetic corpus would be consigned to the forbidden and derided margins. To take them seriously got you labeled an occultist, a swindler, or a quack. Like a forgotten continent, the Hermetic corpus would not be rediscovered until the middle of the twentieth century, when Italian historians, and later Yates, began to rescue it from the disrepute into which it had been banished for so long.

But perhaps old thrice-great Hermes never really went away. Was not the very idea of progress also dependent on the conviction, shouted throughout the Hermetic corpus, that heaven is here for the taking and that humans, despite our mortal bodies, are in essence godly, capable of understanding all that exists, and even of sharing in the creative powers of the divine? “Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God,” the Hermetic texts advised, and then explained just how to do it: “Make yourself grow to a greatness beyond measure, by a bound free yourself from the body; raise yourself above all time, become Eternity; then you will understand God.” If that wasn’t easy enough, the text went on: “Believe that nothing is impossible for you, think yourself immortal and capable of understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being.”

This, even long after Hermes was banished, would remain the very creed underlying modern scientific endeavor: that all things could be known and all of nature mastered, that mankind, or at least some civilized subset thereof, was marching on a path toward perfection. He—and until very recently, it was always only he—could understand the behavior of the farthest stars, the nuclei of cells and the viscera of atoms, the nature of tortoises and finches, and also of the unfortunate savages who could not walk this path unaided. He could construct a society in which justice reigned and human beings lived, like gods, as equals. This vision, or what little spark of it remained, would not only be a cudgel for empire. How can we imagine any revolutionary faith without it—and not just faith but practice?

Redemption Song

For Walter Benjamin at least, refusing to be blinded by the false promises of progress did not mean that hope was lost. It meant that one could begin to see. Even at the very end, Benjamin believed that the past contains within it an orientation toward its own redemption. This is perhaps less mystical than it sounds. He understood the present—what he called the “time of the now”—to be pregnant with all that has come before, each moment containing within it, “in an enormous abridgment,” the entirety of the past. The past is not inert. It calls out, clamoring for redress. It exists in the present as demand. The “time of the now,” he wrote, is “shot through with chips of Messianic time.” If eternity, all the past and every future, flits through every moment, then we can grab it there. In other words, right here.

For Benjamin this could only be a political act. It meant overturning any structures that relied on the exploitation of labor—which is to say not only our sweat and our skills but our time, being in all its divinity as it pulses through our veins—or on the “mastery of nature,” which was, he suggested, of a piece with any other form of exploitation. And it meant rejecting the slumbrous fantasy that history will carry us to some better land. It would not. Time had to be “blasted out” and history blasted open. Only then could it be redeemed, and with it, us.

This was not, for Benjamin, a choice. It wasn’t that redemption lay behind some distant gate at the end of a path that we could choose not to walk, or that there were other, smoother and easier roads that we might take with less effort, on which we might nonetheless survive. Then, as now, the only other way led to extinction.

In June of 1940, shortly after Benjamin completed the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” German troops entered Paris. Benjamin fled to Lourdes and then Marseilles. He left a copy of the “Theses” with his friend Hannah Arendt, another German Jewish philosopher who was, like him, hoping to escape to the United States by way of Portugal. That September, Benjamin made it as far as the sleepy town of Port Bou, on the Spanish side of the border with France. He was welcomed with neither hospitality nor mercy. Local police informed him that he would be escorted back to the border the following morning and delivered to the French authorities—and thence, almost certainly, to the Gestapo. Benjamin, ill and exhausted, despaired. Alone in his hotel room, he swallowed an overdose of morphine tablets. His body remains in Port Bou, in a cemetery carved high into a bluff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

Hannah Arendt made it out. She and her husband were allowed to leave France and to pass through Spain into Portugal, where they spent three months stranded in Lisbon. They passed the hours reading Benjamin’s words aloud to one another, and to the small group of refugees who had gathered there, waiting to sail to safety, on the edge of a crumbling world.