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Introduction   Recent scholarship on early photography examines the photograph as primary source material in order to identify and explore ‘veins of influence’ that operate on, through, and from it. The ‘veins of influence’ analysis developed in that research brings us, whether as professional creatives, academics, or other participants, into dialogue with the photograph. Through such engagement, we become active participants in and agents of influence, shaping how these early images continue to exert influence in both the contemporary and future contexts.[1]   As creative professionals, we bear a responsibility to the image, and primarily to the persons, communities, and cultures represented within the frame. How should we define that responsibility? What are the elements that we should consider in order to create ‘fair and responsible’ re-presentation, and thus better ensure a ‘fair and responsible’ influence of such images in the contemporary context, given what we know now? This responsibility necessarily extends to how we curate, exhibit, publish, digitise, catalogue, and otherwise present these images or maintain them for engagement.   This updated approach and revised discourse are especially important when the subjects involved are long gone, belong to shrinking communities, or otherwise lack a voice to contribute to the conversation and advocate for themselves. An optimal outcome of the fair and responsible treatment of these early photographs would be a re-evaluation of how, for example, Sri Lanka’s Vedda community is represented, to now improve engagement, fulfil unmet promises, and build meaningful dialogue that includes them in processes of community building and self-determination. The same images that once cast damaging shadows over this community, relegating them to positions of unimportance and primitiveness, have arguably contributed to their ongoing marginalisation. The way these images portrayed them in the past denied them the chance for progress. A retelling of that past, along with a re-assessment of the photographic documentation to present a more balanced narrative, would serve to celebrate Vedda identity in a respectful and empowering manner.   Through a case study of an extensive collection of early twentieth-century photographs of Sri Lanka’s Vedda community, taken by noted anthropologists Charles and Brenda Seligman, we will explore possible frameworks for what constitutes ‘fair and responsible’ re-presentation of these images today, in the many platforms which may potentially showcase them, including the physical gallery, digital feature, documentary review and record, and the archives. Respecting the principles espoused herein, this article will show photographs already in the public domain through the Seligmans’ own publication.   The Seligman Collection, comprising some 400 glass negatives and prints and now part of the British Museum’s collection, documents the Seligmans’ field research on the Veddas in 1908.[2] This body of work has not been examined in this manner before and remains largely unnamed and unnumbered.[3] The Seligmans published their findings in the seminal publication The Veddas , which includes 72 photographs from the Collection as illustrations.[4]   To provide a proper historical context for this Collection, we will begin with a brief review of British colonial presence in Ceylon and the role that early photography played there. We will examine period perspectives on the Veddas as reflected in writings by colonials and others. This review will shed light on the cultural context in which the Seligmans were operating, which likely influenced both their research approach and the visualizations, through the photographs they took and selected for their publication. We will then briefly analyse the Seligmans’ study itself, noting key aspects of their methodology, relevant findings, and the photographs. The photographic process that the Seligmans followed over a century ago differs significantly from contemporary visual anthropology practices. By comparing these approaches—albeit in broad strokes—we can understand how the field has developed and how these developments reflect on the subject matter. Such comparisons highlight the ethical and legal developments related to human rights and the preservation of cultural dignity, particularly in research. In this way, we can better inform our understanding of the processes needed to develop a framework for what might be considered a ‘fair and responsible’ re-presentation of the Collection images in a contemporary context.   Colonial Presence and Photographic Discourse   To understand the cultural context in which the Seligmans were operating, we need to consider the nature of British presence in Ceylon (since 1972 Sri Lanka), the colonial use of photography, and the prevailing perspectives on the Vedda community. Ceylon under the British contributed to the empire’s prime purposes of profit, power, and prestige. Propaganda about the colonial mission of civilising was an integral part of the colonial narrative, but the facts of the matter were somewhat different. As in India, so in Ceylon, there was a gap between the realities of imperial rule and the justifications of it which aimed to ward off criticism at home and among the colonial subjects. The administration’s approach to the Vedda community provides a clear example of this dissonance, with repeated efforts to ‘civilize’ and tame the community, which ultimately worked against Vedda interests and threatened their cultural existence.   Ceylon has a long history of occupation by conquerors and colonisers. From the early sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century, Ceylon was colonized in part, first by the Portuguese, then by the Dutch and finally by the British from 1802 until 1948, when the country gained its independence. [5]   The advent of photography conveniently coincided with the growth and consolidation of Britain’s empire, providing an impetus to the medium. Indeed,   [t]hrough means often complex and subtle, […] [photography] engaged viewers to look at the colonized through a pictorial dynamic of realist exoticism with varied results. Colonial photographs nonetheless often engender ambiguous and fluctuating relationships between the photographer or observer and the subject peoples and terrains.[6]    Frederick Fiebig’s 1850s salt print calotypes, now housed in the British Library, form the earliest known collection of ‘original’ (ie, not prints of originals) photographs of Ceylon. Other key commercial photographers operating in Ceylon in the mid-nineteenth century, either as travellers or through a more permanent presence on the island, included Samuel Bourne (Bourne & Shepherd), John Thompson, Joseph Lawton, Henry Cave, Colombo Apothecaries, AW Andree, Cyrus Koch, Henry Martin, Lawton & Co (Swaminathan Kandiah Lawton), Plate & Co, Scowen & Co, and Skeen & Co. Local photography studios tended to adopt standard classifications of photographic categories that included portraiture and ethnographical studies, often labelled as ‘native types’ or ‘racial studies’.[7] Gathering photographs under these broad headings helped to create ‘enduring markers’ of social status, religion, custom, ritual, ethnicity, and where various cultures stood in the indigenous hierarchies of high to low.[8]   Photographers found a ready market for portraits of the Veddas, indigenous people who wore few clothes. A notable example is the official album for the Royal Ophir Tour of the Duke and Dutchess of York in 1901, later King George V and Queen Mary, during which the couple visited Ceylon for a few days. That album features two images of Vedda men posed to show action with bows and arrows, and another of a cooking show. [9]     Early Writings on the Veddas   The earliest and much-referenced English-language account of the Veddas comes from Robert Knox’s 1680 publication, An Historical Relation of Ceylon . For centuries after, this work served as an important source of knowledge about Ceylon, including the Vedda community, and became a colonial classic, providing British leaders with new information about the island. Knox’s insights were based on nearly 20 years of captivity in Ceylon, during which he was in and out of ‘open’ jail, meaning he was allowed to roam the island freely. While his observations were undoubtedly shaped by his own prejudices, Knox was seen as providing an honest portrayal because he was perceived as a straightforward man who did not ‘dress the thought’. [10] Ironically, Knox’s account of the Vedda community became an authoritative reference, despite the fact that it was based purely on hearsay—Knox himself admitted to never having seen one of the ‘wild men’ he described. [11]  His depiction of a Vedda man, described by later commentator John Bailey as a ‘fancy portrait and decidedly flattering’, is evidence of his unfamiliarity with the community. [12]  Yet Knox’s account, though inaccurate, provided a detailed description of Vedda character, customs, property rights, diet, rituals, and clothing, and remains highly influential. Even the Seligmans credited him as the first to accurately describe the Veddas. [13]   By the mid- to late nineteenth century, further commentary on the Veddas emerged, mostly by colonial administrators who assumed the role of scholars due to their authority and access. One such administrator was John Bailey, who, based on his personal and repeated investigations, offered early ‘ground-truths’ about the Veddas. Bailey, who oversaw the Badulla region, home to the ‘most barbarous Vedda tribes’, took an interest in their habits and customs. [14]  He argued that the Veddas represented the ‘original’ and ‘pure’ indigenous man, focusing on the jungle-dwelling tribes because they maintained isolation from other races, thus preserving their supposed unique ‘peculiarities’. [15]  Like others of his time, Bailey also recorded the Veddas as intellectually inferior, stating that their frequent ‘perplexed’ manner was common among ‘people of weak intellect’. [16]   Around the same period, the Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland (founded in 1845) published a few articles on the Veddas. [17] These articles often repeated the ideas of previous writers like Knox and Bailey, with little grounding in field research. The earliest article, published in 1851 by Reverend J Gillings, already noted the perceived corruption of the ‘pure’ Vedda identity through intermarriage with the majority ethnic group, the Sinhalese, reflecting a concern among scholars that such assimilation would erase an opportunity to study this ‘rare and treasured human specimen’. [18]  Colonial efforts to civilize the Veddas were evident in their attempts to settle them in smallholder lots with houses, efforts that were largely unsuccessful. The Veddas, resisting domestication, returned to the forests, continuing their traditional hunting practices and eschewing formal education, remaining ‘totally destitute’. [19] Furthermore, Gillings expressed disappointment in their resistance to Christianity, despite some success with coastal groups. [20] His writing reflects the missionary zeal common among colonials, who saw the Veddas as untamed and in need of saving.   In 1881, prominent scientist Dr Rudolf Virchow published a study on the Veddas’ origins in the same journal, in which he claimed that the Veddas had biological links to other South Asian indigenous groups, [21]  with conclusions based solely on skull measurements sent to him in Germany. [22]  He never set foot in Ceylon. Virchow theorised that the Veddas were related to Dravidian or pre-Dravidian tribes of Hindustan, bore little resemblance to Tamils, and that the Sinhalese showed evidence of Vedda genetic influence, likely through intermarriage. Despite never observing a living Vedda, Virchow offered extensive commentary on their social behaviour, echoing earlier authors like Knox and Bailey. His assertions about their intellectual inferiority, based on the size of their skulls, reflected the pseudo-scientific racism prevalent in the era. Virchow concluded that their inability to count or plan beyond the present day, along with failed educational efforts, proved the ‘inferiority of the race’. [23]   In 1902, American explorers HM Hiller and WH Furness documented their two-week visit with the Veddas, similarly describing them as primitive and noting their ‘unwashed, uncombed and all but unclad appearance’. Though their work has since been criticized as subjective and insubstantial, it reflected the prevailing colonial attitudes of the time. The explorers’ documentation included a few photographs, capturing these negative perceptions visually. [24]   Virchow’s ideas on physiological distinctions and origins were later echoed by Swiss naturalists Fritz and Paul Sarasin, who conducted five scientific expeditions to Ceylon between 1883 and 1907. Initially focused on zoology, the Sarasins’ later expeditions shifted to anthropological research on the island’s indigenous peoples, the Veddas, likely inspired by Virchow’s studies. [25]  Unlike Virchow, the Sarasins conducted fieldwork in Ceylon, collecting over 400 artefacts, skeletal remains of over 90 individuals, and more than 500 photographs. In their collection of portraits, we find early studies of the Veddas, very much following the period anthropological oeuvre of ‘mug shots’, rather than sociological studies. The Sarasins, in their 1907 visit, just before the Seligman visit, also ‘established the existence of a stone age upon the island […] [and objects] most reasonably attributed to the Veddas’. [26]   Their anthropological work included studies of Vedda skulls, following the period’s trend of racial anthropology, focusing on physical features over social or cultural contexts. They concluded that the Vedda phenotype was distinct from other Sri Lankan groups, but this assertion has been challenged by recent research. For example, Samanti Kulatilake’s study of the Sarasins’ collection found no significant cranial morphological differences between the Vedda and other Sri Lankan groups, suggesting that the long-held notion of Vedda distinctiveness may have been influenced by outdated or biased scientific approaches. [27]   The recurring themes in these various writings—primitive, unintelligent, hopeless—reflect the colonial mindset that reduced the Veddas to a subhuman species, albeit one deemed worthy of study. The Seligmans operated within this cultural context, informed by both scientific and popular ideas that framed the Veddas as objects of curiosity, backwardness, and inferiority.   The Seligman Study, 1908   Dr Charles Seligman and his wife Brenda conducted a significant anthropological study of the Vedda community during their expedition to Ceylon in 1908. Their research, officially commissioned and supported by figures including Cambridge anthropologist Dr AC Haddon and colonial administrators Sir Henry Blake and Henry McCallum, was driven by the belief that the Veddas were one of the most ‘primitive’ surviving races, potentially on the verge of extinction, thus their remit was to explore the Veddas’ ‘social life and religious ideas […] as thoroughly as possible’.[28] As such, the Seligmans’ work was heavily publicized and people eagerly awaited the results, viewing the study as crucial to understanding both the past and future of Ceylon. Newspaper coverage of the time echoed these sentiments, reporting that:   Ceylon has perhaps more than any contemporary ‘modernised’ country—for she is not yet wholly and completely civilised […] [The] few surviving primitive Ceylonese, the fast disappearing Veddas, stand as one of the few remaining proofs of a branch of the great theory of evolution propounded by Darwin and since applied by such thinkers as Haeckel, Thomas, Henry Huxley, and Buckle.[29]    The expectation was that the research would be ‘exhaustive in nearly all the details worthy of investigation’ regarding this ‘primitive’ and ancient group, though in fact the Seligmans only encountered and studied four families.[30]   In 1911, the Seligmans published the illustrated volume  The Veddas , which remains the ‘standard work’ on this ‘very primitive and interesting people’, as the Royal Anthropological Institute website informs us today.[31] The publication gained  iconic status that endures as  a ‘pioneering ethnology’ and a ‘standard reference work of the social structure and material culture of the Veddas’. Even now, some Sri Lankan academics accept the Seligman ethnographic research methodologies without challenge.[32]    While the study provided detailed accounts and extensive data, what should be kept in mind is that the photographic process may have been less that ‘fair and responsible’. At the time of the study, there were no photographing protocols. Some of their approaches appear questionable from today’s perspective. Nonetheless, the Collection remains extremely important for historical data, perspectives, and of course the images that were published. Photography was a key feature of the study and the Seligmans ‘devoted the whole of [their] attention to obtaining a reasonably complete series of photographs’. [33] The methodology was new, there were no protocols, and the results were iconic.   The study recorded what were new findings for the time, particularly because Brenda Seligman gained access to Vedda women and children. This allowed her to photograph and study more intimate instances of their family life, including making phonograph recordings of lullabies. She gained access to activities which men were not allowed to witness. Of the nearly 400 photographic glass negatives that are now part of the British Museum collection, some 71 photographs appear as illustrations in the Veddas  publication. Some of these Seligman admitted to touching up, in particular those documenting the dances at Sitala Wanniya and Bandaraduwa, to minimise the blurring from the movement. [34] Some photographs cover the Vedda dances of Kirikorana, Bambara Yaka, and Pata Yaka. We know now that the Kirikorana has sacred features, as likely do the other dances. In the absence of protest and clarification from the living Vedda community, what is the best practise for the sharing of these dance and ritual photographs now? How should they be handled in the Seligmans’ publication now that we know what we do? If Brenda Seligman gained access to photograph the Vedda women and their children in situations where men were not allowed, how can we rationalise breaching that privacy by showing these photographs to the public eye?   Another aspect of the Seligmans’ published photography that has come under scrutiny is the potential staging of Vedda subjects. Seligman himself observed that the Veddas were often ‘fetched’ to meet travellers at rest houses, where they would appear dressed in traditional Vedda attire, despite normally dressing like neighbouring peasants when not on display.[35] This suggests that even during the Seligmans’ study, there may have been a performative element in the Veddas’ presentation to outsiders, raising doubts about the authenticity of some of the photographs and observations. Nishanka Wijemanna has justly criticised the way the Veddas were presented in these images, arguing that they were dressed up as ‘showpieces’ for the benefit of foreign observers, thus reinforcing the stereotype of them as uncivilized and barbaric.[36]   The Seligmans’ study also raises ethical questions in view of its scientific evaluations and suggestion that ‘the few unsophisticated Veddas of the present day do in fact represent the aboriginal   inhabitants of Ceylon’. In support of this thesis, they referred to the work the Sarasins, using this and their own observations to separate the Veddas from the Sinhalese on the grounds that there were ‘obvious external characters in which the Veddas differ from the Sinhalese […] [at] a single glance’.[37] They compared certain measurements of the Vedda male being some three inches shorter than the Kandyan (Sinhalese) as further proof of such genetic distinction, not considering (as others before also failed to do) that such shorter height could have been due to nutrition.     The anthropologist James Brow, who undertook extensive field research on the Veddas in the 1980s, draws our attention to the problem that ‘the search of racial and cultural purity became an increasingly dominant theme in their [European’s] inquiries, and that their ability to discover it was greatly enhanced by the division of the Veddas into two kinds. Even the Seligmans, whose ethnography ushers in the period of modern anthropology as applied to the Veddas, were still under the spell of these concerns’.[38] Indeed, the Seligmans repeatedly note that the ‘Veddas have been regarded as one of the most primitive of existing races’.[39] Their aim was to ‘isolate the customs of the ‘pure blooded’ Veddas from those of the ‘half-breed’ combination of Sinhalese and Vedda strain, so that the ‘authentic’, ‘original’, and ‘ancestral’ customs of the Veddas can be discovered’.[40]   Nonetheless, we should also be aware of the potentially harmful biases that the photographs cast. Today, the Collection remains extremely important There is thus a need to establish a more effective approach to managing and disseminating the Collection through appropriate contextualisation.     Ethical Extrapolations   At the time of the Seligmans’ anthropological work in the early twentieth century, there were no formalised research ethics or institutional guidelines. Credibility relied heavily on the reputation of the researcher and photography, while used, was not yet recognised as a rigorous anthropological tool. This began to shift in the 1930s with the pioneering work of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, whose fieldwork in Bali (1937-9) contributed to the foundation of visual anthropology. Mead and Bateson aimed to document cultural behaviour as it unfolded naturally, stating that their goal was ‘to shoot what happened normally and spontaneously, rather than to decide upon the norms and then get [the subjects] to go through these behaviours’.[41] Their methodological approach, centred on a ‘disciplined subjectivity’, treated the camera as a neutral recording instrument rather than an illustrative device, thereby setting a precedent for ethical engagement through visual media.[42]   The aftermath of the Second World War catalysed a global movement toward codifying human rights and dignity, influencing how research, representation, and consent were subsequently framed. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights emphasised the ‘inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family’, while Articles 26 and 27 underscored the right to education and cultural participation.[43] The 1945 founding Constitution of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) likewise spoke to the importance of accurate cultural representation, stressing that member governments are ‘agreed and determined to develop and to increase the means of communication between their peoples and to employ these means for the purposes of mutual understanding and a truer and more perfect knowledge of each other’s lives’.[44] Later frameworks, such as the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, affirmed that Indigenous communities ‘have the right to the dignity and diversity of their cultures, traditions, histories, and aspirations [to be] appropriately reflected in education and public information’.[45] Although these instruments do not address photographic representation directly, they provide a foundational basis for ethical reflection on the use of such media in research, publication and exhibition contexts.   Today, a growing number of academic and research institutions, along with the communities they engage, have developed comprehensive ethical frameworks to guide responsible scholarship, particularly in cross-cultural and historically asymmetrical settings. Guidelines such as the ‘Code of Ethics for Research in the Social and Behavioural Sciences involving Human Participants’ (Netherlands)[46] and the ‘Global Code of Conduct for Research in Resource-Poor Settings’ articulate frameworks premised on concepts of fairness, respect, care, and honesty. The latter’s Article 8 (Respect) advises researchers to explore potential cultural sensitivities to avoid violating customary practices, while Article 12 stresses the importance of tailoring informed consent procedures to local contexts for meaningful understanding.[47] The ‘National Inuit Strategy on Research’, co-developed with Inuit leadership, frames research as a tool for achieving social equity and calls for ‘respectful relationships’.[48] Similar concerns are addressed in the ‘Protocols for Native American Archival Materials’, which guide institutions in handling sensitive heritage content.[49] Notably, the Warburg Institute’s decision to remove select early photographs of the Pueblo community from public access, citing cultural sensitivity, demonstrates the growing institutional recognition of ethical responsibility in archival and visual practices, as does that Institute’s development of a protocol for those materials. These evolving norms form a crucial backdrop against which we can ethically reconsider the Seligmans’ visual anthropological work.   These policies and conventions reflect ethical values that touch people’s lives, operating not only to grow community conscience but also to inform personal micro ethics, including those that assist in evaluating and rationalizing ‘ethically important moments in research practice’.[50] Guillemin and Gillam, in their astute coverage of ethical values, ask us to be ‘reflexive in an ethical sense [which] means acknowledging and being sensitized to the micro-ethical dimensions of […] practice and, in doing so, being alert to and prepared for ways of dealing with the ethical tensions that arise’.[51]   Though the Seligmans did not benefit from these policies to guide their photographic protocols and research, we now have the advantage of them and of hindsight. Given the iconic and pioneering stature of their study, it becomes imperative to properly frame the Collection images, not only to qualify their authority in light of recent learnings but to develop different approaches. A sad truth that underscores the importance of obtaining better narratives is that these past biases, including those depicted through visual media, may have contributed to the colonial and later Sri Lankan government’s poor treatment of the Veddas. The Veddas were forced out of their natural habitats starting with colonial development because they were considered ‘primitive’ and ‘totally destitute’, imagery that stayed in the wider community consciousness. These actions of neglect continue today with forced displacement and attempts to erase the identity of the group. In recent times, the Sri Lankan census even removed the classification of ‘Vedi’ in 1963.[52]   Recent publications surveying the plight of the Vedda community conclude that ‘these communities are faced with insurmountable challenges that rob their dignity and self-esteem when identifying themselves as the people of this land’.[53] The migration and / or forced displacement of the Vedda communities into areas where the government promised them land—promises that have not been met to this day—remains an ongoing issue.[54]   Engagement with the Collection and its ‘Re-Presentation’   Knowing what we do now, the central issue is how we should approach this collection to present it in the various platforms on which these images could feature, in such a way as to be ‘fair and responsible’ including, essentially, in ways that dignify the Vedda community. How can we display these photographs in a manner that avoids reinforcing outdated and harmful stereotypes—such as portraying the Vedda as primitive, unintelligent, or unworthy of recognition—that have historically caused them so much harm? In this context, re-evaluating the Seligman Collection and reframing the narrative may offer an opportunity to challenge existing biases against the Veddas and provide an alternative perspective that highlights their history and lifestyle, thereby elevating their recognition and status.   While a comprehensive review of the entire collection is beyond the scope of this study, several key points emerge that guide and contribute to the principles of ‘fair and responsible’ re-presentation, that include the following:   1. Preface the Collection with Historical and Ethical Context:  The archival presentation should include a preface contextualizing the Collection’s development within its historical period, noting the absence of ethical frameworks that might have influenced the Seligmans’ methodology. It is likely that Charles and Brenda Seligman may have unconsciously perpetuated the cultural biases and stereotypes prevalent at the time regarding the Vedda community. Acknowledgment of this potential bias should precede the Collection.   2. Engage the Vedda Community and Local Scholars:  Such local involvement, along with connecting to points of origin, can inform and culturally sensitise curation. Collaboration with contemporary Vedda community leaders and local scholars to notate and comment on the collection and individual images, would further inform the archival depth of these images by including community perspectives, memories, and contemporary treatment of the images. Their insights should inform the contextualization of the images using culturally relevant knowledge. Representatives from the Sri Lankan Ministry of Culture, responsible for safeguarding Vedda heritage, could be involved in this process. Each photograph should be individually reviewed and annotated by Vedda community members to incorporate their perspectives on content and optimal display practices. These annotations should form part of the Collection’s archival documentation, ensuring that the presentation is guided by Vedda community authority in both public and archival contexts.   3. Protect Private and Sacred Content:  Images that infringe on personal privacy or depict sacred rituals should remain restricted and reserved solely for scholarly research, governed by institutional protocols. Public access should only be granted with explicit consent from the Vedda community, and such permissions must be formally documented. In particular, photographs depicting female activities, rituals, and sacred dances should not be publicly exhibited until the Vedda community authorizes their display or provides interpretive guidance to enable a nuanced understanding.   4. Establish Institutional Guidelines:  Institutions should develop and publicly share guidelines that reflect best practices for re-evaluating early photographic collections. The current lack of transparency in these efforts limits broader learning and collaboration. Public dissemination of these protocols would benefit institutional teams and stakeholders by incorporating the perspectives of those directly impacted by the presentation, promoting equitable and informed representation of colonial-era photographic archives.   Conclusion   Early authorities on the Veddas became experts primarily by extolling new knowledge and through repeated, often unchecked validation. By contrast, the Seligmans’ study was more rigorous, with focused attention on gathering findings for publication, further supported by funding. This study was not only pioneering but also credible, gathering important observational data that, while possibly distorted through a colonial lens, can nonetheless be reviewed in a contemporary context. Furthermore, the Seligmans’ objective appears to have been honourable, demonstrating a commitment to gaining ground truths and showing an appreciation for firsthand contact to enhance research credibility. Photography was a critical component of this endeavour, introducing a novel methodology that illuminated and supported his findings.   The criteria for evaluating whether there is ‘fair and responsible’ re-presentation in these early images should consider the methodologies of picture-taking acceptable at the time, acknowledging that no formal guidelines existed, as well as to consider the objectives of the researchers. Those early studies and imaging exercises operated under different guidelines than those known and recommended today. While it can be argued that the Seligmans acted in good faith, this does not imply that they adhered to the standards of respect expected by contemporary human rights norms. Prefacing the context of the photographs encourages us to reflect, learn, and engage, utilising valuable historical endeavours to reshape narratives. My hope is that this review raises critical questions that we must address to gain new knowledge and consciously build upon the ‘fair and reasonable’ re-presentation of early photographs of peoples, generally, and in doing so also strengthen our individual and community consciences when we interact and intersect with these early images. Shalini Ganendra Shalini Amerasinghe Ganendra is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research integrates nearly three decades of programming experience with a foundation in legal training. She actively investigates theoretical frameworks through the lens of creative practices and cultural histories, particularly in under-researched regions such as Sri Lanka. Her work foregrounds the complex interplay between tradition and contemporary dynamics, offering alternative modes of engagement that are deeply attuned to diverse cultural contexts.   Shalini has received numerous accolades for her contributions to cultural development and community impact, including the Knighthood of St Gregory the Great (DSG) from the Holy See and the Chevening Fellowship from the United Kingdom. She has held visiting academic appointments at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, serving also as an Associate Academic in Oxford’s Department of the History of Art. Shalini read law at the University of Cambridge, earned an LL.M. from Columbia University Law School, and qualified as both a Barrister (UK) and an Attorney in New York. [1] Shalini Amerasinghe Ganendra, Veins of Influence: Colonial Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in Early Photographs and Collections (Neptune Publishing Pvt Ltd 2023). [2] CG Seligman and Brenda Z Seligman, Collection of Seligman Glass Slides (396) and Prints from Those Slides: Photographs of Vedda Community, Ceylon  (1908). [3] James Hamill, ‘Charles Seligman Glass Slides and Photos, British Museum, Nature of Current Cataloguing’ (11 September 2024). [4] CG Seligman and Brenda Z Seligman, The Veddas  (Cambridge University Press 1911). [5] GC Mendis, Ceylon Under the British  (first published 1952, Gyan Press 2020) 12. [6] Eleanor M Hight and Gary D Sampson, Colonialist Photography, Imag(in)Ing Race and Place  (Routledge 2002) 15. [7] Other categories included plantation views, railways, archaeological sites (and buried cities), British royal visits, botanical gardens (and tropical plants), urban landscape, and elephant captures. [8] Benita Stambler, ‘Context and Content: Colonial Photographs from Kandy, Ceylon’ in H Hazel Hahn (ed), Cross-Cultural Exchange and the Colonial Imaginary: Global Encounters via Southeast Asia  (NUS Press 2019) 233. [9] George JA Skeen, The Royal visit to Ceylon, April 1901  (Government printer 1901) image numbers 28-30. See < https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PH-QM-00002/ > accessed 9 November 2025. By contrast, the private album of Queen Mary covering that tour has no images of the Veddas, indicating a lack of personal interest in them. See Royal Tour Ophir, 1901. ‘Queen Mary’s Photograph Album Volume 7’  (1901). [10] Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon  (Tisara Prakasakayo Ltd 1981) 48. [11] John Bailey, ‘An Account of the Wild Tribes of the Veddahs of Ceylon: Their Habits, Customs, and Superstitions’ (1863) 2 Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 278. [12] ibid 284. [13] Seligmann and Seligmann (n 4) 6. [14] Bailey (n 11) 279. [15] ibid 278. [16] ibid 284. [17] The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (RAS) has a long and illustrious history as an influential organisation, starting with its grant of royal status in 1823 by King George IV . The RAS’s elite colonial membership, commitment to scholarship, and subsequent, inclusion of elite local members in its various branches reinforced this enduring legacy. The Royal Asiatic Society of Ceylon was the society’s first branch, established in 1845. [18] Rev J Gillings, ‘On the Veddahs of Bintenne’ (1853) 2(2) The Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 83. [19] ibid 88. [20] ibid 85. [21] Rudolf Virchow, ‘The Veddás of Ceylon, and Their Relation to the Neighbouring Tribes’ (1886) 9 The Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 349. [22] Richard L Spittel, Vanished Trails. The Last of the Veddas  (Geoffrey Cumberlege, OUP 1950) xii. [23] Virchow (n 21) 371. [24] Richard Boyle, ‘Visiting the Veddahs, 1899’ The Sunday Times  (Sri Lanka, 12 June 2016) < http://www.sundaytimes.lk/160612/plus/visiting-the-veddahs-1899-196988.html > accessed 10 August 2024. [25] Samanti Kulatilake, ‘The Sarasins’ Collection of Historical Sri Lankan Crania’ (2020) 128 Anthropological Science 119, 120. [26] Seligman and Seligman (n 4) 18.  [27] Kulatilake (n 25) 122. [28] Seligman and Seligman (n 4) vii. [29] ‘Seligman’s Lecture to the Asiatic Society - A Link with Old Ceylon’ Ceylon Observer, Supplement  (Ceylon, 26 May 1908). [30] ‘The Sociology of the Ceylon Veddas: Final Investigation by Dr. and Mrs. Seligman’ Ceylon Observer  (Ceylon, 26 May 1908). [31] ‘Charles Gabriel Seligman’ ( Royal Anthropological Institute ) < https://www.therai.org.uk/archives-and-manuscripts/obituaries/charles-gabriel-seligman > accessed 10 September 2024. [32] Alex Perera, ‘Centenary of a Classical Study’ The Sunday Times  (London, 2 October 2011) < https://archives.dailynews.lk/2001/pix/PrintPage.asp?REF=/2010/12/22/art32.asp > accessed 30 October 2023. [33] Seligman and Seligman (n 4) 4. [34] ibid 235 fig 2.  [35] ibid vii. [36] Nishanka Wijemanna, ‘Myths and Reality about the Veddas’ (2023) 3 Voice of Citizens 15 < http://citizenslanka.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Issue-03-English-Final-2.pdf > accessed 5 July 2025. [37] Seligman and Seligman (n 4) 415. [38] James Brow, Vedda Villages of Anuradhapura, A Historical Anthropology of a Community in Sri Lanka , vol 33 (University of Washington Press 1978) 15. [39] Seligman and Seligman (n 4) vii. [40] Brow (n 38) 15. [41] Ira Jacknis, ‘Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali: Their Use of Photography and Film’ (1988) 3(2) Cultural Anthropology 166. [42] ibid 161. [43] United Nations, ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (1948) < https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights > accessed 28 October 2023. [44] ‘Constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (1945) Preamble < https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%204/volume-4-I-52-English.pdf > accessed 9 November 2025. [45] United Nations, ‘United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’ (13 September 2007) < https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-%20the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html > accessed 3 September 2024. [46] ‘Code of Ethics for Research in the Social and Behavioural Sciences Involving Human Participants’ (2016) < https://www.eur.nl/eshcc/media/67289 > accessed 12 July 2025. [47] ‘Global Code of Conduct for Research in Resource-Poor Settings’ < https://www.globalcodeofconduct.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Global-Code-of-Conduct-Brochure.pdf > accessed 12 July 2025. [48] ‘National Inuit Strategy on Research’ (2018) < https://www.itk.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ITK_NISR-Report_English_low_res.pdf > 23. [49] ‘Protocols for Native American Archival Materials’ < https://www2.nau.edu/libnap-p/ > accessed 10 September 2024. [50] M Guillemin and L Gillam, ‘Ethics, Reflexivity, and “Ethically Important Moments” in Research’ (2004) 10 Qualitative Inquiry 261, 278. [51] Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam, ‘Ethics, Reflexivity, and “Ethically Important Moments” in Research’ (2004) 10(2) Qualitative Inquiry 278. [52] Lionel Guruge, ‘Editor’s Note’ (2023) 3 Voice of Citizens 4-5 < http://citizenslanka.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Issue-03-English-Final-2.pdf > accessed 5 July 2025. [53] ibid. [54] Ahinsaka Perera, ‘Issues Facing the Eastern Indigenous Community’ (2023) 3 Voice of Citizens 9 < http://citizenslanka.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Issue-03-English-Final-2.pdf > accessed 5 July 2025.

Sarah Dunant is a novelist, broadcaster, and cultural critic whose work blurs the line between historical inquiry and literary imagination. Best known for her fiction set in Renaissance Italy, she gives voice to women whose lives have been obscured by time, deftly merging narrative and historicism. Rendering the past not as backdrop but as pulse, Dunant allows history to unfold with the texture of lived experience. Her acclaimed novels, The Birth of Venus , In the Company of the Courtesan , and Sacred Hearts , have been translated into over thirty languages.   A long-time contributor to BBC Radio 4 and a thoughtful commentator on the intersections of gender, art, and power, Dunant returns with The Marchesa , a novel centred on Isabella d’Este. The Marchesa  offers a vivid reimagining of Isabella d’Este: art collector, political strategist, fashion icon, and one of the most influential women of the Italian Renaissance. Her court is long vanished, her treasures scattered, but thousands of preserved letters remain, housed in the deconsecrated church that now holds Mantua’s state archive.   From this paper trail, Sarah Dunant conjures Isabella’s voice, bold, curious, and unyielding, tracing her life from precocious daughter and reluctant bride to formidable consort and cultural force. Blending fiction with biography and art history, The Marchesa is both an intimate portrait and dialogue with Isabella, and a reflection on how we read the past through the lens of the present.   CJLPA : In your talk, ‘Being lost and being afraid is a part of writing’, you mentioned that before you began writing Sacred Hearts , you knew it would open in a cloistered convent, with the silence broken by the scream of a young girl. That striking image stayed with you throughout the research process.   In The Marchesa , you begin with a very different kind of sensory register: scent. ‘I have always had the most sensitive nose’ is the novel’s opening line, a sharp contrast to the auditory jolt of Sacred Hearts .   Why did you choose to open with Isabella’s sense of smell—her perception of bodies, decay, and perfume—evoking a rich fusion of Renaissance luxury and the physical erosion of her afterlife? Was this sensory focus present throughout your research process?   Sarah Dunant : It’s a good question, actually. The gleam of the idea for this novel came when I was in the archives in Mantua, and I got to step behind the door to take a look at where all the actual documents are stored. It’s an extraordinary building, once a deconsecrated church and an old Jesuit convent, with a mind-blowing amount of history pulsing out at you from stacks and stacks of disintegrating folders. And it struck me, because I already knew then how many letters Isabella had written and how many were written to her, that in some sense Isabella herself was in that archive. She was there in the letters. She saturated the ink of them.   I had this image that when I opened those folders she would somehow be there, hovering above, looking down at me or indeed whichever scholar was studying her. In fact, when I finally sat in the actual reading room, the setting was a huge disappointment; municipal, boring, and bare, so it was harder to hold that image. But at the same time I felt there was also a smell coming off all those disintegrating letters—a slight scent of decay, if you like. Now I already knew that Isabella had a relationship with scent, she produced her own perfumes. And that smell was important to many women at that time because of the relationship of bodies and sweat and dirt.   I’ve always felt that within historical novels, indeed within history, we spend a lot of time with the words but much less time with the senses. So I thought it would be fitting to begin not just with Isabella’s presence, but also her sense of smell.   That idea coalesced the more research I did, the more I understood syphilis, for instance, and what it meant to live with someone who had it, as her husband did. That understanding started to shift how I thought about smell: how it might carry disease, how perfume was also used to ward off the plague as well as mask unpleasant odours.   So I suppose what I’m saying is that that single image of her being present in the archive became a kind of magnet. As my research went on, other ideas fused onto it. There’s a passage later in the book where Isabella actually says the problem with history is that it’s all words, you can’t enter the senses, and she tries to take the scholar back into the court, to taste and smell the food, feel the cloth, hear the sounds. Because that is vital as a way to bring the past alive.   But it isn’t until you remind me, of course, that Sacred Hearts  began with a scream, another version of the senses, something hitting you from history, that I realise this has always been something the historian in me has been drawn to. Indeed, historians are now working on things like soundscapes for particular periods. And so we try to project people back atmospherically and sensuously, as well as through the rather dry, desiccated notion of the word on the page.   CJLPA : The nature of your book involves the interweaving of narrative and history, and you include italicised fragments from Isabella’s real-life letters, which are often verbatim. You then expand on them into a narrative with emotional depth. Rather than inventing a character entirely, it seems you’re really building on what the text gives you, adding interiority while staying grounded in the history and context. How did you approach that layering process, and what guided you in developing a voice and perspective around these documents?   SD : Actually, I think that Isabella is the greatest gift a writer could possibly have, because although she is, in many cases, a piece of work, a definite manipulator—she’s got charm and she’s also politically savvy. She uses letters as part of her diplomatic armoury, both to get what she wants in art and to control political situations when she’s having to rule the state. You start to see how letters contained absolutely everything during that period.   While we now tend to think of letters as something intimate, in that period they served as a kind of armour, especially for a woman with status and influence. For Isabella, they were a tool for everything from managing family relationships to controlling foreign policy or acquiring a work of art.   If you read enough of her words, you begin to watch the chameleon-like shifts in her tone depending on whom she’s addressing. She’s imperious when crossed: when the artist Giovanni Bellini in Venice fails to deliver a painting, she takes him to court to reclaim her money. That’s one kind of Isabella. Then there’s the charming Isabella, as when it’s clear they backed the wrong horse in one of the Italian wars, and she has to be as friendly to France as she was to Spain. You watch her craft letters full of flattery, things like ‘Oh, we’re all wearing the fleur-de-lis here because it’s so wonderful that you won’. Through these letters, you begin to appreciate both her intelligence and her guile. This also highlights how women wielded power at the time: they couldn’t show their hand openly. Both the art market and the diplomatic world, where most decisions were made, were run entirely by men.   How, then, did women make their mark without seeming too pushy? Once I found her voice, I saw she had self-awareness, she knew when to be tough and when to be charming. There’s a moment in the book when her husband is in prison, and she must write a pleading letter to the Queen of France, asking her to intercede. I imagined her sitting, crafting the very flowery prose: ‘Oh, I die a thousand times when I think of my poor husband’. Of course a thousand is too much, and she knows it, but it’s deliberately over the top as a way to get to the Queen. Moments like this gave me the richness of her personality. It’s also a historical observation because it shows how women mixed emotion and diplomacy through letters.   At one level, I think all my historical novels are a political, feminist reclamation of a past usually dominated by men. Ask people to name figures from the Italian Renaissance and very few will come up with a woman’s name. But I wanted to write books that are also a gripping read, so you keep turning pages to find out what happens. Having worked for the BBC over many years, I recall its founder Lord Reith’s idea that good broadcasting should ‘inform, educate, and entertain’. Over time, that word education has come to be seen as rather elitist or threatening in culture. So I have inverted that: if you entertain, you can inform, and maybe even educate, slipping it in under the guise of entertainment.   CJLPA : Going on from this, Isabella is so wonderfully sharp, reflective, but also can be envious, jealous, and performative. In this moment for example, where you write ‘My hand reveals a tremor, deliberate, of course, as I write the words’. Here she’s calculated, and she seems self-conscious of her effect on history.   Did you find moments in her real letters where that kind of theatrical self-awareness emerged? Was there a particular piece of correspondence that revealed the contrast between the woman and the icon, between the strategist and the self-doubting daughter?   SD : What I will say is that sometimes the letters challenge us across time. One in particular stands out: after giving birth to a second daughter, she writes a short, painful letter to her husband saying, ‘the chill that has come over me because I have given birth to another daughter’. For the modern reader, it can be jarring. Too often, we look to the past, expecting people to wear prettier dresses and feel exactly as we do. But if you do the real work of a historian, you begin to understand that their thoughts grew from a different cultural soil.   This letter is a striking example of that. At the time, marriages often faltered if a woman couldn’t produce a male heir. Isabella needs to produce a boy, and six years into her marriage, she hasn’t. And within that letter, I think something else is being revealed about her. The novelist in me thought: I don’t think this woman enjoys sex, actually. I think what she enjoys is the work she’s doing as a collector of art. She takes pleasure in being smart, confident, and politically capable. She doesn’t strike me as one of those women who coasted by on their looks and male attention.   CJLPA : Do you think this was an area where her sister Beatrice thrived in a way Isabella didn’t?   SD : Yes, I think so. And in that case, I wonder if it all felt quite daunting for her, the idea that, as she tells the scholar, ‘I know it is challenging for you to read that word “chill”, but you don’t know what it was like to be me’ .  In that moment, she had failed, again, to deliver a male heir. And that meant they had to keep trying until she did produce those three sons. We don’t often think about that now. We rarely consider that most women at the time would go on to have seven, eight, even nine children, that reality feels so distant from contemporary female experience. But it’s worth remembering: your gender was, in many ways, writing your history for you. And if you wanted to push back against that, you had to be clever, strategic. You had to know when to be sharp, when to be sweet. You had to learn how to survive it.   She’s a gorgeous character for both the novelist and the historian to get their teeth into. Because for the novelist, you can make her life narratively exciting. And for the historian, you can suggest that there are things she’s going to do that you may not necessarily like, coming from your own moment in history. But it seems to me that the imaginative journey of history is to take you back into the past and ask you to soak yourself in difference. And she is a perfect character to do that with, because sometimes she seems very modern, while at other points, she feels absolutely grown from her own moment, in ways that throw a gauntlet down to us.   CJLPA : To touch back on your previous point about Isabella and her sexual relations. There are recurring moments where Isabella complies dutifully with her husband Francesco   II Gonzaga’s sexual advances but registers disgust, such as when ‘he pushes his tongue between my lips […] I get a smell off him […] breath or saliva? […] I feel bile rising in my throat’. This physical revulsion is echoed in her memory of the unsettling, pseudo-sexual relationship between Beatrice and her grandfather, and again later, when Francesco, on his deathbed, acknowledges that Isabella never found pleasure in the bedchamber. How do you see sex and sexual performance functioning in Isabella’s life, and more broadly, in the lives of women of that period?   SD : Well, it’s an interesting one, isn’t it? Because I have to be aware of myself, that I’m also leading a kind of schizophrenic life. There’s both the novelist and the historian in me. And interestingly enough, that’s exactly what I’m talking about in one of my Radio 4 talks: the historian in me cannot prove how Isabella feels about sex, because there’s no evidence of it. But the novelist can ask questions based on the material that’s being uncovered, and that might lead you to feel a certain way.   There’s an extraordinary letter she writes after all the marriage ceremonies have ended and everyone has left. She writes to her sister — and I’m paraphrasing now — ‘My lord could not be nicer to me, but, oh God, I miss you’. And it’s absolutely clear that, yes, she’s young, yes, she’s homesick, but you feel this is a young girl who’s been through some kind of shock. She’s 16, and she’s been in the marriage bed with someone far more experienced than she is, because that’s how it worked in that period.   When we write historical fiction, there’s always a temptation to include sex, it’s part of the romantic cliché, especially with female characters. But we’re doing that from the perspective of decades of openness, of sex being sold back to us, discussed, deconstructed. In reality, many women in the past may not have liked sex or had the chance to explore it. They couldn’t reflect on it the way we can now, the strange contradictions, the mismatches between love and desire. So I wanted to challenge myself: can I write a good historical novel that doesn’t highlight sex? Because often, in novels or period dramas, it’s all about conflict, love, sex, maybe a bit of torture, the usual hooks. But I was more interested in being honest to the period, imagining a woman whose energy isn’t in the bedroom but in power, collecting, and patronage. That felt truer, and just as compelling.   CJLPA : You’ve said that you couldn’t have written these books 25 years ago because the research simply wasn’t there, and that it’s largely thanks to female historians asking new questions that women like Isabella have become more visible. There’s a moment in the novel where Isabella reflects on this shift herself: ‘Slowly, archives, throughout history founded by men for men, were being invaded by women […] my stubbornness, even my bad behaviour, were now to be celebrated’.   It’s a powerful merging of past and present. How do you see this historical reclamation continuing to evolve, both within scholarship and fiction? And what role do you think novelists can play in pushing it forward?   SD : Well, what I could say is that when I studied history at Cambridge, a long time ago, I don’t think I wrote a woman’s name in an essay, possibly a royal name, but that’s it. The history of women was still something we hadn’t really thought about at all. And because my own journey through life coincides, if you like, with the arrival of feminism, I then watched as women, and some men too, started to ask questions of the past that we hadn’t asked before, which in turn also became about challenging whiteness and attitudes to race.   I think if I have an image of history now, it’s history as a kind of pointillist painting. The past is made up of dots. The artist puts a lot of dots on the canvas, and gradually, if you stand back, you get the form and structure of the painting through these dots. Well, what the last 30 or 40 years has done is add hundreds of thousands of dots, dots that for me certainly highlight the other gender in the world, which is women.   Take the Renaissance. In 1976, the historian Joan Kelly wrote the article ‘ Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ That’s how little we knew about women in the Renaissance at that time. Partly, of course, because the Renaissance becomes very fashionable again at the end of the nineteenth century, when history starts to be ‘invented’ by people like Jacob Burckhardt, and they’re not interested in the women. And partly because the only man who writes art history is Giorgio Vasari, and there’s maybe one woman in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists . There was an orthodoxy up until the 1960s: this is what the past was.   But we have run a truck through that now. Indeed, for me one of most fantastic things about feminism is that it hasn’t just changed the present, it’s changed the past.   Now in doing so, novelists have taken broadly two main routes when resurrecting women in history. One was to concentrate on those who broke the mould and should have been more noticed, and the other to give voice to unknown women who were treated badly. So you had this kind of binary approach: famous but hidden, or invisible victims.   What’s fascinating about a character like Isabella is that she’s a real flawed, but hugely interesting woman. I don’t have to make her a victim; she was never anybody’s victim. I don’t have to make her likable. I don’t have to make her sexually attractive. She can stand on her own two feet and be who she was in history: a complex, powerful human being. That, I think, is the last part of feminism’s journey, that we don’t have to excuse these women, or champion them, or feel sorry for them. They’re just included as part of this rich painting, which, when we stand back, now looks measurably different. And I think that’s so important.   It feels to me that that should be the role of historians: to show that history is more complex than we thought, and it’s always more complex than our own moral judgments forged in our moment in time. Our job is to leave our own morality behind and go back and immerse ourselves in the ‘then’. And that’s what makes Isabella such a wonderful subject, because you are  immersed, because she’s actually talking to you. And in the end, I can’t tell when I’m talking or she’s talking, because the two merge.   CJLPA : You’ve spoken about her determination as a collector and how she had to fight to be taken seriously in a male-dominated art market. But her influence extended beyond collecting, into politics, fashion, taste, and the arts across Europe. Her studiolo  is often a focal point for historians. How do you see her use of aesthetics and patronage as part of her self-fashioning and assertion of power?   SD : She’s a little bit like a very, very early Virginia Woolf with A Room of One’s Own . It’s interesting because we know about places like Urbino and Gubbio, where the Duke of Urbino had small rooms for men to consider the classics, appreciate art, and define themselves as cultural beings. Women didn’t have that space.   Right from the start, Isabella goes for it. She had some training in this, born at the right moment, in the 1470s in Ferrara. The main Renaissance focus is usually Florence, Venice, Milan, and Naples, but places like Ferrara and Mantua had great artists and their own early Renaissance schools.   Isabella grew up in a city saturated with art and with parents who greatly appreciated art. On her mother’s wall was a Rogier van der Weyden Deposition , for example. So Isabella understood art from a young age and was well educated. She was perfectly positioned to build her own collection with clear taste.   This was a time when all the big names were sought after. And I think the wonderful thing about that studiolo  is that right from the start, it has marked out on its walls places where the art is going to go. In the case of her first studiolo , we know what her view was, looking out over the lakes. We know where the paintings would have gone; how, when commissioning works, she would specify details like light direction, even the size and number of the figures to be painted. She was at times—and there is no other word for it—a control freak.   Some artists, Bellini for instance, resisted, wanting more freedom. But she’s also lucky because she inherits one of the great mid to late fifteenth-century painters : Andrea Mantegna . Now, he was old by the time she arrives in Mantua and he’s not a particularly loving character. He clearly takes offence of being bossed around by a 17 year old girl.  They clash, but he still delivers art to her, and this gave her confidence to seek—indeed pester—other artists, including Leonardo da Vinci.   Her hunger for art, her confidence, and upbringing surrounded by art meant she wasn’t nervous about her own taste, which is vital for a collector. But as a woman, this was tricky. The dilemma was how much she charmed versus how much she ordered to get what she wanted.   What I really think about Isabella is that she was very lucky. She was a girl child, much loved by her father, and given a fabulous education. It was a moment when women were beginning to be educated in humanist culture, but it wasn’t intended that they would then use it in the way she did. Because she was smart, the firstborn, and adored, she exuded a kind of confidence from a very early age and clearly quite enjoyed showing off. That’s another reason why she is both adorable and deplorable at the same time.   CJLPA : Are there any pieces in her collection that you were particularly fond of or that stuck out to you?   SD : The piece I love, because the story really shows her bad behaviour, is the little Michelangelo statue, which no longer exists. It’s an amazing story. We know that when Michelangelo was a student in the Medici sculpture workshop in Florence, he copied a trope from Greek and Roman mythology: Cupid lying on a bed of stone, sculpted in marble or bronze. It showed the sculptor’s incredible talent to be able to do this with soft, childish flesh.   Michelangelo made one, and then he and a dealer dirtied it up, sent it to Rome, buried it in the ground, and ‘rediscovered’ it before selling it to a cardinal—this was before Michelangelo had become famous. When the cardinal found out it was a fake, he sold it on. But by the time Isabella goes after it, it’s already a famous fake, because Michelangelo’s name is now well known.   She gets it by going behind the backs of her in-laws, whose state has been invaded by Cesare Borgia. They’re actually staying with her at the time, seeking refuge. And she’s clearly always coveted this piece from the Duke of Urbino’s collection. So she writes to her brother, who’s a cardinal, asking if he can intercede with the Pope, who is Cesare’s father, to get her that little statue. And she does get it.   Of course, it’s bad behaviour, right? But as I have her say, and what she more or less says herself in the letters, is that that’s what you do when you’re a collector. And if men behaved like this, it would be seen as them really knowing what they wanted and getting it—strategic intelligence. So don’t blame me. And I love that about her. I know her brother-in-law was very annoyed about it. I know he made it clear when he won back his state that he’d like things back that had been taken. She writes this incredibly artful letter going, ‘Oh, but I spoke to your wife. She said if she knew that I’d liked it, she would have given it to me. So it’s really just between us families, isn’t it?’   She spins this tale and you think, ‘How could you say this?’ But of course, she wanted the Cupid, she got the Cupid, and she kept the Cupid. So at the same time as you’re enormously impressed, you’re quite shocked.   CJLPA : Returning to another shocking moment, the syphilis outbreak had a significant impact on Isabella and her relationship with Francesco. He was surprisingly brash about the illness, writing in 1508 to his agent at the court of Louis XII of France: ‘Please tell the king that my illness is probably caused by love!’—to explain why he may not be able to fight in battle. At the time, it seems the illness was almost celebrated like a battle wound.   Later, Isabella received a letter stating: ‘His Lordship showed me how the marks of his affliction have healed […] he would like to consummate marriage with you again […] a fresh young girl’. In retrospect, the letter reads as deeply unsettling, especially when viewed through a modern lens, with the knowledge we now have about the long-term ramifications of syphilis.   What impact did Francesco’s contraction of syphilis have on Isabella, both personally and publicly? And is there any evidence that they ceased physical relations after his diagnosis?   SD : It’s a question that I asked myself so many times. She must have known. For instance, after 1509, when she is only 34 and clearly still fertile, there are no more children, so in some shape or form she’s managing to avoid the marriage bed. And yet, there is nothing directly in the letters to back that up. Now, obviously, I haven’t read every letter, but I know the scholars who’ve done all the work on her, and I went to them and said, ‘Have you discovered anything about her talking about her husband’s syphilis?’ I mean, she knows syphilis exists — she mentions it in other letters, but there is or was nothing about him.   There’s this great quote by Thomas Aquinas, which still holds true for Isabella’s moment in history: ‘Prostitution is like the sewer in a great palace’. In other words — it is something men need. Sexual politics in this period is all about pure noble women and virile men; the double standard is ferociously powerful.   By 1509, Francesco had likely been suffering from syphilis for some years, though this wouldn’t have been obvious, since initially the symptoms disappeared, giving the illusion of a cure. The disease was still new and poorly understood. (It comes, we think now, from the new world.) It would return in cycles, and a man could remain sexually contagious for three or four years even without visible signs. But again there is no documentation of how noblewomen responded. It’s almost as if they weren’t supposed to know.   So I needed to ask the question, how will the reader find out how she knew? It was when reading Francesco’s letters that I discovered the comment you mentioned to the French king. And then I found that fabulous letter from her secretary when Francesco tells him how his ‘marks of affliction’ have healed, saying outright that he wants his wife home to get into bed with him again.   I love that letter, because we also know the couple had a row around this time. We know, for instance, that she writes back to him furiously. She never mentions his ‘invitation’ or indeed makes any reference to that letter at all. But she basically says, ‘Don’t give me a hard time. You have nothing to condemn me for’. Now, normally, she’s sweet as pie in the letters she writes to him. Whatever she’s personally feeling, it’s ‘Oh, I miss you, I love you’. She plays along with the narrative of the good wife. But in that one, she really goes for him. That, if you like, is the moment when the novelist and the historian go hand in hand again. Because I am sure she knew about the syphilis, and I’m sure it was therefore deliberate that she doesn’t sleep with him.   CJLPA : Giulio Romano created the Room of the Giants  at the Palazzo Te in Mantua, completing it between 1532 and 1535. The fresco portrays the dramatic story of the giants’ rebellion against the gods, drawn from Greek and Roman mythology, specifically Ovid’s Metamorphoses . The Room of the Giants  was commissioned not by Isabella d’Este, but by her son, Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that  whilst Isabella might have resisted the grotesque elements of the Room of the Giants, she was likely captivated by the sheer imagination behind it.   How do you think Isabella’s personal tastes and ambitions influenced her collaboration with Giulio Romano, and what does that reveal about her as a patron and a woman navigating artistic power?   SD : The thing about Isabella is that she was quite traditional in her views on art, particularly when it came to what she felt was morally or aesthetically right. And art was taking a real turn in the 1520s. We were moving away from the height of the Renaissance. Partly, that shift was due to the Sack of Rome, but also because the Renaissance itself was leaving Rome behind. This marked the beginning of the Mannerist period: artists had mastered human anatomy and perspective, and the style began to evolve, becoming more grotesque, more extravagant.   Before long, the Counter-Reformation would sweep in and strip art of its sensuality, responding to anxieties about the Reformation. But I don’t think Isabella was particularly fond of the more fleshy, erotic elements emerging at that time. Take Giulio Romano, for example, an extraordinarily talented painter who trained with Raphael and who in the Palazzo Te created what we now recognise as the first true mannerist palace. He experimented with architecture in ways that Michelangelo would later echo, but Giulio did it first. He was also a master of erotic art. Even today, at the Palazzo Te you’ll see priapic gods cavorting with willing females, or Apollo in a ceiling lunette driving the chariot of the sun across the sky wearing nothing under his billowing tunic. it’s extravagant, overtly sensual, and likely not to Isabella’s taste. She had a certain prudishness.   Nevertheless, I think she appreciated greatness when she saw it. I imagine Isabella sitting in those rooms, recognising how extraordinary it all was. I led a tour to Mantua and Ferrara in the autumn and even today, when people walk into the Room of the Giants, they are stunned. They’ve never seen anything like it. Romano reshaped the room itself, so it no longer feels like a room, but a cave. The original floor was made of pebbles that rose to meet the walls. As one scholar put it, it’s like ‘grotesque Disney’. Completely immersive. You weren’t just looking at art; you were in it. More like stepping onto a film set than viewing a painting.   CJLPA : As we reach the end of The Marchesa , the ending folds in on itself, the scholar becomes the author, the archive becomes the novel. It’s a quietly profound moment about authorship, legacy, and the act of writing history. What does that cyclical structure mean to you? Is it a comment on how we carry the past forward, or how women, across time, help write and rediscover one another into being?   SD : I didn’t know how The Marchesa  would end when I began writing. I knew Isabella’s personality would take the lead, the more I learned about her, the more her voice asserted itself. I always knew I wanted her to be in a kind of silent conversation with the scholar. And looking back, I think the book is partly about how one writes historical fiction, if one is serious about the history.   I’ve now written six of these novels and spent 25 years in the Renaissance, which ironically wasn’t a period I studied when I trained as a historian. So I came to it as an outsider, just as all this rich new research was unfolding. My approach is always split: the historian in me is constantly checking facts, making sure I’ve got the context right. The novelist, though, is waiting for that moment when I can turn knowledge into narrative, when I feel grounded enough in the truth to imagine beyond it.   That shift is almost osmotic. I sit with the research for so long that eventually I stop analysing it and start inhabiting it. I cease to be the historian and become the novelist. So that moment at the end of the book, when Isabella stops being the historical figure and becomes instead a character in a novel, is, in a way, what I believe historical fiction should  do.   It was fascinating being in the company of someone so strong, so smart, so flawed, who could only do what she did by being absolutely determined. You have to show her behaving badly and still forgive her. That’s why I liked the device of her talking to the future, and the future talking back through the scholar. The scholar’s journey is about saying: I leave my present behind and enter your past.   And I have to say, Lily-Rose, it’s really important to me that you have seen so much in it, because I’m now an older white woman. I’m trying to have a conversation about the present in the past. And I would like to have that conversation with people exactly at your moment in life. Because there are so many things to be talked about. The battles certainly haven’t been won. We still need spaces where these intergenerational dialogues can happen. So the fact that you got so much from The Marchesa,  and enjoyed  it—well, that’s everything.   Lily-Rose Morris-Zumin is a Cambridge University graduate, the External Arts Officer at CJLPA , and Managing Editor at The COLD Magazine . Currently working at DMG Media, she will soon begin a Magazine Journalism MA at City, St George, and she is the recipient of the Stationers’ Award. As a journalist and editor, she explores art and culture through film, theatre, literature, fashion, and visual art, with a focus on social issues, cultural context, and representation.

Abstract   In popular discourse, the idea of ‘renaissance’ is rarely associated with Ancient Egypt, but one has to wonder why. Throughout its long history, the land of the Pharaohs underwent a series of transformations, with centralised kingdoms repeatedly disintegrating into a patchwork of regional polities and then being ‘reborn’ several centuries later under unified rule. The reasons for these transformations, and subsequent revivals, were much the same as those we face now: climate change, war, and mass migration. To survive for as long as it did, the Egyptian state frequently had to reinvent itself—and this required an ideology to underpin the reinvention.   With this in mind, Ancient Egyptian culture developed a sophisticated concept of rebirth at the level of both the state and the individual. With the accession of every new Pharaoh, a renewed incarnation of the god of kingship, Horus, was seen as taking the throne. On the individual level, each mortal was guaranteed a renaissance of their own in the afterlife if certain conditions were met, which people were encouraged to work hard to meet. Existence was thus seen as both a progression of events going forward and a cycle of perpetual renewal. Indeed, the vocabulary of the Egyptian language itself has distinct words for linear and cyclical time: it acknowledges that all things grew older, but also that all things recycle themselves, as epitomised by the daily spectacle of sunrise and sunset. As we confront the challenges of renewal and transformation in our own societies, this article hopes to add perspective by tapping into the wisdom of a people who were already theorising these same topics four millennia ago—and drawing conclusions which may prove surprisingly useful today.   Introduction—Why does renaissance matter to Egyptology?   Renaissance and Egyptology seem at first sight to be unlikely bedfellows—in fact, in the popular imagination one might be more inclined to construe them as close to polar opposites. The term ‘renaissance’ carries in its very name connotations of the new and the renewed, whereas Ancient Egypt, at least as far as modern audiences are concerned, does not. This prevalent view is summed up perhaps most effectively by Daniel J Boorstin, an eminent American historian and former Librarian of Congress: describing the Ancient Egyptians, he claimed that ‘for three thousand years their sculpture showed less change than modern European sculpture in a decade’, characterising their culture as a ‘changeless rhythm of daily life’ entirely dominated by Pharaoh, the ‘unchanging god’.[1] The archetypal symbol of Ancient Egypt in popular culture, the pyramid, has long been seen as eternal and static, encapsulated by the medieval Arab proverb ‘Man fears Time, but Time fears the Pyramids’. Professional Egyptologists too have been eager to stress the significance of the pyramids’ enduring appeal—and that of Egyptian material culture more broadly—for the development of their discipline and sustained public interest in it.[2] And yet, a contrasting trend is also present: that of analysing Ancient Egypt as a dynamic system undergoing repeated cycles of change, in line with how the Egyptians themselves perceived their culture.   The historical case for ‘renaissance’ in Ancient Egypt   At the most basic level, ‘renaissance’ is an appropriate word to deploy in studies of Ancient Egyptian history because the Egyptians themselves used it. The term wehem mesut —literally ‘repeating of births’ was an established feature of the Egyptian language denoting a return to what was perceived as good social and political order after a period of chaos.[3] This reflected a key trend in Ancient Egyptian history throughout the Pharaonic period, which was marked by repeated cycles of political centralisation and fragmentation.[4] The first such cycle began with the formation of the very first unitary Egyptian state in the Early Dynastic Period (c.   3000-2686BCE), which gradually evolved into the highly centralised Old Kingdom (2686-2160BCE). This time, best known today for grandiose and extremely expensive royal construction projects such as the Giza Pyramids, ultimately proved both politically and economically unsustainable. A series of weak rulers failed to exercise effective control over the country’s regional centres, while these centres came to realise the potential economic benefits of seceding from the unitary state. The situation was exacerbated by climate change leading to low Nile floods and greater aridification of the surrounding Nile valley.[5] As a result, the Old Kingdom crumbled, ushering in a period with no universally recognised Pharaoh: the First Intermediate Period (2160-2055BCE).   The second cycle then began, centralisation being restored once more with the advent of the Middle Kingdom (2055-1650BCE). Among the first Pharaohs of this newly reunified polity was Amenemhat I (r. 1985-1956BCE), in whose reign the concept of ‘repeating of births’ was explicitly included in the royal titulary as one of the King’s names.[6] This reign saw the consolidation of state administration around a single royal court once again, with this ‘renaissance’ cemented by the return of the capital to the city of Memphis, the traditional seat of Pharaonic government in the Old Kingdom. The Middle Kingdom would go on become what is widely accepted as the classical age of Egyptian literature and also saw Egypt develop imperial ambitions in Nubia and the Levant on a hitherto unprecedented scale. However, it too eventually succumbed to forces of decentralisation, driven on this occasion by vast population movements from the Levant into northern Egypt.[7] These immigrant communities, collectively known today as the Hyksos, were eventually able to set up their own state in the Nile Delta that was independent of indigenous Egyptian government in the south, leading to another period of fragmentation: the Second Intermediate Period (1650-1550BCE).   The third cycle, marking another ‘renaissance’ of the unitary Egyptian state, emerged out of the warfare between the Hyksos and indigenous Egyptian populations that characterised the Second Intermediate Period. It gave rise to the New Kingdom (1550-1069BCE), arguably the most famous historical period of Egyptian history among today’s public. With the Hyksos driven out or subsumed into indigenous communities, Egypt once more coalesced around a single Pharaoh. This was the age of Tutankhamun (r. 1336-1327BCE) and the Valley of the Kings, the epoch of Ramesses II (r. 1279-1213BCE) and the apogee of Egyptian imperialism, far outstripping even the heights of the earlier Middle Kingdom.[8] However, cracks within the system eventually emerged, with court factionalism, incursions from the west and south by Libyan and Nubian forces, and food shortages all contributing to a growing sense that by the twelfth century BCE Egypt was again on the decline.[9] This in turn meant the idea of ‘repeating of births’ once again sprang to the forefront, being officially made the name of a new era during the turbulent and politically unstable reign of Ramesses XI (r. 1099-1069BCE).[10] Ultimately, these efforts to give new life to the New Kingdom did not prove successful and fragmentation returned with the onset of the Third Intermediate Period (1069-664BCE), but the ill-fated efforts of Ramesses XI and his government do at least point to the ongoing ideological relevance of ‘renaissance’ as a concept.   Moving on to the first millennium BCE, new political realities meant that the language of renaissance changed somewhat, as the Egyptian state would never again be reconstituted on the same territorial scale, but the general idea of rebirth after a period of hardship—and, at times, even existential crisis—emerged stronger than ever before. This is evidenced by a strong tradition of oracular literature, works such as the Demotic Chronicle , the Dream of Nectanebo , and ultimately the early Roman-era Egyptian texts known as the Oracle of the Lamb and the Oracle of the Potter .[11] All of these highlight the challenges first millennium BCE Egypt faced in view of its occupation by one foreign power after another: Nubians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and finally Romans. However, the Oracles —which typically purport to be the recorded utterances of divinely-inspired prophets—all conclude with a promise of the Egyptian state being reborn under a future ruler who will take the country to a destiny greater than at any time in the past. While such hopes were not borne out by events, they nonetheless serve as a testament to the enduring appeal of ‘renaissance’ as an idea in the Egyptian public consciousness.   The ‘renaissance’ of the individual and the divine in Ancient Egyptian thought   Set against this backdrop of the state repeatedly reinventing and recreating itself—or at least trying to—are various Egyptian beliefs on how mortal individuals and deities might themselves go through a ‘renaissance’ of their own.[12] The most famous of these is undoubtedly the Ancient Egyptian conceptualisation of the afterlife. Egypt was the first civilisation in the world to produce a detailed set of writings on what happens beyond the grave and how a new beginning may be achieved after the ultimate point of destruction: death. Starting with the Pyramid Texts  of the Old Kingdom,[13] through the Coffin Texts  of the Middle Kingdom,[14] and culminating in New Kingdom’s Book of the Dead ,[15] the Egyptians developed an increasingly sophisticated theology on reanimation in the next life. In its canonical form, this involved the inert dead body, preserved as a mummy, regaining vitality after the heart of the deceased had been judged and found worthy by the divine assessors of the Hall of Two Truths—symbolised by the weighing of the heart against the Feather of Truth ( Maat ).[16] With this test overcome, the deceased could enter the lush ‘field of reeds’ that represented the Egyptian afterlife.[17]   Parallels with this story of reanimation are visible in a range of other Egyptian beliefs. Osiris, the chief chthonic deity, was believed to have originated as Egypt’s first King in this existence, but was thought to have transmuted himself into an afterlife ruler after his death. Having been murdered, cut into pieces, and dispersed—hence becoming deprived not only of life but also of physical form—Osiris was nonetheless put back together again and arose in a new life.[18] Those who died subsequently could then merge with him after their own passing, thereby partaking in the original reanimation.[19] Meanwhile, back in the world of the living, it would fall to the son of Osiris, Horus, to initiate renewal and lead the next generation. It is, therefore, unsurprising that this regenerative Horus identity was bestowed on each new King, every incoming ruler explicitly named as the living incarnation of that god as part of the royal titulary.[20]   However, the Osiris mythology went far beyond offering ‘renaissance’ for individuals and the King. It was also connected to an even more fundamental cycle of cosmic renewal—that of the sun and its god Re, threatened with final destruction daily after sunset by a cosmic serpent but nonetheless reborn every day after a perilous journey through the Twelve Hours of the Night.[21] Each night Re was thought to descend into the afterlife to physically unite into one body with Osiris, thereby obtaining the power necessary for his own resurrection as the rising sun.[22] Going back to the individual, we can see that the rebirth of each person relies on essentially the same mechanism as the rebirth of the sun: entry into the afterlife (death), merging with Osiris who had overcome death, and emerging afresh in a new existence. In such a theological setting, the rising of the sun every morning would have brought considerable comfort; here was highly visible evidence of a solar ‘renaissance’, a recurring sign that people too could be reborn.   Indeed, so profound was the Ancient Egyptian focus on cycles of rebirth that it was even reflected in how they conceptualised time itself. Jan Assmann has demonstrated that the term used to denote cyclical time, neheh , differed to the term used for the unending progression of time, djet .[23] The conventional expression denoting ‘for all eternity’, typically used on tomb inscriptions, invoked both these concepts: its literal reading, r neheh hena djet  (‘for cyclical time together with unending time’), underlined the nature of existence as both cyclical and linear at once.[24] The Egyptians clearly recognised that time was passing and that, among other things, they themselves were getting older, but parallel to this they could see cycles of renewal all around them: whether the daily cycle of the sun, the centuries-long cycles of fragmentation and reunification in Egyptian history, or religious beliefs around Osiris and their own eventual rebirth. No doubt the cyclical nature of the annual Nile flood, so central to Egyptian agriculture, would have further consolidated this focus on different types of renewal as part of day-to-day lived experience.[25]   Lessons from Ancient Egypt: ‘Renaissance’ as a way of living   To the Ancient Egyptians, ‘renaissance’ was not an abstract concept associated with a particular historical epoch or artistic tradition, but rather a way of living, something fundamental to existence itself on the level of gods, people, and the state. There was an acknowledgement that everything had to end—and that at times such endings could be brutal—but there was also immense confidence that everything could be reborn too. No destruction was seen as permanent.   In our world today, we could draw considerable benefit from similar lines of thinking. This is because, at least at first sight, our situation seems fairly bleak: there is no shortage of apocalyptic news, ranging from the impending and seemingly inevitable threat of global climate catastrophe to growing concerns about nuclear war. All this is set against the backdrop of a mental health crisis among the young and a cost of care crisis among the old, unprecedented levels of irregular and dangerous migration, and generally declining living standards among vast tranches of the population with no obvious solution. This looks like a recipe for a disaster every bit as frightening as anything the Egyptians could envisage in their own oracular tradition, but, unlike the Egyptians, our own society does not seem to share their optimism in expecting renewal. This tendency towards demoralisation is a cause for concern, not least due to its potential capacity to breed resignation and inaction.   Clearly, none of this should be interpreted as a call for us to wholeheartedly embrace Ancient Egyptian beliefs—relying on a new ‘renaissance’, in an act of blind faith, to simply come along automatically and solve all our problems as a matter of course is obviously not a viable strategy. However, paying more attention to the renewable elements of our own lives—and in particular what we can do both as individuals and as a society to bring about instances of ‘renaissance’ great and small—would be far more meaningful. As we go about recycling plastic, rebalancing the carbon cycle, or recalibrating European and global security, we could do a lot worse than contemplate the Egyptian notion of neheh —the cyclical time that allows things to start over again even as the arrow of time, djet , presses on. Such a way of thinking proved helpful to the Egyptians over three millennia, so perhaps it can help us too. There certainly seems to be no harm in giving it a go. Alex Loktionov Alex Loktionov is an Egyptologist. He is a Fellow of Christ’s College and the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge and Professor of Egyptology at the Institute of Oriental and Classical Studies at HSE University, Moscow. He is also a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy at King’s College, London. [1] Daniel J Boorstin, The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination  (Random House 1992) 153. [2] Examples are numerous. For the pyramids specifically, see for instance Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass, Giza and the Pyramids  (Thames and Hudson 2017) 80-107; Miroslav Verner, The Pyramids: The Archaeology and History of Egypt’s Iconic Monuments (American University in Cairo Press 2020). For other examples, see for instance Edna R Russman, Eternal Egypt: Masterworks of Ancient Art from the British Museum  (British Museum Press 2001); Pierre Montet, L’Égypte éternelle  (Marabout 1964). [3] Jacobus van Dijk, ‘The Amarna Period and the Later New Kingdom’ in Ian Shaw (ed), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt  (Oxford University Press 2000) 309. For more detailed surveys of Egyptological sources mentioning this term, see Andrzej Niwinski, ‘Les pèriodes whm mswt dans l’histoire de l’Égypte’ (1996) 136 Bulletin de la Société Française d’Égyptologie 5-26; Rolf Gundlach, ‘Wiederholung der Geburt’ (1986) 6 Lexikon der Ägyptologie   1261-4. [4] For a helpful summary of key political, social, and economic developments across the entire Pharaonic period, the standard reference work remains Ian Shaw (ed), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt  (Oxford University Press 2000). The chronology given in that book serves as the basis for dates in the present article. For more detailed chapters on practices in specific periods, as well as extensive further references, see Juan Carlos Moreno García (ed), Ancient Egyptian Administration  (Brill 2013). [5] The literature on climate change at the end of the Old Kingdom is sizable. See for instance Fabian Welc and Leszek Marks, ‘Climate change at the end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt around 4200 BP: New geoarchaeological evidence’ (2014) 324 Quaternary International 124-33; more recently Judith Bunbury, The Nile and Ancient Egypt  (Cambridge University Press 2019) 63-76. [6] For more on this, see Dorothea Arnold, ‘Amenemhat I and the Early Twelfth Dynasty at Thebes’ (1991) 26 Metropolitan Museum Journal   18. [7] For more on these population movements and associated questions of identity and social perception, see Danielle Candelora, Redefining the Hyksos: Immigration and Identity Negotiation in the Second Intermediate Period (UCLA PhD Dissertation 2020) < https://escholarship.org/uc/item/01d9d70t > accessed 10 August 2023. [8] For the latest study of Egypt as an empire in this period, see Ellen Morris, Ancient Egyptian Imperialism  (Wiley-Blackwell 2018) 117-252. [9] For a convenient brief overview of these processes, see van Dijk (n 3) 305-9. [10] For a concise recent treatment of developments in the reign of Ramesses XI, see Kathlyn Cooney, ‘The New Kingdom of Egypt under the Ramesside Dynasty’ in Karen Radner, Nadine Moeller, and Daniel Potts (eds), The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East: Vol. III: From the Hyksos to the Late Second Millennium BC (Oxford University Press 2022) 337-41. [11] For summaries of all of these and further literature, see Alexandre Loktionov, ‘Egyptian Oracles and the Afterlife’ in Hilary Marlow, Karla Pollmann, and Helen van Noorden (eds), Eschatology in Antiquity  (Routledge 2021) 51-7. [12] The distinction between the mortal and the divine individual was notoriously blurred in Ancient Egypt. As will be shown, this makes ‘renaissance’ concepts equally applicable to both. For a useful introduction to the nature of the divine in Ancient Egypt and the relationship between gods and mortals, see Richard Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt (Thames and Hudson 2003) 26-35. [13] A convenient edition is James Allen (ed), The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Society of Biblical Literature 2005). [14] These represent a vast corpus of literature pertaining to survival and transformation in the afterlife—see Adriaan de Buck and Alan Gardiner (eds), The Egyptian Coffin Texts , 7 vols (University of Chicago Press 1935-1961). [15] Raymond Faulkner (ed), The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead  (British Museum Press 2010). [16] This theology is stated in Book of the Dead  Spells 30B and 125—see ibid 27-34. [17] For more on the terminology and imagery of the ‘field of reeds’, see Dieter Mueller, ‘An Early Egyptian Guide to the Hereafter’ (1972) 58  Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 99-125. [18] The canonical version of this myth is preserved in Plutarch’s Moralia . See < http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/plutarch/moralia/isis_and_osiris*/a.html > (accessed 10 August 2023). [19] The deceased is called ‘the Osiris N’ throughout the Book of the Dead— see Faulkner (n 15). [20] For a study of the royal titulary and a comprehensive set of accompanying royal names, see Ronald Leprohon, The Great Name: Ancient Egyptian Royal Titulary (Society of Biblical Literature 2013). [21] For full details on this set of beliefs, see Erik Hornung and Theodor Abt (eds), The Egyptian Amduat: The Book of the Hidden Chamber (David Warburton tr, Living Human Heritage Publications 2007). In this story, the sun god Re overcomes a new challenge in every hour of the night, until he is eventually reborn on the eastern horizon in the morning. [22] For more on Osiris-Re syncretism and the associated iconography, see Wilkinson (n 12) 35, 120. [23] Jan Assmann, The Mind of Egypt (Metropolitan Books 2002) 18. [24] For a very recent and extremely comprehensive study of neheh and djet  and their full range of uses in Egyptian texts, see Steven Gregory, Tutankhamun Knew the Names of the Two Great Gods: d̠t and nḥḥ as Fundamental Concepts of Pharaonic Ideology (Archaeopress 2022). [25] The Nile flood and the mud it brought was also explicitly associated with Osiris—see Wilkinson (n 12) 122.

Funding for the arts is quite frequently commended by political philosophers and political pundits—whom I shall call ‘edificatory perfectionists’—as a policy that can incline people to improve their ways of life by taking advantage of cultural opportunities.[1] By contrast, this article advocates such funding because it can promote the occurrence of outstanding achievements and thereby help to bring about the conditions under which every citizen can be warranted in feeling a strong sense of self-respect. Such a rationale will be designated here as ‘aspirational perfectionism’. Naturally, the tenor of aspirational perfectionism would be especially plain in policies that establish competitions and prizes for excellence in the arts. However, for the purpose of sharpening the contrast between aspirational perfectionism and edificatory perfectionism, let us continue to focus on subventions disbursed by a system of governance to enable the producers or organizers of artistic events to price their tickets at affordable levels. Subsidies so aimed can indeed sensibly figure among the techniques plied by a system of governance in pursuit of the objectives of aspirational perfectionism.   Whereas edificatory perfectionists favour such subsidies as means of steering members of the public toward more sophisticated pastimes and lifestyles, aspirational perfectionists favour them principally as means of sustaining the sundry aesthetic ventures through which great accomplishments can emerge. In the absence of those subventions and in the absence of any private-sector subventions that would be of approximately the same scale and efficacy, the number of people in attendance at high-art events (with staggeringly expensive tickets) would dwindle to the point where most such events might lose their viability altogether. As a result, there would be a sharp diminution in the abundance of the fora wherein painters and composers and playwrights and authors and musicians and other practitioners of the high arts are able to present their endeavours to the public. Those endeavours would consequently be set back, as practitioners of the high arts would struggle to come up with their livelihoods and with the audiences on whom they could try out their ideas. If public subsidies for events in the arts can avert such setbacks by keeping the events affordable and by thus providing the practitioners of the high arts with ample opportunities to gain attention for their offerings, the subsidies can encourage the aesthetic striving that is necessary for the attainment of excellence in the high arts. They can also promote a rich cultural tapestry that is itself a mode of societal excellence.   Of course, the scenario sketched in the preceding paragraph adverts to a number of empirical contingencies that might or might not obtain in any given society. For one thing, as has already been suggested, the likelihood or unlikelihood of adequate private-sector subventions for the arts in the absence of public subventions is obviously a matter that can vary from one society to another. That matter and the other contingencies recounted in the aforementioned scenario would have to be explored by the relevant officials in any system of governance before they could legitimately go ahead with disbursals of funding for the arts. Still, although the legitimacy of such disbursals will hinge partly on those contingencies, a situation in which the facts do militate in favour of public funding is not at all implausible. On the contrary, the facts can align in favour of some public subventions in many credibly possible societies.   Under the aspirational-perfectionist rationale for public financial support of the arts, any enhancement of the aesthetic sensibilities of the citizenry is a byproduct rather than a justificatory factor. Welcome though such a byproduct undoubtedly is, it does not contribute to the justificatory basis for the policy of public subventions. To invoke it as an element of that justificatory basis would be to evince the meddlesome mentality of edificatory perfectionism. That is, if a system of governance adopts a policy of funding the arts, and if one of its aims in doing so is to increase the urbanity of its citizens, its policy is tainted by the officiousness of a busybody. Its policy is a product of edificatory perfectionism rather than solely of aspirational perfectionism.   Nonetheless, although an aspirational-perfectionist system of governance that provides subsidies for the arts is not thereby endeavouring to refine the sentiments and outlooks of citizens, it is endeavouring to improve their lives in quite a different fashion. Its immediate aim in supplying the subsidies is to nurture excellence in the arts by helping to ensure that audiences and livelihoods will be available to the practitioners thereof, but its underlying objective through the promotion of excellence is to enable every citizen to be warranted in harbouring a robust sense of self-respect. Given the centrality of warranted self-respect to a good life (not only by the reckoning of aspirational perfectionists, but also by the reckoning of Rawlsians), aspirational perfectionism does indeed aim to make each person’s life better. However, instead of trying in the manner of a busybody to elevate the lifestyle or sensibilities of each person, it tries to endow a society with estimableness on which the warranted self-respect of every member of the society can be partly based.   Thus, the aspirational-perfectionist rationale for the subventions envisioned here is considerably more complex than the edificatory-perfectionist rationale. Under either of those justifications, the immediate effect sought through the subventions is on the members of the public whose inclinations to attend high-art events will be triggered by the affordability of the tickets for the events. However, edificatory perfectionists seek that effect in the hope that the members of the public will be uplifted through their engagement with aesthetically sophisticated performances or exhibitions. By contrast, although an aspirational perfectionist can of course applaud the edification of members of the public and can perceive that it is a likely consequence of the policies which she commends, her prescriptions are not oriented toward it. Rather, aspirational perfectionists seek the attendance of members of the public at high-art events to sustain the flourishing cultural conditions in which the occurrence of outstanding feats of creativity is encouraged. In other words, the effect on the members of the public is sought for the sake of the resultant effect on the practitioners of the arts—composers, authors, playwrights, painters, sculptors, musicians, actors, and so forth—whose creative striving will be vitalized. In turn, that effect on the practitioners of the arts is pursued by aspirational perfectionists for the sake of the resultant effect on the warrantedness of everyone’s sense of self-respect. Insofar as the vitalization of the creative striving undertaken by the practitioners of the arts does fruitfully lead to top-notch achievements, it will have imbued their society with a mode of excellence. If the society is likewise excellent in some other ways and is governed as a liberal democracy, it comprises the conditions under which every citizen can be warranted in feeling a high level of self-respect. (Of course, as this chapter will remark, the excellence of a society is only a necessary condition rather than a sufficient condition for the warrantedness of a strong sense of self-respect on the part of each citizen. Numerous specificities of the conduct of any particular individual will bear on whether she is warranted in harbouring a strong sense of self-respect, and those specificities along with numerous specificities of her temperament will bear on whether she actually feels such a sense of self-respect.)   Naturally, some aspirational-perfectionist policies—for example, some prizes or fellowships or other such awards—will be more straightforwardly aimed at promoting the occurrence of outstanding achievements than are the subventions for the arts that have been pondered here. Public support for the arts and for other endeavours can be channelled by sundry routes. However, subsidies of the type contemplated here are important not only because they are familiar and because their immediate beneficiaries are quite numerous, but also because they can help to shape a rich medley of cultural offerings that will cumulatively constitute a form of excellence with which a society can be endued. Thus, my outline of the aspirational-perfectionist rationale for such subsidies is an apt point of departure for my elaboration of aspirational perfectionism as an alternative both to edificatory perfectionism and to any position that opposes subsidies for the arts.   1. Societal excellence and warranted self-respect   Perhaps the aspect of aspirational perfectionism most in need of clarification and defense is the connection which it postulates between the excellence of a society and the warranted self-respect of the individuals who belong to that society. Why would the warrantedness of anyone’s sense of self-respect depend partly on the occurrence of great accomplishments by other people in his society? If somebody has not been at least tenuously involved in any of those accomplishments, why would the occurrence of them make any difference to the warrantedness or unwarrantedness of his feeling a high level of self-respect? Are aspirational perfectionists preposterously suggesting that individuals should take credit for the feats of others in whose exploits they have not participated at all? Are aspirational perfectionists suggesting that warranted self-respect is partly a vicarious property?   These and related questions may seem to pose serious difficulties for aspirational perfectionism. They manifestly have to be addressed. One thing to be noted straightaway is that these questions are ethical rather than psychological. They are about the warrantedness of certain attitudes rather than about the likelihood that such attitudes will be held. Aspirational perfectionism is premised on ethical claims about warranted self-respect rather than on empirical claims about self-respect. (John Rawls did not sufficiently differentiate the former claims from the latter in his famous discussions of self-respect in Part Three of A Theory of Justice .)[2] Nonetheless, despite the crucial differences between ethical assertions about warranted self-respect and empirical assertions about self-respect, we can fruitfully approach the ethical matters by briefly mulling over some empirical matters. My empirical observations will be at an elementary level and are meant to be suggestive as a transition to my ethical argumentation; they are decidedly not presented as the premises of an argument from which some ethical conclusions would be derived in defiance of the ‘is’/‘ought’ divide.   1.1. Pride in the accomplishments of others   Although the notion of taking pride in the accomplishments of other people can initially seem outlandish, it is in fact instantiated in many commonplace settings. Some of the most resounding instances arise from the fervour felt and exhibited by the followers of teams in various sports. Across many societies, people tend to identify themselves with teams on the basis of numerous different factors: current residence, past residence, institutional affiliation (often determinative in relation to collegiate sports, for example), national affiliation (often determinative in relation to Olympic sports and other international tournaments), and so forth. Myriads of people take great pride in their cherished teams, and they tend to feel better about themselves and their lives when their teams are faring especially well. Of course, such pride is not always entirely vicarious. Spectators who attend some sporting event can contribute quite significantly to the flow of play by cheering vociferously for their favoured team and by showing disfavour for the rival team. Still, the principal responsibility for victories by a successful team belongs to the athletes who make up the team, and no direct responsibility at all for those victories is attributable to followers of the team who have not attended any of the games or matches. All the same, countless devotees of teams who do fall into the not-having-attended category take pride in their teams’ triumphs. Their doing so is an everyday feature of life in most countries.   As has been noted, one of the factors that can lead people to associate themselves enthusiastically with a team is national affiliation. That factor, like each of the other factors mentioned above, extends far beyond the confines of sports. Patriotic sentiments, whether in perniciously chauvinistic forms or in more salutary forms, typically involve the taking of pride in others’ achievements as well as in one’s own achievements. Many people in Finland take pride in the musical accomplishments of Jean Sibelius, who was himself ardently patriotic; many people in England take pride in the magnificent plays and poetry of their countryman William Shakespeare; many people in the United States take pride in the ethical and oratorical greatness of their compatriot Abraham Lincoln; many people in South Africa take pride in the towering stature of Nelson Mandela as a statesman; many people in the Netherlands take pride in the formidable roster of superb painters among their countrymen, ranging from Rembrandt to Vincent van Gogh; and so forth. Patriotism is a pervasively felt attitude or set of attitudes whereby people feel better about their lives because they perceive themselves as belonging to a country that is admirable. Patriotism does not always involve hearty support for the currently reigning government in one’s country; indeed, one’s resistance to a government’s policies or demands can be impelled by one’s sense that the ruling officials have deviated from some commendable values or traditions of one’s country. Still, although patriotism does not always translate into support for the system of governance that currently prevails in one’s country, it leads people to feel lifted above their solitary lives by dint of their being linked to a nation whose institutions or traditions or fellow citizens are perceived by them as laudable.   Numerous people who enter major universities—whether to study or to teach—quite rapidly come to feel proud about the intellectual feats of their predecessors or contemporaries. Universities and many of their members brag about Nobel Prizes and other high-profile awards and achievements attained by those predecessors or contemporaries. They do so partly because the institutions gain prestige from the amassing of such awards and achievements, and because the members materially benefit from belonging to prestigious institutions. However, more generally, a lot of the people who study or teach at a major university derive pride and gratification from their connections to such a centre of learning with its illustrious exploits. Their awareness of those exploits can invigorate them in their own striving for academic excellence. (Of course, as has already been observed, some of the non-academic accomplishments attributable to universities—most notably their sporting triumphs—can also engender great pride in many of the members thereof.)   Like national allegiances and institutional affiliations, regional and local ties are often operative in inclining people to experience greater esteem for themselves by reference to the achievements of others. A host of examples could be adduced here, but three literary instances from England will suffice to illustrate the point. The county of Dorset promotes itself as ‘Hardy country’; the county of Hampshire and the city of Bath compete to promote themselves as ‘Austen country’; and the county of Warwickshire around the town of Stratford-upon-Avon promotes itself as ‘Shakespeare country’. Doubtless, the promotional ventures of these regions and municipalities are undertaken principally in order to encourage potential tourists to visit. However, anyone who visits these places can quickly discern that many of the people who have been brought up in them—not just the tour guides—genuinely harbour feelings of pride from residing where such eminent writers worked.   Heretofore my examples of vicarious pride have pertained chiefly to some outstanding accomplishments attained by individuals or by small sets of individuals. However, people also take pride in great collective accomplishments of others and in glorious features of the natural environment. For instance, many inhabitants of the English city of York (or Ely or Canterbury) experience a somewhat heightened sense of self-esteem as a result of living in the proximity of one of the grandest cathedrals in the world. People who are not religious at all and who do not participate in the maintenance of the York Minster (or Ely Cathedral or Canterbury Cathedral) can nonetheless feel better about themselves as they daily savour its magnificent architecture in their midst.   Similarly, numerous residents of the states in the upper Midwestern portion of the USA have long taken pride in the flagship public universities which their legislatures have established. When describing this phenomenon, the sociologists Christopher Jencks and David Riesman directly analogized the outlooks of citizens in the Midwestern states to those of people who dwell in European cathedral cities: ‘Like medieval cathedrals, public universities in these states seem to have become symbols of communal solidarity, a focus of civic pride, and a tribute to faith in ideas that transcend the here and now’. Even citizens who have not studied or taught at the flagship university in their state can look upon its excellence as a source of gratification accruing to everyone who abides there.   Elements of the natural environment can elicit cognate attitudes. For many people who live in places with spectacular natural scenery, the breathtakingness of the environment serves to reinforce their self-esteem. This role of the natural topography was poignantly captured in June 2014 by Nashreem Ghori, who hails from Pakistan. Speaking to a Washington Post  reporter one year after a massacre perpetrated by Taliban terrorists against foreigners who were climbing in the northern mountains of Pakistan, Ghori lamented the precipitous decline in the flow of tourists and climbers to his country. Inhabitants of northern Pakistan were of course suffering financially from that decline, but they were more profoundly undergoing a collapse in their morale. As Ghori explained: ‘We have so little to be proud of, so if there is something as impressive as this [namely, the mountainous terrain of northern Pakistan], and foreigners come praise it, it’s a psychological lift’.[3] Because people so often identify themselves with the locations in which their lives unfold, the prepossessing features of those locations combine with individuals’ own doings as determinants of their levels of self-esteem.   In short, although the idea of vicarious pride might at first seem queer when it is broached in abstracto , a bit of reflection indicates that vicarious pride is manifested ubiquitously in everyday life. Of course, the pervasiveness of the practice of taking pride in the accomplishments of other people (and in the grandeur of natural environments) is consistent with the proposition that every instantiation of that practice is unwarranted. My empirical observations in this subsection are consistent with that proposition. Even more obviously, those observations are consistent with the proposition that some instances of the aforementioned practice are unwarranted; indeed, that latter proposition is plainly true. Nevertheless, what the observations in this subsection help to underscore is that the bolstering of people’s self-esteem through the achievements of others is not something opaque to us as if it were occurrent only in possible worlds that are highly remote from actuality. It is such a widespread phenomenon that we largely take it for granted.   1.2. Is vicarious pride ever warranted?   As has already been remarked, the discussion in the preceding subsection is not a set of premises from which some ethical conclusions can validly be derived. The ‘is’/’ought’ gap precludes such a derivation from empirical claims. Still, although no ethical conclusions directly follow from those claims, the role of the preceding subsection in drawing attention to the familiarity of vicarious pride is of relevance here. Notwithstanding that some instances of vicarious pride are unwarranted—sometimes egregiously unwarranted—the pervasiveness of such pride and the benignity of many of its manifestations should incline us to be surprised if no solid arguments could be advanced to support the warrantedness of some of its instances.   Unlike the instinct for revenge, which is probably as widespread as the tendency to take pride in the achievements of one’s fellows, the latter tendency is not inherently oriented toward the harming of others. Indeed, it is frequently not so oriented. As the comment by Nashreem Ghori makes clear, the experience of feeling good about oneself by reference to the accomplishments of one’s fellows or to the beauty of nature does not have to involve any denigration of other people. It does not have to involve any nasty gloating or sneering—types of conduct that are indicative of insecurity rather than of warranted self-respect. When an individual has reinforced his sense of self-respect by associating himself with some modes of excellence achieved by others, he can become more appreciative of excellence in its diverse forms. Such an effect is not inevitable in each particular case, but it is always possible and is not at all fanciful. As Rawls contended: ‘When men are secure in the enjoyment of the exercise of their own powers, they are disposed to appreciate the perfections of others’.[4] Rawls characteristically presented his readers with an excessively sweeping empirical assertion, but his thesis becomes much stronger if the disposition to which he referred is understood as a credible possibility rather than as something that always obtains.   Vicarious pride, then, is separable (though not always separate) from any malign attitudes toward others. Important though that point is, however, it does not per se suffice to establish that some instances of such pride are warranted. We still need to address the further ethical question whether the strengthening of one’s self-esteem through one’s association of oneself with the outstanding achievements of others is ever tenable. That question can be sharpened into two concerns. First, would the enhancement of one’s self-respect amount to taking credit for the exploits of others? Second, would it amount to a display of a person’s inadequacy, where the person relies on those exploits to compensate for the insufficiency of her own doings as a basis for her sense of her own worth? Let us designate the first of these queries as the ‘Credit Concern’ and the second as the ‘Inadequacy Concern’.   1.2.1. A first concern addressed   A response to the Credit Concern is quite straightforward. Although some instances of vicarious pride are doubtless impelled by delusions on the part of people who have hoodwinked themselves into thinking that they deserve credit for achievements to which they have not contributed, there are no grounds for thinking that all or even most instances are of that kind. In countless credibly possible situations in which the self-esteem of individuals is reinforced through the splendid exploits of other people or through the captivatingness of natural beauty, the individuals in question are not under any illusions that they are personally responsible for the greatness with which they associate themselves. Worth noting also is that not all instances of vicarious pride are purely vicarious. As has already been mentioned, some of the devotees of teams in various sports do contribute in certain ways to their teams’ victories by attending games or matches with clamorous ebullience. When the devotees feel better about themselves with reference to those victories, they are taking pride in triumphs for which they can accurately claim some small shares of the credit. Much the same is true of quite a few of the stonemasons who make repairs in the magnificent edifices of Cambridge and Oxford colleges.[5] They take pride not only in the results of their own labours, but also in the overall exquisiteness of the architecture which they have helped to preserve.   1.2.2. A second concern addressed   Somewhat more complicated is the second of the two queries broached above, the Inadequacy Concern. Like the Credit Concern, the Inadequacy Concern is accurate in relation to certain instances of vicarious pride. Some individuals who experience such pride are undoubtedly seeking to offset and obscure their own failures by absorbing themselves with the successes of other people. However, such self-deception is scarcely the only possible factor that can prompt a person P to feel a heightened sense of self-esteem through the accomplishments of other people. Instead of unworthily trying to play down any of his own shortcomings, P can simply be recognizing that the trajectory of his life comprises far more than solely his own doings. It also comprehends many of the doings of people who stand in sundry relationships to P. Any satisfactory assessment of the estimableness of P’s life will need to advert to the fortunes of those people, even though such an assessment will of course be focused primarily on P’s own endeavours.   Because P is positioned in the relationships just mentioned, P himself and other people aptly identify his fortunes partly with the fortunes of his contemporaries and predecessors and successors who are linked to him through those relationships. Gauging the goodness of P’s life partly by reference to the activities of some of his contemporaries and predecessors and successors is apt inasmuch as his relationships with them augment the lustre of his life through their successes and detract from the lustre of his life through their failures. Perhaps the most obvious examples of relationships that produce such effects by intertwining people’s lives are those of typical families. If P as a member of a typical family generally fares well in his undertakings, and if the other members of his family fare badly, the goodness of his life will have been lessened by the dismalness of their lives. Of course, the quality of P’s life is primarily determined by his own accomplishments and setbacks; but its estimableness is diminished by the lacklustre fortunes of people with whom P is significantly associated. Conversely, if P generally fares well and if the members of his family also fare well, the goodness of his life will have been augmented by their flourishing. As Rawls affirmed, ‘[w]e need one another as partners in ways of life that are engaged in for their own sake, and the successes and enjoyments of others are necessary for and complementary to our own good.[6] To be sure, the term ‘partners’ in this statement by Rawls should be construed loosely. Even in some families—and a fortiori  in larger and more diffuse groups—the members might seldom come into contact with one another and might not collaborate with one another in any structured fashion. Still, in a typical family and in any of the sundry other groups that Rawls designated as ‘social unions’,[7] the members are partners at least in the sense that their diverse activities cumulatively determine the character of their group to which they all are linked.   In a typical family, the members interact frequently and intimately. In any typical larger group, the members interact less frequently; in a group on the scale of a nation, most of the members will not encounter one another directly at all. Still, despite the limitedness of any direct or intimate interaction among most of the citizens of a sizeable nation, they are partners in the expansive sense that has just been specified. Their conduct cumulatively shapes the ethical character of their society, and that ethical character is a determinant—usually an ancillary determinant, though sometimes a central determinant—of the overall ethical quality of each citizen’s life. Even when somebody fiercely dissociates himself from the society to which he belongs, the trajectory of his life (including his dissociation of himself from his society and his perception of the need to dissociate himself therefrom) will have been inflected in its ethical bearings by the collectivity which he now ferociously excoriates. His very denunciation of that collectivity is expressive of the stake which he has had in its fortunes.   Given the importance of a society in affecting the overall course of the life of each individual who belongs thereto, its members have good reasons to feel better about themselves when other members enhance the society’s stature through their accomplishments. On suitable occasions, they have good reasons to partake in the practice of experiencing vicarious pride. So widespread throughout the world, that practice is often solidly justifiable. This point is particularly pertinent at the level of ideal theory, as Rawls recognized: ‘In a fully just society persons seek their good in ways peculiar to themselves, and they rely upon their associates to do things they could not have done, as well as things they might have done but did not […] It is a feature of human sociability that we are by ourselves but parts of what we might be. We must look to others to attain the excellences that we must leave aside, or lack altogether […] Yet the good attained from the common culture far exceeds our work in the sense that we cease to be mere fragments’.[8] As Rawls’s meditations on social unions serve to accentuate, the fundamental misconception underlying the Inadequacy Concern is the notion that all limitations on a person’s abilities and achievements are a cause for consternation. Some such limitations are indeed a cause for dismay, but the sheer finitude of each person is not. Instead of compensating for ignominious inadequacies, the outstanding feats that warrantedly elicit vicarious pride are such as to complement and enrich the contributions made by other citizens to the overall lustre of their society from which every citizen can benefit.   1.2.3. An apparent objection   By pointing to facts that markedly contrast with those which I have highlighted in §1.1, a wary reader might impugn my effort to ground aspirational perfectionism on the warrantedness of some instances of vicarious pride. Such a reader would submit that, although the attainment of excellence by certain people can heighten the self-esteem of many of their fellow citizens, it can also produce much more deleterious effects. In response to the great achievements of illustrious predecessors or contemporaries, some people can feel daunted and demoralized because their own talents seem to them paltry in comparison. Alternatively, or additionally, some people can feel envious and embittered as they sense that their own exploits have been overshadowed by the remarkable accomplishments of certain predecessors or contemporaries or successors. Far from enhancing the self-esteem of the people who develop these negative attitudes, the remarkable accomplishments in question have substantially impaired their self-esteem. Whether or not such reactions are as common as the practice of taking pride in the great achievements of others, they certainly are familiar.   Any objection to aspirational perfectionism along these lines would be misconceived. As has been emphasized, the empirical observations advanced in §1.1 are not premises from which this chapter has sought to derive ethical conclusions. Rather, in arriving at ethical conclusions, this chapter has inquired whether any of the patterns of behaviour recounted in those empirical observations are warranted or not. My ethical conclusions, reached through ethical reasoning, are an answer (an affirmative answer) to that ethical inquiry.   Now, the empirical observations in the penultimate paragraph above—which of course are consistent with the observations in §1.1, even though their tenor is markedly different—are likewise not premises from which any ethical conclusions can validly be derived. If they are to be parlayed into a challenge to aspirational perfectionism, they will have to be subjected to ethical scrutiny like the scrutiny to which the observations in §1.1 have been subjected. That is, we have to ask whether people are ever warranted in responding to the outstanding achievements of others by feeling daunted and demoralized or envious and embittered. Such attitudes do indeed detract from people’s self-esteem, but are the reductions in self-esteem ever warranted?   On the one hand, if the self-esteem of some person Q is currently at an inordinately high level, his exposure to some sterling accomplishments by other people might salutarily decrease his self-esteem to an appropriate level. He might come to be accurately attuned to his own limitations and merits. If so, the diminution in his self-esteem is warranted. Of course, any such diminution could easily go too far. If Q does become demoralized because of his shedding of his illusions about his abilities, he will unwarrantedly have gone from one excess to another. Nonetheless, if his exaggerated estimation of his own talents is lowered to an apt level without plummeting further to a level of despondency—and without leading to a sour-grapes sense of resignation or sullenness—the reduction in his self-respect will have been warranted.   On the other hand, if the self-respect of Q is currently at an apt level (or even if it is not), and if he becomes dispirited or seethingly envious in response to somebody else’s towering achievements, his reaction is unwarranted. A reaction of either type may be humanly understandable, but it is ethically unworthy. If Q does indeed fall prey to dejected torpor or to envy, he is exhibiting his own ethical weakness by focusing his appraisal of himself largely on the fact that he is not someone else.   Somebody with a warranted sense of self-respect focuses her appraisal of herself on what she is and does: on her abilities, on her accomplishments, and on her relationships with other people and her surroundings. (Of course, if her accomplishments fall well short of what could reasonably be expected on the basis of her abilities, she is warranted in lowering her sense of self-esteem commensurately.) Given that her level of self-respect is pegged accurately to her own abilities and accomplishments and relationships, that level is not degradingly centred on the fact that she lacks someone else’s abilities or on the fact that she has not performed someone else’s deeds. Unlike Q in the preceding paragraph, a person with a warranted sense of self-respect will have attained that sense positively by reference to what she does and is—including her relationships with other people—rather than negatively by reference to her not having done what somebody else has done.   In sum, although the empirical observations at the outset of this subsection are true, they cannot be parlayed into any conclusions that are problematic for aspirational perfectionism. It is quite likely that some people will become demoralized or bitterly envious in response to the outstanding achievements of others, but such self-abasing reactions are always unwarranted as an ethical matter (even if they are psychologically understandable). Any curtailment of someone’s self-esteem that is attributable to such reactions is unwarranted. When a person harbours a proper level of self-respect, that level will have been bolstered rather than sapped by the sterling exploits of others in her society.   1.2.4. Another apparent objection   Wary readers might thus press forth with a different objection to my grounding of aspirational perfectionism on the warrantedness of some instances of vicarious pride. Such readers might point out that, when somebody has grown up in disadvantaged circumstances and has risen above those circumstances to achieve success in some field(s) of endeavour, he will be warranted in harbouring an especially high sense of self-esteem. He can rightly pride himself on his fortitude and talents that have enabled him to overcome the obstacles which he would not have encountered if he had grown up in more auspicious circumstances. Wary readers might also point out that somebody who campaigns effectively against injustices can aptly take satisfaction in what he has done to rectify wrongs. An ancient Hebrew prophet such as Amos or Jeremiah, or a modern-day prophet such as Martin Luther King or Václav Havel or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, could quite properly take pride in his forthright condemnation of iniquity under conditions of grievous peril and persecution. Had such a prophet lived in a better society with much less severe injustice, there would probably have been fewer occasions for him to display his courage and eloquence.   Unlike the riposte to my theorizing that has been plumbed in §1.2.3, this new riposte—which I will henceforth designate as the ‘Struggling Against Adversities Objection’—presents some empirical claims that are already subsumed into ethical propositions about the warrantedness of enhanced levels of self-respect under certain kinds of circumstances. Still, the purport of the Struggling Against Adversities Objection is not entirely clear. It appears to be directed against my thesis that the warrantedness of a high level of self-respect for each person in any society depends partly on the occurrence of outstanding achievements within the society. That thesis does stand in need of further defense, which it will receive in §1.3 of this chapter. By contrast, the arguments in §1.2 have been marshalled not in support of that thesis but in support of an anterior proposition: namely, the proposition that people can sometimes warrantedly take pride in the great accomplishments of others who belong to their society. At any rate, although the Struggling Against Adversities Objection is somewhat premature, three rejoinders to it are pertinent even at this stage.   1.2.4.1. Illegitimate measures   First, this article is primarily a work of political philosophy. Its argument about the warrantedness of some instances of vicarious pride is ultimately in the service of conclusions about the proper role of any system of governance. More specifically, those conclusions pertain to the ways in which any system of governance is both morally obligated and morally permitted to bring about the conditions under which every citizen can be warranted in harbouring a strong sense of self-respect. Even if the Struggling Against Adversities Objection were correct in suggesting that every citizen could be so warranted as a result of coming to grips with obstacles posed by injustices or by natural hardships such as disabilities, no system of governance would ever be morally permitted to inflict injustices on citizens for the sake of providing them with opportunities to meet the ensuing challenges. No system of governance can ever legitimately perpetrate injustices for any purpose—not even the purpose of promoting the incidence of warranted self-respect.   The dialectical situation here is somewhat akin to that which confronted the apostle Paul in his Letter to the Romans. Quite early in that letter, Paul noted that some of his opponents had accused him of propagating the message that sinful behaviour is permissible and even commendable because it gives rise to occasions for the working of God’s redemptive grace: ‘And why not do evil that good [in the form of God’s forgiveness and salvation] may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying’ (3:8). When Paul returned to this matter subsequently in the letter, he emphatically affirmed that sinful behaviour is never permissible even when it is undertaken in pursuit of benign ends (6:1–2): ‘What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?’   In short, even if the Struggling Against Adversities Objection were unproblematic in all other ways, it would not be broaching a prospect on the basis of which any system of governance could ever legitimately act. Aspirational perfectionism is located within an array of deontological constraints. Each such constraint is absolute in that it is always and everywhere morally binding. Contraventions of a deontological constraint are never morally permissible even if they are somehow promotive of good consequences such as the strengthening of a person’s warranted self-respect. Yet a system of governance would blatantly violate deontological constraints if it were deliberately to afflict people with poverty or disabilities or other serious hardships in order to furnish them with opportunities to surmount those hardships. Hence, the Struggling Against Adversities Objection does not cast any doubt on the proposition that every system of governance is morally obligated and morally permitted to avert or remedy injustices rather than to generate them.   1.2.4.2. Warranted self-respect impaired   In any event, the Struggling Against Adversities Objection errs in suggesting that a country where prophets need to rail against iniquities is a land in which a system of governance has secured the conditions under which every citizen can be fully warranted in harbouring a strong sense of self-respect. Specifically, what is missing is the mode of excellence that consists in the realization of the requirements of justice. Of course, a society can attain that mode of excellence without being perfectly just; however, a society debased by injustices on a scale that elicits well-founded prophetic remonstrations is not a community whose members can warrantedly take pride in their status as members. It is not surprising that what suffuses the declamations of the Hebrew prophets, in addition to a sense of truculent indignation, is a sense of shame. Although the prophets were not personally responsible for the depravity against which they inveighed, they were warranted in feeling ashamed of belonging to a community that had succumbed to such depravity.[9] A prophet could recognize that the trajectory of his life included his membership in a deeply unjust society, and he could warrantedly conclude that that trajectory was tarnished pro tanto . Notwithstanding that he could warrantedly derive satisfaction from his own indefatigability in condemning and countering the heinous   wrongs committed by his fellow citizens, the conditions for the full warrantedness of a robust sense of self-respect on his part (or on the part of any of his fellow citizens) were not in place.   1.2.4.3. Insusceptibility to generalisation   Even if the other shortcomings in the Struggling Against Adversities Objection were to be pretermitted, the objection would fail because the conditions which it recounts as potentially underpinning the warrantedness of a strong sense of self-respect are not susceptible to being universalized. A society S in which every member acts as a prophet who aptly fulminates against injustices is not possible—partly because the basic life-sustaining functions of a society would not be adequately fulfilled in S if every member were devoting his time and energy to prophetic denunciations,[10] but even more importantly because S would no longer be properly subject to such denunciations if everyone within it were firmly and appositely opposed to injustice. In a situation where every member of S is endowed with the moral uprightness of Amos or Havel or King or Bonhoeffer, there would not be any suitable targets for prophetic reproaches. (Throughout this discussion I have been assuming that prophetic rebukes are grounded on correct principles of morality. Such an assumption is safe in application to the rebukes uttered by the four men just named, but it fails in application to some other prophets. For example, the Hebrew reformer Nehemiah trained his ire on his countrymen partly because of their inter-ethnic marriages. Insofar as his tirades were benightedly rooted in a xenophobic moral outlook, he could not warrantedly feel a heightened sense of self-esteem by dint of his having engaged in them.)   Likewise insusceptible to being universalized are the conditions under which a person can warrantedly feel a strong sense of self-esteem as a result of having overcome special hardships on the way to a successful life. If everyone were subject to some limitation or adversity, then no one could correctly claim to have transcended any special disadvantage by virtue of succeeding in the presence of that   limitation or adversity. A disadvantage is not special or distinctive if everyone shares it; to assign oneself special kudos for flourishing in spite of it would be akin to assigning oneself special kudos for flourishing in spite of one’s inability to fly by flapping one’s arms.   In sum, although the Struggling Against Adversities Objection purports to highlight certain conditions under which everyone could be warranted in harbouring a high level of self-esteem, those conditions cannot be extended to everyone—either because they cannot be extended to everyone tout court  or because they cannot be extended to everyone while still performing the role ascribed to them by the Struggling Against Adversities Objection. By contrast, feeling proud about the great achievements that occur in a society is something that everybody within the society can warrantedly do. In other words, when aspirational perfectionism specifies certain conditions that are necessary for the warrantedness of a strong sense of self-esteem on the part of everyone in a society, it is adverting to conditions that can be applicable to everyone simultaneously. Thus, far from undermining the tenets of aspirational perfectionism, the Struggling Against Adversities Objection helps to reveal one of the strengths of those tenets.   2. Why is societal excellence necessary?   In the preceding paragraph, I have again referred to the aspirational-perfectionist proposition that the warrantedness of a high level of self-respect for each person in a society depends partly on the occurrence of outstanding accomplishments which endow the society with excellence. Let us designate that proposition as the ‘Societal Warrant Thesis’. In §1.2, I have argued in favour of one of the presuppositions of the Societal Warrant Thesis: that is, I have argued that each person in a society can warrantedly take pride in any splendid feats of human endeavour by others who belong to the society. Let us designate that presupposition as the ‘Taking Pride Premise’. However, although the vindication of that premise is necessary for the vindication of the Societal Warrant Thesis, it is not sufficient. Some further argumentation is needed, since the warrantedness of each person’s taking pride in any sterling achievements by members of her society does not per se establish that the occurrence of such achievements by members of her society is necessary for the full warrantedness of her harbouring a strong sense of self-respect.   To see why the occurrence of great exploits by oneself or by other members of one’s society is necessary for the warrantedness of one’s maintaining a high level of self-respect, we should note that the considerations in favour of the Taking Pride Premise also militate in favour of a converse proposition. If some person P would be warranted in feeling better about herself by virtue of belonging to a society that is endued with excellence, then conversely she would be warranted in feeling worse about herself by virtue of belonging to a society that is devoid of excellence. Suppose that the country to which P belongs is drably mediocre, or suppose that it is worse than mediocre (perhaps because it has long been convulsed by a civil war with atrocities on all sides). In that event, given that the connection between P and her country is an important constituent of the overall trajectory of her life—even if, or perhaps especially if, she views her country with disdain—she will be warranted in lowering her sense of how well her life has gone.   Of course, if P has managed to attain success in many of her endeavours, any warranted lowering of her self-esteem in response to the mediocrity or depravity of her country will most likely leave her warranted self-esteem at quite a high level. Nevertheless, the level would have been even higher and more solid if it had not been held down by the failings of the society to which P belongs. Had her country been a place of excellence in which she could warrantedly have taken pride instead of warrantedly feeling abashed or dismayed about her connection to it, her warrantedness in feeling good about herself and in pursuing her projects with gusto would have been strengthened. Thus, even for a successful person like P, the full warrantedness of her experiencing a strong sense of self-respect depends partly on the flourishing of her society.   Naturally, if P had been a towering genius such as Shakespeare or Beethoven or Albert Einstein, the warrantedness of her harbouring an extremely high level of self-esteem would not have been perceptibly impaired by her belonging to an otherwise unaccomplished society. Had P been of that calibre in her achievements, those achievements alone would have endowed her society with excellence. However, the vast majority of people are not even close to the rank of towering geniuses (or toweringly great athletes). For them as for P, more modest degrees of success are their personal bases for the warrantedness of their self-respect. For them, then, the excellence of their society is necessary for the full warrantedness of their feeling robustly good about their lives.[11] Here we can see that, although aspirational perfectionism might initially seem to be an elitist doctrine, its concern with enabling everyone to be warranted in feeling a solid sense of self-respect is quite strongly egalitarian.   2.1. A focus on warrantedness   As in §1.2, the focus throughout the present discussion has been on the warrantedness of individuals’ feelings of self-respect rather than on those feelings themselves or on individuals’ judgments about the quality of their society. That is, in two principal ways the focus of the present discussion has been objective rather than subjective. First, I have not been addressing any array of empirical questions about the conditions under which people will tend to experience high levels of self-respect. Such questions, which fall within the domain of social psychology, are of some interest here—as can be inferred from my observations in §1.1—but they do not have any determinative bearing on the ethical matters into which I am enquiring. As this article has sought to make clear, the property under investigation here is not the psychological property of self-respect; rather, it is the ethical-cum-psychological property of warranted self-respect. Hence, the present discussion has not been seeking to support the proposition that the endowment of a society with excellence through the occurrence of outstanding accomplishments is necessary for the experiencing of a high level of self-respect on the part of each person who belongs to the society. Instead, the present discussion has been seeking to support the proposition that the endowment of a society with excellence through the occurrence of outstanding accomplishments is necessary for the warrantedness of a high level of self-respect on the part of each person who belongs to the society. Whereas the former proposition is an empirical claim, the latter is an ethical thesis.   Second, the nexus between a society’s excellence and the warrantedness of a strong sense of self-respect for each member of the society is objective in that the decisive property on the former side of that nexus is actual excellence rather than perceived excellence. What matters for the warrantedness of a strong sense of self-respect on the part of any particular person in a society S is not whether the person perceives S as endowed with excellence, but whether S actually is endowed with excellence. Of course, as my reflections in §1.1 suggest, actual excellence and perceived excellence frequently coincide. There are no grounds for thinking that there is always or usually a discrepancy between the two. Nonetheless, some sterling feats might long be ignored or contemned, even while some mediocre achievements or evil deeds are erroneously regarded as wonderful. More broadly, a country might be lauded by many of its citizens as estimable notwithstanding that it is in fact bleakly mediocre or viciously corrupt, and a country might be despised by many of its citizens as paltry even though it in fact comprises an array of outstanding accomplishments and instances of natural beauty. Such incongruities between actuality and perception might not arise very often, but they are always possible. When discrepancies do arise, actuality takes priority over perception in determining whether a heightened degree of self-respect on the basis of societal excellence is warranted for each person in S or not—and in determining whether a lowered degree of self-respect on the basis of societal shabbiness is warranted for each person in S or not.   2.2. A first role of justice   As has been underscored in §1.2.4.1 above, the prescriptions issued by aspirational perfectionists are located within a matrix of deontological constraints. Hence, one way in which the value of justice bears on the promotion of excellence for aspirational-perfectionist purposes is that it imposes a set of restrictions on the routes by which those purposes can legitimately be pursued. Injustices can never permissibly be perpetrated for the sake of endowing a society with excellence that will help to constitute the conditions under which every member of the society can warrantedly feel a robust sense of self-respect. Indeed, were injustices to be perpetrated in furtherance of such an aim, they would be counterproductive; the warrantedness of any heightening of everyone’s self-respect is an ethical property that cannot be realized through unethical means. Such an upshot is a corollary of the general resistance of deontological principles to any end-justifies-the-means rationale.   2.3. A second role of justice: Rawls on social unions   To discern another way in which the value of justice bears on the promotion of excellence for aspirational-perfectionist purposes, we can turn to A Theory of Justice . Although Rawls of course did not have in mind aspirational perfectionism as such, and although he naturally centred his discussion of justice and excellence on his own principles of justice (whereas I am prescinding here from questions about the specific contents of the correct principles of justice), his ruminations on the implementation of justice as a mode of excellence are valuable for aspirational perfectionism conjoined with any credible liberal-democratic account of justice. His ruminations are set within the contractualism of his theorizing, but—suitably construed—they can be incorporated into a resolutely non-contractualist approach to matters of justice and political legitimacy.   The final chapter of A Theory of Justice  is entitled ‘The Good of Justice’, and it contains numerous piquant and perceptive lines of thought that could fruitfully be explored at this juncture. However, the only line of thought that will be highlighted here is from Rawls’s account of social unions. Rawls applied the designation ‘social union’ to any group in which the members share some fundamental end(s) and in which the activities of the group are valued for their own sake. He made clear that the sharing of a fundamental end is consistent with a high degree of competitiveness among the members of a social union. For example, although the teams in a sporting league such as the National Basketball Association all strive to outperform one another, they are united by the aim of engaging in strenuously contested games wherein their sport is played with commendable proficiency.   Having expounded the nature of social unions in general, Rawls proceeded to characterize a well-ordered society as a social union of social unions: ‘The main idea is simply that a well-ordered society (corresponding to justice as fairness) is itself a form of social union. Indeed, it is a social union of social unions. Both characteristic features are present: the successful carrying out of just institutions is the shared final end of all the members of society, and these institutional forms are prized as good in themselves’. Because every person in a well-ordered society is possessed of a motivationally efficacious sense of justice, ‘the members of a well-ordered society have the common aim of cooperating together to realize their own and another’s nature in ways allowed by the principles of justice […] Each citizen wants everyone (including himself) to act from principles to which all would agree in an initial situation of equality’.[12]   The first aspect of a well-ordered society as a social union—the fact that its members share the end of sustaining the operations of just institutions—is a corollary of Rawls’s general conception of a well-ordered society. Slightly more complicated is the second aspect, the fact that the operations of just institutions in such a society are inherently good. Rawls set out to explain why ‘the fundamental institutions of society, the just constitution and the main parts of the legal order, can be found good in themselves once the idea of social union is applied to the basic structure as a whole’.[13] He began his explanation by adverting to the propensity of citizens in a well-ordered society ‘to express their nature as free and equal moral persons, and this they do most adequately by acting from the principles that they would acknowledge in the original position’. Because citizens in a well-ordered society act in accordance with the basic status attributed to them by any liberal-democratic reckoning—namely, their status as free and equal persons—they endow their society with the mode of excellence that consists in instantiating the ideals of liberal democracy. ‘When all strive to comply with [correct principles of justice] and each succeeds, then individually and collectively their nature as moral persons is most fully realized, and with it their individual and collective good’.[14]   Continuing his explanation of the inherent goodness of the just institutions that prevail in a well-ordered society, Rawls submitted that ‘a just constitutional order, when adjoined to the smaller social unions of everyday life, provides a framework for these many [smaller] associations and sets up the most complex and diverse activity of all’. Subsumed within such a framework, the projects of private individuals and associations are harmonized in relation to one another through their common subjection to principles of justice that are administered by the officials of the constitutional order: ‘Thus the plan of each person is given a more ample and rich structure than it would otherwise have; it is adjusted to the plans of others by mutually acceptable principles. Everyone’s more private life is so to speak a plan within a plan, this superordinate plan being realized in the public institutions of society’. Rawls emphasized that the overarching institutional framework of a well-ordered society, with its coordination of the activities of individuals and associations, does not impose any comprehensive doctrine such as Roman Catholicism. Instead, it is guided only by the end of giving effect to the requirements of justice. Its superordinate plan consists in that very end: ‘The regulative public intention is […] that the constitutional order should realize the principles of justice’.[15] In much the same way that the diverse individuals who belong to a well-ordered society share only the end of sustaining the operations of the society’s just institutions, the workings of those institutions are all oriented toward the end of implementing the correct principles of justice.   As Rawls reached the culmination of his reflections on the inherent goodness of the realization of justice in a well-ordered society, he drew connections between the moral virtues of the governing institutions in such a society and the moral virtues of the citizens who support those institutions:   We have seen that the moral virtues are excellences, attributes of the person that it is rational for persons to want in themselves and in one another as things appreciated for their own sake, or else as exhibited in activities so enjoyed […] Now it is clear that these excellences are displayed in the public life of a well-ordered society […] [M]en appreciate and enjoy these attributes in one another as they are manifested in cooperating to affirm just institutions. It follows that the collective activity of justice is the preeminent form of human flourishing. For given favourable conditions, it is by maintaining these public arrangements that persons best express their nature and achieve the widest regulative excellences of which each is capable. At the same time just institutions allow for and encourage the diverse internal life of associations in which individuals realize their more particular aims. Thus the public realization of justice is a value of community.[16]   2.4. A second role of justice: Summing up   As has already been remarked, several aspects of Rawls’s meditations on the goodness of justice—such as his contractualist appeals to the selection of principles of justice in the Original Position—should be set aside. One problematic aspect not mentioned in the opening paragraph of §2.3 above is that his pronouncements on the nature and goodness of any well-ordered society are pitched entirely at the level of ideal theory. Still, the insights to be gathered from his pronouncements can be extended beyond the confines of well-ordered societies where every citizen is unfailingly supportive of just institutions and their requirements.   Most prominent among those insights is that the operations of the institutions which implement the requirements of justice in a liberal democracy are an outstanding collective accomplishment. Both on the part of legal-governmental officials and on the part of ordinary citizens, the patterns of self-restraint involved in the workings of just institutions are prodigious. Every generally law-abiding person who belongs to a society governed by a liberal-democratic regime can warrantedly take pride in those workings. Of course, in any actual liberal democracy—as opposed to a well-ordered Rawlsian society—the operations of the prevailing institutions are imperfectly just, and the compliance of citizens with the just requirements of those institutions is likewise imperfect. Nevertheless, in any society whose system of governance is liberal-democratic to a high degree and whose citizens are largely faithful to the values of liberal democracy, the realization of those values through the system of governance is a mode of excellence in which every generally law-abiding citizen can warrantedly take pride. It is a mode of excellence that pro tanto  enhances the life of every generally law-abiding person who belongs to the society. In any actual liberal democracy, where citizens naturally tend to concentrate on the shortcomings of the regnant institutions, many of them sometimes lose sight of the magnitude and preciousness of the achievement that consists in the sustainment of those institutions. All the same, they can warrantedly derive satisfaction from that achievement—as the overall trajectory of the life of each generally law-abiding person P is made better by it. Because the course of P’s life is inevitably affected (for better or for worse) by the tenor of the system of governance that presides over the society with which P is associated, the adherence of such a system to the values of liberal democracy is something that bolsters the level of self-respect which P can warrantedly feel.   As should be evident from earlier portions of this article, my claim here about the bolstering of each person’s warranted self-respect is not an empirical conjecture about the likelihood that each person will be materially better off as a result of the sway of a liberal-democratic system of governance in his or her society. On the one hand, there are quite strong and familiar correlations between liberal-democratic systems of governance and material prosperity. On the other hand, such correlations—important though they are—are not directly to the point here. My claim about the bolstering of each person’s warranted self-respect is focused on the inherent moral quality of liberal-democratic governance rather than on the beneficial consequences that are likely to ensue causally therefrom.   Rawls well captured two of the ways in which the inherent moral quality of liberal-democratic governance raises the level of self-respect which each generally law-abiding person in a society can warrantedly feel. In the passages quoted in §2.3 above, he frequently declared that a liberal-democratic system of governance enables its citizens to realize their nature as free and equal persons. His contentions to that effect should be construed as making two main points. First, each person under a liberal-democratic system of governance is treated with the respect due to somebody who is a rationally deliberative agent possessed of the two Rawlsian moral powers. Second, each person under such a system of governance is morally and legally required to exercise the self-restraint that is due to other rationally deliberative agents. Being required to exercise such self-restraint is a hallmark of one’s status as a free and equal person, as is being treated with commensurate forbearance by everybody else. Patterns of reciprocal forbearance among citizens, and patterns of forbearance in a government’s interaction with citizens, give expression to the status of every sane adult as a free and equal person. Rawls grasped and indeed emphasized that those patterns of forbearance increase the level of self-respect which every generally law-abiding person is warranted in experiencing. Having reminded his readers that his ‘account of self-respect as perhaps the main primary good has stressed the great significance of how we think others value us’, he proclaimed that a key ‘basis for [warranted] self-esteem in a just society is […] the publicly affirmed distribution of fundamental rights and liberties’.[17] He elaborated: ‘In a well-ordered society then self-respect is secured [partly] by the public affirmation of the status of equal citizenship for all’.[18] Of course, in addition to referring to the fundamental rights and liberties of citizenship, Rawls should have referred here to the fundamental responsibilities thereof. Each citizen’s status as a free and equal person—along with the quantum of warranted self-respect that is appurtenant to that status—is upheld not only through her being endowed with the fundamental rights and liberties, but also through her being expected and required to accept that each of her fellow citizens is endowed with those rights and liberties.   For a further regard in which the sway of a liberal-democratic system of governance elevates the level of self-respect which everyone in a society can warrantedly harbour, we need to go somewhat beyond Rawls in the direction of aspirational perfectionism. As has already been remarked, the sway of such a system—notwithstanding its imperfections—is a sterling collective achievement that should elicit feelings of pride in every generally law-abiding member of the society over which the system presides. Because the trajectory of the life of each such member includes her association with a country in which that great achievement has occurred and been sustained, each such member can warrantedly conclude that her life has gone better by dint of the association (quite apart from any material benefits that have causally accrued to her as a result of it). Pro tanto , she can warrantedly feel better about herself and her projects than she otherwise could.   Conversely, of course, somebody who belongs to a society governed by a repressively illiberal regime can warrantedly conclude that her life has gone worse by dint of her links to that society (quite apart from any material hardships that have beset her as a result of the regime’s grim oppression). Because the overall course of her life includes her connection to the country ruled by that regime, it is marred by the collective failure of the citizens of that country—among them, most notably, the regime’s officials—to uphold the values of a liberal democracy. As has been underscored in §1.2.4.2, this point about the ethical worsening of a person’s life is independent of her supportiveness or unsupportiveness of the tyrannical regime. On the one hand, the trajectory of her life will be substantially worse ethically if she has been complicit in maintaining the regime’s grip on power. On the other hand, my point here has not been about her personal responsibility for the regime’s persistence or any of its iniquities; rather, this paragraph is about the collective responsibility of her fellow citizens with whom she is associated as a member of their community. Even if she has been like one of the prophets discussed earlier (King or Havel or Bonhoeffer) in struggling gamely against the despotism of the system of governance in her country, her life that has been elevated by her struggling is worsened ethically by the need for her struggling—because the need for her struggling is a product of a collective failure on the part of a community to which she belongs.   2.5. Concluding remarks on multiplicity   As can be gathered from the foregoing reflections on any just system of governance as a mode of excellence, the outstanding achievements and features that can imbue a society with estimableness are multifarious. Perfectionists of all stripes have mostly concentrated on aesthetic and intellectual modes of excellence, but, hugely important though those modes of excellence are, they are only some of the possibilities that are serviceable for the purposes of aspirational perfectionism. The realization of the values of liberal democracy through a system of governance that treats its citizens as free and equal persons is another mode of excellence. It is a precious collective accomplishment. Athletic feats and ventures of exploration can be still further modes of excellence, and sundry other areas of human endeavour—such as mountaineering or chess or restaurateurship or tailoring—might likewise produce great achievements in which all the members of a society can warrantedly take pride. Moreover, the diversity of ethnic / religious communities and practices sought by multiculturalists can constitute an entrancing medley that is itself a mode of societal excellence. Much the same can be said about a rich tapestry of cultural offerings in a society whose citizens can warrantedly look upon that tapestry as a source of pride (on top of its lucrativeness as a cynosure for tourists). Furthermore, mountains or mighty rivers or other magnificent topographical features can warrantedly bolster the self-esteem of the people who live in countries that are graced by such features. People can similarly feel proud about wonderful gardens and other places of great beauty in their society. All these modes of excellence can serve the ends of aspirational perfectionism.   Though Rawls never quite invoked the notion of vicarious pride that is central to aspirational perfectionism, he highlighted the multiplicity of modes of excellence and the synergetic interaction among them when they occur alongside one another in any society. As he wrote in the final paragraph of his ruminations on social unions, which I have partly quoted earlier:   [W]e cannot overcome, nor should we wish to, our dependence on others. In a fully just society persons seek their good in ways peculiar to themselves, and they rely upon their associates to do things they could not have done, as well as things they might have done but did not […] It is a feature of human sociability that we are by ourselves but parts of what we might be. We must look to others to attain the excellences that we must leave aside, or lack altogether. The collective activity of society, the many associations and the public life of the largest community that regulates them, sustains our efforts and elicits our contribution. Yet the good attained from the common culture far exceeds our work in the sense that we cease to be mere fragments.[19] Professor Matthew Kramer   Professor Matthew H Kramer is a legal philosopher and a leading proponent of legal positivism. He is Professor of Legal and Political Philosophy at Churchill College, Cambridge, and heads the Cambridge Forum for Legal and Political Philosophy. [1] This article is a modified version of a portion of Chapter 8 from my book Liberalism with Excellence  (Oxford University Press 2017). I am grateful   to Oxford University Press for permission to republish this version of several sections from that chapter, which have been considerably modified and abridged. [2] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice  (Harvard University Press 1971). [3] Tim Craig, ‘One Year after Shocking Terrorist Attack, Pakistan’s Peaks Bereft of Foreign Climbers’ Washington Post  (Washington DC, 29 June 2014) < https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/one-year-after-shocking-terrorist-attack-pakistans-peaks-bereft-of-foreign-climbers/2014/06/29/b72beaa8-f7b6-11e3-a606-946fd632f9f1_story.html > accessed 20 February 2021. [4] Rawls (n 2) 523. [5] This empirical claim is based on my conversations with several such masons in Cambridge. [6] Rawls (n 2) 522–23. [7] ibid §79. [8] ibid 529. [9] Having encountered Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1942, Bishop George KA Bell wrote that Bonhoeffer was ‘completely candid, completely regardless of personal safety, while deeply moved by the shame of the country [Germany] he loved’. George KA Bell, ‘Foreword’ in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship  (SCM Press 1959) 7. [10] Note that, when Amos took up his calling to be a prophet, he had to leave behind his occupation as a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees (Amos 7:14–15). [11] A somewhat similar observation has been made by Robert Yanal: ‘Spinoza, exiled and excommunicated, could  have had good self-esteem. Yet such instances strike us as heroic (or perhaps a little mad), but in any event beyond the pale of how normal people operate’ (emphasis in original). Robert Yanal, ‘Self-Esteem’ (1987) 21(3) Noûs 363, 368. [12] Rawls (n 2) 527. [13] ibid 527–28. [14] ibid 528. [15] ibid. [16] ibid 528–29. [17] ibid 544. [18] ibid 545. [19] ibid 529.

The adoption of the United Nations (UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 was a major step for the practice of International Development worldwide. In addition to legitimising the benevolent nature of the UN, the Declaration established a precedent for understanding the human condition as a universal experience. Through the Declaration, all people were declared ‘free and equal in rights’ despite geographical, cultural, or socio-political differences that influenced the unequal distribution or diverse understandings of human rights.[1] The UN’s concept of universalism became a tool for enforcing how human life should be as opposed to acknowledging how it is , thus failing to address diverse human needs. This further entrenched a hierarchy that favoured western perceptions of an ideal life—a postulation that went on to inform the practices of many disciplines and professions. From medicine and anthropology to multinational corporations and development studies, universalism has influenced the ‘right’ way to cure, reconstruct, commercialise, and order different societies. Moreover, as the UN’s western concept of humanity gained international traction, human rights became more universal and less transcultural.[2] This resulted in confining not only the rights of adults within a western perspective, but also those of children, and the concept of childhood itself.   The 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child defines a child as any human being below the age of 18 and affirms that children should be afforded their own rights ‘by reason of [their] physical and mental immaturity’.[3] This western view categorises childhood as a stage of vulnerability and innocence that makes children averse to the physical or financial responsibilities of an adult. The Convention’s universalist perspective acknowledges childhood as a ‘coherent group, or a state defined by identical needs and desires, regardless of class, racial or ethnic differences’.[4] This categorisation enables the concept of ‘global childhood’, where children are removed from their socio-political contexts and grouped within a universalist belief in childhood. The ideology of global childhood, however, misrepresents the reality that childhood is experienced differently in different spaces, such that no one ideology of childhood can account for all children’s experiences.   The concept of global childhood is heavily contested on various grounds, including the child labour discourse and the extent to which children should be allowed to work given their presumed innocence. These discussions often highlight the should versus is dilemma, where it is argued that a child should  stay out of the labour force without addressing why a child is  in need of or desires the labour force. In this paper, I will examine the impact of universalism as it relates to global childhood and assess how these perspectives transform the practices and beliefs of child labour. I argue that it is not possible to speak of global childhood because its universal perspective misrepresents the needs of children around the world. Furthermore, I argue that in trying to assert the existence of a global childhood, one puts oneself in a position to mould and manipulate the concept of childhood for their own, as opposed to the child’s, benefit. I begin by assessing the concept of global childhood, its historical legacy, contemporary understandings, and the consequences of its prevalence. I then analyse how child labour laws and practices have been impacted by the global childhood ideology and how this affects the children and nations involved. Finally, I use UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited policy as a case study to show how dominating the universal definition of childhood makes it possible to manipulate the labour market in favour of international organisations, businesses, and governments.   From Barbarism to Globalisation   The concept of global childhood is an amalgamation of various characteristics, including immaturity, vulnerability, and innocence, that encapsulates a western, idealised version of a child. These characteristics, however, are neither ahistorical nor apolitical. For centuries, childhood has been weaponised against colonised, racialised, and ethnic ‘others’ who are deemed inferior in the eyes of the western overseer. In this section, I analyse both the historic and contemporary uses of global childhood to discern how the imposition of western notions of childhood misrepresents and delegitimises non-western livelihoods.   Since the inception of European colonialism, the characterisation of indigenous groups as ‘childlike’ beings was essential for intervention and domination. From Rudyard Kipling’s description of the colonised as ‘half-devil, half-children’[5] to Cecil Rhodes asserting that the ‘native is to be treated as a child and denied franchise’,[6] childhood has assigned a negative stereotype onto the non-west. To be childlike was to be degenerative and thus it became justified for paternalistic Europeans to intervene in foreign worlds. The colonies were imagined to be at an earlier stage of European civilisation, or even the ‘childhood of Europe itself’, which the colonial administration used to validate the governance, discipline, and control of the natives.[7] As a result, the trope of childlike behaviour, or being encased in perpetual childhood, became a way to reframe violence ‘as necessary, legitimate, and even benevolent’.[8]   The patriarchal domination imbued in European colonialism infiltrated many disciplines, one of the most influential being medicine. French doctors in the Maghreb region during the nineteenth and twentieth century, for example, routinely diagnosed colonised people with ‘mental infantilism’. Due to the authority bestowed on these medical professionals and their alleged regard as ‘pillars of science and modernity’, mental infantilism became a common diagnosis for colonised people worldwide.[9] The infantilised colonial subject, however, was not simply placed in a category of childhood that was incomparable to any other childlike behaviour. The colonised were deemed developmentally akin to white children. Here, we see the beginning stages of white children dominating the idea of childhood and becoming the yardstick against which all childhoods are measured. The difference between the colonised and white children, however, was that the white child was bound to grow and become mature, while the colonised would remain ‘stuck within a state of savagery and “mental infancy”’.[10] The western child became the ideal model for childhood, while non-western people were condemned for their stagnant development.   The children of the colonised also played an important role in the conceptualisation of childhood. Through colonial schools, missionary interventions, and a host of child ‘protection’ initiatives, colonial administrations set out to ‘save’ colonised children from their barbaric impulses.[11] By intervening at a young age, Europeans assumed the authority to define the ‘right’ childhood and curtail all the negative influences of indigeneity. The stage of childhood for the colonised child thus became of grave importance to the colonial administration; one that could either spell doom if the child maintained their indigenous beliefs or one where childhoods could be reconstructed to fit within the colonial regime. Colonial interventions within diverse childhoods established a form of epistemicide, or the ‘failure to recognise the different ways of knowing by which people across the globe provide meaning to their existence’.[12] By determining that there was one way to be a child and that all other childhoods were savage or underdeveloped, Europeans codified a single story of childhood which was then claimed to be universal. In so doing, they misrepresented the needs and desires of children around the world, using the imperial ideology of childhood to assert dominance over non-western people.   Following the end of World War II in 1945, international development agencies and governments started to legitimise ideas of a homogenous human experience and eventually a homogenous experience of childhood. Beginning with the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights, criteria were being established to determine the rights of all human beings. The establishment of these rights, however, also enabled development agencies and governments to intervene in the ‘underdeveloped’ world as a means of securing human rights for all. Development actors such as President Truman in his 1949 inaugural address claimed that ‘for the first time in history humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these [formerly colonised] people’.[13] Western countries were believed to possess the skills necessary to rectify the dysfunction of the non-west and carry on their roles as paternalistic leaders.   The passing of the Convention on the Rights of the Child brought with it its own prejudices on the ‘right’ childhood. Within the Convention, a universal / global childhood was set as the standard by which all children could live a free and just life, ‘in particular [those] in the developing countries’.[14] As Olga Nieuwenhuys argues, however, the Convention was ‘grounded in the assumption both of the superiority of the childhood model as it has evolved in the north and of the need to impose this model on a global scale’.[15] This model had reinvigorated itself through various power relations including international development and child-rights movements that prioritised western childhoods as ideal.[16] This not only flattened children’s various experiences of childhood but also excluded the majority of children from the concept of childhood.[17] Instead of acknowledging the varied understandings and experiences of a child, global childhood implied that children who did not live up to western standards were being robbed of their childhood. By promoting the western notion of childhood on a global scale, western beliefs came to ‘dominate the experience of being human’.[18]   Who is a Child Labourer?   Whether to make money for themselves or their families, children have had to adjust to the economic and social demands of a globalised world. As globalisation expanded post-World War II, it redefined childhood and brought it into the clutches of international elites. Under capitalist motivations, northern and southern elites clung to the concept of global childhood and used it to determine not only the ‘right’ way of being a child, but the ‘right’ way for a child to labour. In this section, I analyse how global childhood impacts child labour practices, and how these practices vary between different geographies and populations. I argue that this variation exposes the myth of global childhood and highlights how only certain childhoods are protected while others are subjugated to satisfy the capitalist world system.   The triumph of neoliberalism and its structural adjustment policies beginning in the 1980s brought children of the ‘developing’ world under a universalist regime. Within this regime, only one childhood mattered enough to be protected—the childhood that promoted a western, ‘autonomous, liberated consumer’. The non-consumer southern child, however, was branded as deficient and in need, which could only be rectified by becoming a ‘full participant in the new market-approach of development’.[19] As such, child labour in the Global South was heavily promoted, but participation in the market did not (and does not) guarantee the benefits it promised. Studies such as Michael Bourdillon’s 2010 documentation of working girls in Morocco highlight how international child labour policies greatly affect the consistency of work for children of the Global South.[20] In Morocco, working girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen were targeted in a Marks and Spencer (M&S) garment factory after a TV programme investigated the prevalence of child labourers in the workplace. Before the programme could air, M&S sent representatives to the factory and ensured that all workers under the age of fifteen were fired. For M&S and the TV programme, this is where the story ended, but the girls who were fired were now forced to find new work, often in less desirable sectors. Bourdillon’s study begs the question of whose interests are served. By firing the girls, M&S advanced their corporate image and profit but did nothing to ensure the well-being of the children they claimed to care so much about. What became of the children was no more important than the desire to ‘settle the British conscience’.[21] Global childhood’s claim to secure children’s well-being is, therefore, not always upheld for children in the Global South.   Globalisation is a force to which people have adapted out of necessity, taking on extra responsibilities to do so. Children in the Global South, and marginalised youth in the Global North, are among those most impacted by this adaptation as they set out to economically contribute to poverty reduction, while being simultaneously shunned by the global public for child labour. In many cases, children enjoy their work, gain social and interpersonal skills, use work to improve their lives, and gain educational experiences while working.[22] These benefits, however, are often not highlighted in mainstream child labour discourses, where child labour is instead used as a scapegoat to hide political and financial motivations.[23] As seen in the ‘raid-and-rescue’ operation in Morocco, a focus on child labour can simply be a means for raiding and rescuing a company’s reputation. This then puts children of the Global South at risk of unjust termination, without safeguarding their rights promised by global childhood.   In addition to inciting the need for children to work, globalisation also determines the extent to which certain children can work. Beginning in the 1800s, the Industrial Revolution’s Romantic Movement declared that western children were no longer fit to work in factories for fear of ‘corrupting the natural innocence of children and destroying their potential for moral and intellectual development’.[24] This, coupled with the fact that children’s inconsistent work patterns were economically burdensome to employers, set a precedent for condemning child labour for those in the north. During the same period, however, children in the colonies were exploited and their labour was not banned by any authority, including the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in their 1919 Convention on Child Rights. Instead, child colonial labour was endorsed and disguised by claiming that the children were under apprenticeships, that they were attending school during their downtime, or that they were simply helping their mothers with menial tasks. In some cases, colonial administrations argued that the colonised child matured faster, meaning that the working age could be lowered.[25] These framings enabled childhood to only be seen as innocent in the north and among specific racial and ethnic distinctions. This persists today as black and brown children are overly criminalised, expected to ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’ and work towards a better life, due to the belief that they are not really children.[26]    Political and financial investments in child labour by ruling elites in the north and south further distinguish between children who are protected and those who are exploited. For southern countries, publicly adhering to child labour movements through NGOs and aid can provide significant financial advantages. On the other hand, if southern governments lower their labour standards and conceal the existence of child labour, they gain a competitive advantage in the global market. This is often referred to as the race to the bottom , where countries lower their labour standards to attract foreign investment, incentivising other countries to do the same.[27] This competition can promote abusive labour standards for children in the Global South and marginalised communities in the Global North, while elite children are largely unaffected.   Though southern countries are often shamed by their northern counterparts for their participation in child labour, it is no secret that northern countries participate in exploitative labour practices and turn a blind eye if the child labour in question benefits their bottom line.[28] Child labour is a tool through which countries can assert their moral or financial dominance. This then makes it dangerous and misleading to assume that child labour campaigns, established through the standards of global childhood, should be taken at face value. The decision to universalise or homogenise any diverse population is rarely done for that population’s benefit. Instead, the population is made more governable, manageable, and easier to dominate in the elite’s favour. In the next section, I examine this domination in UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited policy, in order to discern how international organisations use global childhood campaigns to carve out a ‘new field of consumer childhoods’.[29]   Generation Unlimited   Global childhood and child labour go hand in hand to determine what practices are suitable for a child. For decades, mainstream development discourses have championed the abolishment of child labour, premised on the belief that such labour ‘deprives children of their childhood […] [or] deprives them of the opportunity to attend school’.[30] In recent years, however, the tides have seemingly started to change as more and more development agencies call for an increase in youth employment. This change is evident in UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited, where the focus on youth labour practices, skills, and education has been rebranded to mark exciting possibilities in a globalised future. In this section, I analyse this rebranding to discern how concepts of global childhood and child labour are not universally applied and can be manipulated by development authorities (ie wealthy governments, development agencies, and multinational corporations) to further their economic interests. I argue that, by appealing to global childhood, children are put at greater risk of being exploited in the global market and are further bound to labour practices that reflect the needs of development authorities, as opposed to the needs of children.   In 2018, UNICEF’s global youth agenda, Generation Unlimited (GenU), was launched at the United Nations General Assembly. In response to the ‘demographic boom happening across much of the world’, UNICEF proposed GenU as an opportunity to ‘raise global productivity’[31] and counter ‘labour underutilization’.[32] As a global multi-sector partnership, GenU is committed to ‘preparing young people [aged 10-24] for the world of work’ by investing in education, training, and employment opportunities.[33] Through its partnership with the ILO, UNICEF finds that the labour participation rate of young people in the Global South has decreased, and though this reflects that as more children are in secondary and tertiary education, fewer young people are employed. UNICEF and the ILO argue that young people who are not currently employed reflect the ‘potential labour force’ whose full capability ‘is not being realized’.[34] To combat this, GenU targets young people in the Global South to boost their development prospects. By overhauling education systems that are fragmented and outdated to offering employment opportunities to youth,[35] GenU aims to ‘support every young person to thrive in the world of work’.[36]   At the outset, GenU’s target of young people aged 10-24 offers some questionable notions of work. First, there is the belief that new forms of child labour should now be desired and reconceptualised as exciting opportunities for the youth. Then there is the focus on children of the Global South who are expected to carry the burden of raising global productivity as opposed to attending school. How does this rebranding of child labour affect southern children, and who is GenU truly likely to benefit?   GenU identifies itself as a ‘coalition of leaders coming together for young people’, with established partnerships in the private sector, governments, UN agencies, financing institutions, and civil society organisations. These partnerships lay the groundwork and financial backing for GenU’s initiatives, and by March 2019 projects had commenced in Bangladesh, India, and Kenya.[37] In each of these areas, the focus was placed on creating jobs for young people through apprenticeships, establishing stronger links between the education system and employers, and facilitating skills training to prepare young people for the future of work. By April 2019, GenU entered into a formidable partnership with the World Bank, where the Bank pledged $1billion ‘for boosting job prospects for young people’.[38] This was later followed by the creation of the Young People’s Action Team (YPAT) in August, a group of eight young people (UN-appointed activists and entrepreneurs from the Global South) with whom GenU would interact to ‘ensure meaningful engagement of young people’ throughout the agenda’s implementation.   Though premised on providing the best outcome for young people, GenU created the YPAT nearly a year after its launch. As such, young people were not present in the discussions that would determine and transform the necessity of their work. If neither spearheaded by young people themselves nor discussed with them to determine the new importance of their labour, why had GenU brought the idea of working young people in the Global South—between the ages of 10 to 24—in vogue? Moreover, who were the people responsible for redefining acceptable labour practices for children and young people? The answers are provided by GenU’s governance, headed by its eleven board members. Of these eleven, seven are CEOs or Vice Presidents of some of the world’s largest private sector companies, including Microsoft, Unilever, IKEA, and PwC. The remaining four head some of the largest financial institutions such as the World Bank and Dubai Cares. The GenU board is thus dominated by economically driven institutions that have a vested interest in the future of the labour force. This interest, and their position as board members, enable development authorities to redefine the value of child labour in the Global South in favour of their economic interests, regardless of the impact it may have on children’s wellbeing.   By dominating the definition of global childhood and child labour, development authorities can manipulate these concepts in their favour. Within the Global South, GenU has enabled this manipulation by making the problem of child labour the inevitable solution. As GenU identifies ‘key gaps and opportunities for investment’ in the Global South, they do so by targeting children as an untapped labour market that foreign companies can incorporate into their business, often for a cheaper wage.[39] If the southern child was previously suffering from child labour, development authorities can argue that it was due to their exploitive work conditions in the informal sector. The formal employment opportunities available through multinationals, however, are claimed to offer southern children better opportunities for themselves and the world market. This taps into the underutilised labour potential of the Global South and makes child labour the new shining star of development. Ultimately, the dichotomy between white and colonised children is reinforced; the former are allowed to embody the innocence of global childhood, while the latter bear the burden of uplifting the global economy. Under GenU, development authorities rally funds, establish businesses, and secure contracts, creating a new business model around the southern child’s labour, one in which their well-being is no longer of much concern.   Once the narrative has shifted from anti-child labour to pro-youth employment opportunities, it becomes acceptable to establish education and training companies in the Global South that are dedicated to putting children to work. Microsoft, for example, partnered with GenU to create Passport for Earning, a remote learning platform that provides free certified education and skills training to users around the world. Likewise, Dubai Cares invested $2.5 million in Giga, an initiative to connect every school to the internet. Further investigation, however, finds that the flow of funds has gone less to the children concerned and more to the businesses involved. Microsoft’s Passport for Earning, for example, is not a new programme, but an extension of a previous UNICEF and Microsoft collaboration, the Learning Passport.[40] As such, the multi-billion-dollar company, Microsoft, is awarded a contract through GenU funding to further invest in their previously established Passport project. Likewise, Dubai Cares’ investment in Giga was an investment in UNICEF’s previously established partnership with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).[41] Together, UNICEF and the ITU created Giga as a flagship global youth initiative which was now being brought under the umbrella of GenU and funded with millions of dollars. The internal flow of funds between big businesses and development agencies highlights the profit to be made from promoting youth employment in the Global South.   Outside of UNICEF, many arguments have been made in favour of creating more work opportunities for youth and shifting from degree to skills accumulation.[42] Since the 1990s, business and political elites have championed deschooling and anti-college initiatives that expedite youth into the labour force through alternative certifications. Deschooling initiatives—mostly targeting marginalised youth in the Global North—support a ‘neoliberal, privatised and marketised model of education policy reform, in which the core purpose of education is narrowed to serving the needs of the marketplace’.[43] Instead of university degrees, businesses and governments support the accumulation of fast-track, skills-based certificates or enrolment in apprenticeship programmes. Though these measures claim to benefit the economic futures of all people, deschooling initiatives often target low-income and marginalised students to expand a nation’s labour potential. Through strategic closures of schools in low-income areas and the promotion of alternative certification for entry-level, low-paying jobs, neoliberal deschooling advocates exclude marginalised groups from valuable education and work opportunities. Marginalised youth are thus expected to rapidly join the labour force and forgo the protections promised by global childhood.   GenU piggybacks on the neoliberal ideals of deschooling by rapidly bringing marginalised youth into the global labour force. Moreover, GenU generates profit for businesses that provide education, training, and employment opportunities in line with their youth initiative. By speaking of global childhood, GenU claims to know what labour practices are best suited for a child, when in reality it misrepresents children’s desire to work while trying to meet the needs of the global market. Moreover, it and its partner organisations manipulate the idealised image of childhood to bolster their financial interests. GenU should not, therefore, speak of global childhood because their treatment and expectation of children vary across geographical contexts.   Conclusion     Global childhood is a universalist concept that unjustly privileges western ideals of childhood and misrepresents the diverse experiences of children around the world. As a result, global childhood can be used to determine the ‘right’ practices for a child to value, particularly the value of their labour. The universal authority imbued in the notion of global childhood impacts how child labour can be manipulated to benefit the needs of development authorities and cause greater harm to children. It is thus important to democratise the idea of childhood so that no elite group can proclaim any overarching decisions on what is best for all children. Likewise, children must be more involved in the decision-making processes that affect their livelihoods. Only then can a truly comprehensive and inclusive understanding of childhood be used to safeguard children’s well-being across the world. Donari Yahzid Donari Yahzid is a Gates Cambridge Scholar and PhD candidate in the Centre of Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is also a former Fulbright Scholar and MPhil in Development Studies Graduate (Cambridge), through which she began her work on researching Indigenous land rights movements throughout the globe. Now as a PhD candidate, and in addition to working as an editor for the CJLPA , Donari researches land rights for Quilombo and favela communities in Brazil.  [1] Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR] (1948) art I. [2] See Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith  (Zed Books 2019). [3] Convention on the Rights of the Child [UNCRC] (1989) Preamble, here quoting the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959). [4] Jude L Fernando, ‘Children’s Rights: Beyond the Impasse’ (2001) 575(1) The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 18. [5] Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (1899) 12(4) McClure’s Magazine 290-1. [6] Quoted in Ashis Nandy, ‘Reconstructing childhood: A critique of the ideology of adulthood’ (1984) 10(3) Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 361. [7] Joseph A Massad, Desiring Arabs (The University of Chicago Press 2007) 55. [8] China Mills and Brenda N Lefrançois, ‘Child as Metaphor: Colonialism, Psy-Governance, and Epistemicide’ (2018) 74(7-8) The Journal of New Paradigm Research 508. [9] Nina S Studer, ‘The Infantilization of the Colonized: Medical and Psychiatric Descriptions of Drinking Habits in the Colonial Maghreb’ in Rachid Ouaissa, Friederike Pannewick, and Alena Strohmaier (eds), Re-Configurations: Contextualising Transformation Processes and Lasting Crises in the Middle East and North Africa  (Springer VS 2021) 135. [10] Mills and Lefrançois (n 8) 508. [11] See Sherene Razack, Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody  (University of Toronto Press 2015); Evelyn Nakano Glenn, ‘Settler Colonialism as a Structure: A Framework for Comparative Studies of U.S. Race and Gender Formation’ (2015) 1(1) Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 54-74. [12] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide  (Paradigm 2014) 111. [13] Harry Truman, ‘Inaugural Address’ (1949) < https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/19/inaugural-address > accessed 31 July 2025. [14] UNCRC (n 3) Preamble. [15] Olga Nieuwenhuys, ‘Global Childhood and the Politics of Contempt’ (1998) 23(3) Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 270. [16] See Tatek Abebe, ‘“Global/local” research on children and childhood in a “global society”’ (2018) 25(3) Childhood 272-96. [17] See Tatek Abebe and Yaw Ofosu-Kusi, ‘Beyond pluralizing African childhoods: Introduction’ (2016) 23(3) Childhood 303-16. [18] ‘Editorial: The Globalization of Childhood or Childhood as a Global Issue’ (1996) 3 Childhood 307. [19] Olga Nieuwenhuys, ‘Embedding the Global Womb: Global Child Labour and the New Policy Agenda’ (2007) 5(1-2) Children & Geographies 150. [20] See Michael Bourdillon et al, Rights and Wrongs of Children’s Work (Rutgers University Press 2010). [21] ibid 8. [22] See Dena Aufseeser et al, ‘Children’s work and children’s well-being: Implications for policy’ (2016) 36(2) Dev Policy Rev 241-61. [23] See Stuart Aitken et al, ‘Reproducing Life and Labor: Global processes and working children in Tijuana, Mexico’ (2006) 13(3) Childhood 365-87. [24] Bourdillon et al (n 20) 10. [25] See Nieuwenhuys (n 19). [26] See Phillip Atiba Goff et al, ‘The essence of innocence: consequences of dehumanizing Black children’ (2014) 106(4) 526-45. [27] See William W Onley, ‘A race to the bottom? Employment protection and foreign direct investment’ (2013) 91(2) Journal of International Economics 191-203. [28] See Ralitza Dimova, ‘The political economy of child labor’ in Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics (Springer 2020) < https://pure.manchester.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/191173346/GLO_DP_0816.pdf > accessed 31 July 2025; Jagdish Bhagwati, ‘Trade liberalization and “Fair Trade” demands: Addressing the environment and labor standards issues’ (1995) 18(6) World Economy 745-59. [29] Nieuwenhuys (n 19) 150. [30] ILO, ‘What is Child Labour’ ( ILO , 6 August 2025) < https://www.ilo.org/topics/child-labour/what-child-labour > accessed 6 August 2025. [31] UNICEF, ‘Generation Unlimited enables young people to become productive and engaged members of society’ ( Brookings , July 2019) < https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Brookings_Blum_2019_Generation_Unlimited.pdf > accessed 6 August 2025. [32] ILO, ‘Global Employment Trends for Youth 2020: Technology and the future of jobs’ (2020) 13 < https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/wcmsp5/groups/public/%40dgreports/%40dcomm/%40publ/documents/publication/wcms_737648.pdf > accessed 31 July 2025. [33] UNICEF (n 31). [34] ILO (n 32) 13. [35] See Urmila Sarkar, ‘Generation Unlimited: Investing for and with young people’ < https://www.unicef.org/rosa/media/5661/file/urmila-sarkar-presentation-2019.pdf.pdf > accessed 31 July 2025. [36] ‘Generation Unlimited: Overview and Progress’ (2019) < https://www.generationunlimited.org/media/2351/file/Annual%20Report%202019.pdf > accessed 31 July 2025. [37] Sarkar (n 35). [38] (n 36). [39] UNICEF, ‘Generation Unlimited Operating Model’ 7-8 < https://www.unicef.org/genunlimited/media/1121/file/Operating%20Model.pdf > accessed 31 July 2025. [40] See Anupama Saikia, 2021. ‘Accenture, Dubai Cares, Microsoft and UNICEF launch digital education platform under Generation Unlimited to help address global learning crisis’ ( Generation Unlimited , 12 December 2021) < https://www.generationunlimited.org/press-releases/passport-to-earning > accessed 31 July 2025. [41] ‘UNICEF and Dubai Cares announce partnership through Generation Unlimited to scale Digital Connectivity’ ( Giga Global , 17 December 2020) < https://giga.global/unicef-and-dubai-cares-announce-partnership-through-generation-unlimited-to-scale-digital-connectivity/ > accessed 31 July 2025. [42] See Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education  (Princeton University Press 2018); Robert Halfon, ‘Why the obsession with academic degrees in this country must end’ ( New Statesman , 4 March 2018) < https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/2018/03/why-obsession-academic-degrees-country-must-end > accessed 31 July 2025. [43] Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock, ‘Deschooling from Above’ (2020) 61(4) Race & Class 68.

Gus John is an award-winning writer, education campaigner, and lecturer. His work spans the fields of education policy, management, and international development. Since the 1960s, John has been active in issues surrounding education and schooling in Britain’s inner cities, and he has worked in several universities including the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, the UCL Institute of Education, the University of London, and Coventry University. He is a respected public speaker and media commentator, working both domestically and internationally as an executive coach and consultant. In 2018, a committee hosted a church service at Westminster Abbey, memorialising the 70th year of the arrival of the Empire Windrush. The service’s advertisement stated that ‘those arriving on the Windrush in June 1948 were seeking adventure’, as if, as John describes in his book, ‘they had collectively become bored on the plantations…and decided to head to Britain for “adventure”’.[1] In 2023, elaborate plans were made by the Windrush Anchor Foundation to retrieve the Empire Windrush anchor from the bottom of the ocean and restore it as a national monument. The following interview addresses Gus John’s thoughts on the matter.   CJLPA : Professor Gus John, thank you very much for being here today. You have recently published two incredible books, Blazing Trails  and Don’t Salvage the Empire Windrush , both of which have stirred up quite the conversation in the UK. As today we will be discussing the latter, could you please begin by telling us a little bit about your background and what prompted you to write Don’t Salvage the Empire Windrush ?   Gus John :   Thank you very much for having me. Well, I was born in Grenada in the Eastern Caribbean and I came to the UK in 1964 to study theology at Oxford. It soon dawned on me, however, that I couldn't have been further away from the gospel, particularly in terms of the Catholic Church’s role in imperialism and colonialism. I had some dogmatic conflicts with the church as an establishment, so I became a Marxist and left! I, instead, got heavily involved with the Black communities in Oxford as children were seeing some pretty hard days in the schooling system. Children who had parents from Jamaica were particularly affected because they were speaking the Jamaican language (patois) which the education system did not classify as a language. Those children were being made to feel that they were imbeciles, so I tried to ensure that Caribbean children received their entitlements to quality education.   In 1966 I joined with some parents and students, including some students from Oxford, and we started the first Black supplementary school in Cowley Road, Oxford. We ran homework classes for young children and we were giving them an understanding of themselves and an understanding of what was going on around them, even what was happening to other Black people around the world. We had to build communities of resistance to systemic racism, marginalisation, and social eugenics practices—practices that were being used to train teachers to have low expectations of Black children. We had to actively resist these practices and basically mobilise Black parents to defend their children’s right to quality education. Since then, I have been very active in building communities of resistance and Don’t Salvage the Empire Windrush is an extension of that work.   CJLPA : The name Windrush holds a deep-seated significance in the UK, yet anyone who speaks of or hears it conceptualises Windrush differently. What would you say is the common Windrush narrative and what are the implications of that narrative for those a part of or descendant of the Windrush generation?   GJ :   Most people refer to Windrush but they do not refer to the  Empire Windrush . The Empire Windrush  is the actual name of the ship that a group of Caribbean people boarded in Jamaica in 1948, which later docked in England. The name Empire Windrush  was given to a ship that used to belong to the German navy. The ship was called the Monte Rosa and between 1939 to 1945 it was used by the Nazi regime to transport troops from one part of Europe to another. When Britain took its spoils of war after World War II, it also took ships, hence the Monte Rosa  became the Empire Windrush . After the war, the Empire Windrush was used to transport demobilised soldiers from the Caribbean back to their homes as it did in 1947 when it made a trip to and from the Caribbean. This 1947 trip, however, is a trip that nobody talks about.   Before 1948, there were at least 500 ex-soldiers who had been demobilised and returned to the Caribbean from Britain. Along with the Empire Windrush , there were two other ships—the Ormonde  and the Almanzora —that had made that trip to and from the Caribbean to transport these soldiers. In 1948, the Empire Windrush was coming back from the Caribbean and it had loads of empty space. Figures quote that there was space for 1027 people. When the boat got to Jamaica, they put out advertisements stating that colonial subjects should come to Britain via a one-way ticket for 28 pounds. This prompted many people, not just from Jamaica, to scrape the money together—a lot of money in those days—and board the boat.   Among the passengers was a man named Samuel Beaver King, who had been in the Royal Air Force during the war and wanted to go back to Britain. King did not like the conditions he was returned to in Jamaica—lots of poverty and worker unrest. The British colonial administrators in Jamaica were being very brutal in putting down worker uprisings and King was sure that he did not want to raise his children in a colony. But then, King also had a rather peculiar notion of making the Empire Windrush  as iconic as the Mayflower . If he had any understanding of the Mayflower , what it was, where it came from, and what it has done in Virginia, he would not have wanted to make the Empire Windrush  as iconic. Yet, in any event, King began collecting the names and addresses of the 500 or so people on the  Empire Windrush to begin a narrative. Now there is nothing wrong with King collecting these names and wanting to make the Empire Windrush  like the Mayflower , but he and the subsequent Windrush narrative had no right to suggest that their arrival on that boat represented a new chapter in terms of Black people within Britain.   Additionally, the Windrush narrative does not focus on the fact that these people were coming from the colonies  to the United Kingdom. They had a history, a colonial history, prior to that ship. And frankly, all this glorified talk about coming to the ‘mother country’ to help rebuild after the Second World War is a lot of romanticised nonsense. Why these people were having to leave the Caribbean and why they had to leave Britain after the Second World War to be transported back to the Caribbean was because of Britain’s history with racism. Britain has an impervious past which is why we as Caribbean people ended up in the Caribbean in the first place. The true native peoples of the Caribbean were brutally exterminated and those areas were later populated by our ancestors who were brought there forcibly in the hulls of some stinking slave ships. We were made to work as shackled labour. That’s where the story of Windrush began and people tend to forget that.   There is this notion that these Caribbean people came to Britain because they answered the call, but there was never any such call. There were material conditions of their existence that prompted them to get on that boat. Well, correction, at one point Britain’s labour recruitment people did reach out to the Caribbean. London Transport needed lots of workers because in the 1950s white workers were striking for better wages and working conditions. The strikes were crippling the whole system so the higher-ups were determined to go abroad and find labour to break those strikes. No one acknowledges that those Caribbean people who were brought in as labour were used as tools to break strikes—no, these people are seen as patriotic citizens of the United Kingdom coming to support the country. And it is interesting that if there had been a greater degree of class collaboration between white workers in this country and workers across the Caribbean then the situation could have been very different, but it was in the best interest of the British government to put racism at the forefront of people’s minds. The British elites made every conceivable effort to break whatever links were being developed between the trade union movement here in Britain and in the Caribbean. It was politically convenient for Britain to cast us as ‘dark strangers’. In other words, the conflation of race and immigration was a deliberate policy on the part of successive governments. All of this culminated into a misconstrued Windrush narrative that ignores the history of the people who came, detracts attention from the ghastly things the [British government] is doing in the name of immigration, and neglects the realities that were and are faced, not just by Caribbean people, but various racial and ethnic groups in the UK.   CJLPA : I do not want to take for granted what was taught in the Caribbean as our history versus what was taught in the UK of Caribbean history. Could you please explain why Britain was considered the ‘mother country’ for those boarding the ship, as opposed to the Caribbean countries that they were leaving behind or the countries in Africa from which their ancestors were taken?   GJ :   Colonialism was immensely successful. The notion that Britain was the mother country was a notion that Britain itself encouraged. There was an erasure of African spirituality, African languages, African cuisine, and African belief systems for the superimposition of Christianity. I, for one, grew up on a diet of Jane Austen, Edgar Allan, Poe, WE Johns, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and all of those people. I only discovered Caribbean literature when I came to Britain—George Lamming, Sylvia Wynter, and CLR James. Those people were quite extraordinary and it opened my eyes so bright, but unfortunately when you are totally imbued with this kind of colonial ideology you learn to believe that the only value you have is what somebody else confers upon you.   People were nurtured to become Black British, really. When we’re talking about being part of the United Kingdom and its colonies, it really is about seeing Britain implant itself in those places. Slave owners were running plantations, determining who lived and died. They were extracting wealth and sending most of it back to Britain. We were being taught, not with materials from Africa or Asia after our so-called emancipation, but with materials from Britain. That type of behaviour was very, very British.   After all these years, people are still enthralled by British colonialism because they are told that they are supposed to be stupid. So, if you are successful, that is a matter of celebration because you’re not supposed to be bright and successful. Let’s remember that there emerged a class of Black middle-class people who were aping the white middle-class and had no respect whatsoever for ordinary Black working people. It’s still the case now, people are so enthralled with becoming part of British high society. It reminds me how I was joking with a friend a couple of weeks ago about these people who are wanting to rescue and retrieve the Empire Windrush  anchor to jazz it up so that it becomes some major national icon. What I would love to do is salvage and restore the entire ship. Let the government give them some £50,000 or even £100,000 and stick them back on that ship to take them back to the plantations because that is where many of them seem to be headed.   CJLPA : Correct me if I am wrong in saying that Windrush is used as a kind of wall, where in front of the wall stands the common narrative of trailblazers happily coming to help the ‘mother country’ and behind that wall are all the histories and atrocities that do not get told or are strategically buried. If this is the case, what are some of the things that people need to know about what is behind that wall to set the Windrush narrative straight?   GJ : Yes, well first it is ridiculous to suggest that the 500 or so passengers on that boat were the only ones to have a drastic impact on the UK when there were other boats that came en masse between 1949-1960.  In fact, in 1962 when the British government enacted the Commonwealth Immigration Act to restrict immigration, there was a spike in numbers from around 56,000 people in 1961 to 125,000 people in 1962, all travelling to the UK to try and beat the immigration ban. Thus, it was not just the 500 people from the Empire Windrush  who had to fight off racism and the government, and they were not the only ones to change the political landscape of the UK. It was hundreds of thousands of people. Furthermore, when the Empire Windrush or any other boat came, they were not coming to an all-white society. There were many Black and Brown people who had already settled here by 1900 and to say that Windrush was the beginning of Black people settling in Britain is ahistorical, nonsensical, and colonial.   There are also many people who believe that the only people who come from the Caribbean are those of African extraction. So, in places like Trinidad and Guyana where 50% of the population are descended from South Asian indentured labourers, these people are never taken into account in the Windrush narrative. It is also preposterous to say that the few Caribbeans on the Empire Windrush  rebuilt Britain considering the economic contributions of people from South Asia, West Africa, and the Far East. They too have been subjected to brutal and restrictive immigration policies but they never get mentioned.   We, unfortunately, share a common experience of the vilest racism within this country—two nasty, brutal, murderous trends. One was Paki Bashing, where people who looked like they were from Pakistan, irrespective of where they may have come from, would have their homes incinerated, petrol thrown on their belongings, and excrement put in their letter boxes. The second was Nigger Hunting where police stations in Black communities would nonchalantly announce that ‘we’re going nigger hunting tonight’. All of that is within the lifetime of the government spreading a Windrush narrative that celebrates the ‘trailblazers’ but ceases to recognize the wrongs that these trailblazers faced or the wrongs that many other races and ethnicities have faced. The government gives £100,000 for Windrush Day yet our elders are still being killed because their medication has been removed and they can't go to the doctor because they have been told by the Home Office that they are not documented. All of these things continue to happen around us.   CJLPA : In your book, you speak of the erection of a monument in Waterloo Station that is to symbolise a family gallantly making the journey on the Empire Windrush. This monument shows a mother, father, and their daughter coming together, however, in your book, you state that this is a very false representation. Why?   GJ : That monument plays into the mythology and does not accommodate the reality. To put it bluntly, it’s too tidy. The monument depicts a nuclear family with a sense of security going out into a welcoming, hospitable environment but the reality could not have been worse for these people. That journey and their arrival was steeped in loss, mental distress, and racism that was completely shocking to the passengers. The level of discrimination they faced in housing, in employment, as they walked the street was ghastly. This treatment of Black people led to the major riots in West London in 1958. Then to crown it all, in 1959 Kelso Cochrane, an Antiguan carpenter who had damaged his hand at work, had gone to the hospital to get patched up, left to go home and was set upon by white racists and killed. Being Caribbean, we had this view of Britain as a place of sophistication, so no one could believe that they could be walking down the street and be killed for the colour of their skin.   Moreover, people did not often come with their children or as a nuclear family—they often came by themselves or took along other people's children who could afford to send them. This is one of the reasons why in this hostile environment, there have been so many people who found it difficult to prove who they were when they came. It is because thousands of them did not come with their biological parents. The Empire Windrush  journey was not a tidy transition from A to B as that very romantic monument tries to depict.   CJLPA : What I hear you saying is that the Windrush narrative is an erasure of histories and truth similar to other colonial narratives. But it can also be used as a tool to divide as it did with white and Black workers in the onset, and how it separates Black Caribbeans from Africans, Asians, and even Asian populations from the Caribbean. Do you believe that these divisions are intentionally done to impede us from acknowledging our common struggles and acting collectively?   GJ : I believe it is intentional and what I find alarming is that there are so many young people who are genuinely struggling with their identity in this country. This is not helped by further divisions. Let me give an example of what I mean. Recently on this Black and Asian Studies Association platform, I had to take issue with one doctor who was advertising an online course run by somebody from the United States. It was about children, schools, upbringing, and identity formation and what alarmed me was towards the end of this advertisement, there was a line saying ‘strictly African families only’, and in brackets it says, ‘only people who have high melanin compositions’. I thought to myself what on earth is this?   In the education charity I run, we are as much concerned with mixed heritage children being excluded from school as we are about Black children, particularly Black boys. Quite a number of those Black children have white mothers so what good does it do to discuss Black children’s identity formation when the white parents of those Black children have no place there? Over 55% of Caribbean males have white partners and over 39% of Caribbean women have the same. The largest growing group within society are mixed heritage children. The demography of Britain suggests that if these barriers are not broken down, if we don’t support white, Asian, Caribbean, African, and mixed heritage children of the global majority working together across ethnic, class, racial, and sexuality divides then there will be horrors to come.   CJLPA : Thank you so much Professor Gus John, I just have one more question for you. What do you see for the future of our society?   GJ : Deep down, I wish I could be hopeful, but I’m not so sure. People are very reluctant to call out systemic racism for what it is. They believe that by demonstrating patriotism to King and Country they stand a better chance of getting on in this country, but I also believe and hope that that is just a generational thing. More and more people accept these things uncritically but they need to understand how stupid and ahistorical it all is.   If I had the resources, I would want to start a movement in the country that imagines democratic participation other than these established parties. While the government tries to recruit more and more of our people into their ranks—ie the growing Black middle class—we need to assemble the young people of every race and ethnicity to have some serious conversations about the state of the nation. About what all of that means for their generation. We have to find another way and equip young people to believe that there can be another way.   CJLPA : Thank you very much again for joining us today Professor Gus John, your insights were magnificent.   GJ : You are very kind, thank you for having me. This interview was conducted by Donari Yahzid, a Gates Cambridge Scholar and PhD candidate in the Centre of Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is also a former Fulbright Scholar and MPhil in Development Studies Graduate (Cambridge), through which she began her work on researching Indigenous land rights movements throughout the globe. Now as a PhD candidate, and in addition to working as an editor for the CJLPA , Donari researches land rights for Quilombo and favela communities in Brazil.  [1] Gus John, Don’t Salvage the Empire Windrush (New Beacon Books 2023) 4.

In our society and social theory, there is a fine line between a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ decision. While society uses moral justifications to determine a right or wrong choice, social theory relies on adaptive preference formation, the ‘unconscious altering of our preferences in light of the options we have available’.[1] Adaptive preference formation argues that individuals make decisions based on the options made available to them, thus if they have limited options, they may be less capable of making an informed or ‘correct’ decision. This debate often takes place within the realm of education, where adaptive preference adherents argue that an individual without a formal education simply does not have the option of education available to them. Moreover, those who lack the desire to be formally educated are categorised as having low aspirations, a low sense of achievement, or a limited set of options that do not highlight the benefits of education.[2] This perspective assumes that education is the ‘correct’ choice, and if that choice is not made, it is because education is not available, or the individual has an inherent deficiency. In both scenarios, there is a moral argument being made—one that champions education as ‘right’ while simultaneously looking down upon the individual who is either wanting, but incapable of accessing education, or apathetic and incapable of acknowledging the benefits of education.   When the focus is placed so heavily on an individual’s capacity to make the ‘correct’ choice, we lose sight of the true problems. Government entities and international organisations, for example, often intervene in communities to change the desires of individuals (ie, enticing them to desire formal education) without addressing the root causes of systemic injustice (ie, formal education is exclusive). When these interventions are held to change individuals’ desires while the root of the problem is never addressed, true deprivation becomes apparent. Increasing a population’s desire for education, for example, does not automatically make education more affordable or equitable. Instead, it creates a plethora of people who desire education but cannot be absorbed within a fragmented and exclusive education system.[3]   The focus should, therefore, be shifted from an imposed idea of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ via adaptive preference formation to the endogenous desires of a population through the cultivation of public emotion. The cultivation of public emotion is a movement in which a person or persons of influence shift the public consciousness by tapping into people’s endogenous desires and enabling them to identify their own needs. It mobilises a community around their own beliefs and can be used to combat the impositions by adaptive preference adherents. But how can we be sure that the cultivation of public emotions does not simply change the consciousness of the people without changing the situation that oppresses them?[4]   In this paper, I examine how the cultivation of public emotions can challenge the impositions of adaptive preference adherents who claim to know what is best for a community. I argue that adaptive preference is best challenged when the cultivation of public emotions is used to express a community’s endogenous desires, thus being conscious and supportive of the community’s needs. As such, a sense of agency is bestowed on a community which enables them to identify their own desires, advocate for themselves, and acknowledge the power structures that impede access to those desires. Moreover, I argue that by addressing the inadequacies of a power structure, rather than the ‘deficiencies’ of the people it governs, the cultivation of public emotions can mitigate the root cause of adaptive preference formation. I begin this paper by examining adaptive preference formation, the assumptions embedded in the ‘correct’ choice and the impact it can have on target populations. I then assess the cultivation of public emotions as a necessary tool for change and how this change should stem from the desires of a community, not via foreign interventions. Finally, I assess the Civil Rights struggle for voting rights and subsequent voting campaigns in the United States today to analyse how endogenous and agentic desires have a greater capacity to overcome adaptive preference.     The ‘suboptimal’ choice   In its most rudimentary state, adaptive preference formation (APF) is the preference a person adopts based on their current circumstance. A student, for example, may prefer to study abroad if they receive funding, whereas if funding is not provided, the same student may prefer to forego studying abroad. Through circumstantial preferences, people make choices on how best to live their lives and determine what values they want to shape their identity. It can be assumed that, to some extent, all people are subjected to APF because all people acquire preferences and make choices within a specific context. Within economic, social, and moral theory, however, APF is used to analyse the so-called deprived choices of marginalised communities. In this section, I examine the use of APF as a judgement and value-based critique of the ‘suboptimal’ choices made by marginalised groups. I argue that by establishing what is right and wrong for a community to desire, we fail to acknowledge a community’s true needs and values.   Within economic theory, APF is seen as a driver of irrational decisions. Theorists argue that unbeknownst to them, marginalised people do not experience free choice; instead, they adapt ‘to the limited options set by their circumstances’.[5] The individual is thus blind to the institutions that limit their choice and is incapable of claiming agency when making decisions. Similar sentiments are expressed by Amartya Sen, who asserts that,   Deprived people tend to come to terms with their deprivation because of the sheer necessity of survival, and they may, as a result, lack the courage to demand any radical change, and may even adjust their desires and expectations to what they unambitiously see as feasible.[6]   Likewise, Martha Nussbaum argues that because of their environment, marginalised groups adopt ‘deformed’ preferences and begin to subject themselves to welfarism, thus embracing their disadvantaged position and making it ‘impossible to conduct a radical critique of unjust systems’.[7] Within both Sen and Nussbaum’s critique of APF, the focus (and blame) is placed on the ‘deprived’ individual who passively and ignorantly succumbs to their disadvantaged state. Moreover, these scholars argue that marginalised people make the ‘wrong’ decisions which hinder their capacity to demand true freedom.   One of the freedoms that Sen, Nussbaum, and numerous policymakers acknowledge as being underutilised by marginalised communities is participation in formal education. During the early 2000s in the UK, for example, countless initiatives were implemented to increase participation in education among people from ‘non-traditional backgrounds’. Initiatives were premised on the belief that the UK must become ‘economically competitive in the knowledge economy’ by increasing its human (and academic) capital.[8] After securing nearly 100% of middle-class recruits, the UK government set out to enrol school-aged children from Afro-Caribbean, Muslim, and working-class communities only to find that these groups were not interested in further education.[9] This lack of desire for education was categorised as these communities having ‘low aspirations’ and ‘low achievement standards’ as a result of APF. ‘The requirement,’ as David Bridges argues, ‘[was] then to intervene in the interest of changing these…aspirations and…to challenge choices…that [would] not take them on the pathway through higher education’.[10] A moral and social hierarchy was thus established which presumed that education advocates were rational actors who knew what was best for the marginalised communities. These beliefs and interventions continue today as academics and policymakers undermine decisions that lead people away from higher education. Mainstream discourses maintain that preferences that defy the status quo are ‘restricted by ignorance and/or a failure of rationality’ which then impedes people from living in a ‘truly human way’.[11][12]   But if not as a human, in what way have people in marginalised communities been living, and who is given the authority to discern how a human should live correctly? Critiques of Sen, Nussbaum, and Bridges highlight the fundamental arrogance of APF within economic, social, and moral theory—a belief that an elite social group can determine for all others the ‘correct’ way to live and the ‘correct’ things to desire. This belief has many consequences, but the two of significance for this paper are the impact of institutions on APF and the question of agency amongst marginalised groups. As argued by Elaine Unterhalter, ‘the rhetoric of aspiration ultimately serves as a diversion from the reality of increasing social exclusion and inequality’.[13] This is evidenced within the UK education system, where education is lauded as a necessity for local communities and economic growth, yet education budgets have been cut by more than £3.2 billion since 2010.[14] Though the UK government continues to raise aspirations for education, they simultaneously make education more inaccessible and blame the working class for their low aspirations and low standards of living.[15] By refusing to acknowledge the role that institutions play in making education inaccessible, policymakers force marginalised populations into worse-off positions when trying to raise unrealistic aspirations for education. Moreover, because the desire for education is imposed—as opposed to being endogenously identified as a need of the community—there is minimal to no effort made by officials to match the increase in desire with an equal number of educational opportunities. Instead, there is an influx of desire that cannot be absorbed by the fractured education system as resources are allocated to changing people’s desires and not the institutions that leave them deprived.   Instead of championing the capacity for all people to make diverse and informed decisions, policymakers question people’s agency and rationality, which then invites ‘coercive forms of intervention’.[16][17] To combat forms of coercion, it is imperative to acknowledge that marginalised groups have agency and adhere to rational thinking when choosing what they should and should not value. Marginalised communities, HE Baber argues, are not passive receivers of APF, but are rational actors who assess the risk of choosing to follow the status quo.[18] If a government heavily promotes education, for example, but access to education remains precarious, an individual has every right to not desire education, nor should they be forced to desire it. Marginalised communities do not need a rise in consciousness or a boost in self-esteem—they need factual information from which they can make an informed decision about what they ought to value.[19] By acknowledging the agency and rationality embedded in the decisions of marginalised groups, we can become aware of multi-dimensional aspirations and the ways that people determine their own needs.[20]   Within APF theories, the inadequacy of an institution to provide necessary services and the agency of marginalised communities to determine what should or should not be valued is often left out of discussions. This shifts the blame from the institution itself onto the ‘deprived’ communities who require interventions to change their desires. These changes can do more to harm a community when an increase in desire does not equate to increased opportunities or greater accessibility to services. An imposed desire thus does not benefit a community because it is not reflective of a community’s true needs and dismisses the needs and values that a community has already identified. When institutions are held more accountable, however, and marginalised groups are acknowledged as rational actors, there is a greater capacity to challenge APF. In the next section, I analyse how the cultivation of public emotions around the endogenous desires of a community can help to overcome APF.     The importance of emotion   APF theorists are keen to acknowledge the depravity and passivity of marginalised communities, which they claim can be rectified by imposing foreign desires and interventions. Though I argue against the imposition of desires, inciting interventions, and identifying marginalised groups as passive, it is imperative to acknowledge that material deprivation can and does exist within these communities. Material deprivation, or the inability to afford basic, negatively affects the social, psychological, physical, and financial components of a person’s life, thus it is necessary to combat deprivation that is linked to APF.[21][22] The question, however, is who should determine and lead this change? In this section, I assess how marginalised groups cultivate public emotions to combat APF and material deprivation, thus becoming agents of social change.   Emotions, James Jasper argues, ‘accompany all social action,’ thus they play a significant role in society.[23] These emotions, however, can be hard to control and are often critiqued for their precarious and irrational nature. Moreover, it can be difficult to cultivate unified, public emotions that propel societies towards a specific goal. Gerlie Caspe-Ogatis asserts that human beings can be ‘greedy, anxious and selfish,’ which can hinder privileged classes from caring about the material deprivation faced by marginalised groups.[24] Caspe-Ogatis, therefore, questions how privileged groups can be made  to care about the plight of marginalised communities to solve their APF and material deprivation. Though Caspe-Ogatis aims to mobilise emotions productively, I argue that more attention should be given to the emotions and care that already exist within marginalised communities. As such, we should spend less time forging emotions amongst privileged classes and more time mobilising the fears, desires, and motivations present within marginalised groups. By focusing on marginalised groups’ emotions, we become privy to what these groups identify as unjust within their society, such as unequal educational opportunities, discriminatory work practices, or over-policing within their communities. This helps to acknowledge what needs are not being met and what desires are being formulated. Moreover, this begins a process of marginalised communities determining for themselves the best path towards social change.   As marginalised groups begin to identify their collective grievances, they become more cognizant of the role that institutions play in inciting material deprivation. This enables marginalised groups to shift the blame from themselves and, instead, work to rectify the structural inequalities that have affected their community. If a community is over-policed, for example, they may determine that police officers are not productive in their society and thus ban the institution of formal policing within their community.[25] Though this ban may not align with the status quo, it reflects the specific needs of the marginalised community involved, thus making it an appropriate solution that increases the community’s freedom. This freedom is contingent upon identifying the endogenous emotions of a community and acknowledging that these emotions inform the experiences and beliefs of marginalised groups.[26] Once these emotions are acknowledged, community leaders can begin to cultivate public emotions that reflect the context-specific grievances of a community, the structural barriers that impose these grievances, and the actions necessary to provoke social change. The cultivation of public emotions around endogenous desires is thus necessary to begin solving APF.   Martha Nussbaum acknowledges that the cultivation of public emotions should be undertaken by actors who understand a population’s cultural context.[27] During the Civil Rights movement, for example, Martin Luther King Jr. adopted many of Gandhi’s strategies, yet King did not copy and paste Gandhian norms onto a US context. Instead, King merged Gandhi’s practices with American perspectives to enable anti-racism, Christianity, love, and anti-discrimination to be embedded within Gandhian forms of peaceful protest.[28] The cultivation of public emotions thus necessitates a cultural awareness that is best derived from endogenous actors, grievances, and desires.   When APF theories overestimate the importance of elites or foreign ideologies to enact social change, they become ‘problematic because [the]…interpretation either neglects or misconceives the principally bottom-up dynamics of social movements’.[29] For people’s lives to be changed for the better, they need to be acknowledged for determining their own needs and desires, as opposed to being expected to passively receive imposed desires and interventions. The capacity for marginalised groups to rectify structural injustices should never be undermined nor should the presence of emotions within social action be misconstrued as irrational.[30][31] The endogenous cultivation of public emotions is a powerful tool through which rational and agentic actors can identify a grievance, assert a desire, and demand change from the prevailing social structure. Moreover, the APF that is experienced by marginalised groups can be better addressed when blame is not being placed on the communities themselves, but on the institutions that restrains a community. In the next section, I examine how the endogenous cultivation of public emotions during voting rights struggles not only helped to solve APF during the Civil Rights era, but propelled voting campaigns today to provide more access and opportunities to marginalised groups.   From grievance to change   The Civil Rights movement encompassed a range of goals to ensure that Black citizens were no longer treated as lesser than their white counterparts. By enacting campaigns to dismantle racial segregation, demand decent housing, and end police brutality, civil rights organisers cultivated public emotions that acknowledged the collective grievances of marginalised communities. The cultivation of public emotions not only changed the consciousness of Black people but also the national and global consciousness which helped to formalise laws and policies that favoured the movement’s agenda.[32] In this section, I examine how the struggle for voter registration during the Civil Rights movement cultivated public emotions that continue to help solve APF for marginalised groups today.   Taeku Lee’s study of the US Black Insurgency between the 1940s to the 1960s highlights how the endogenous cultivation of public emotions helped solve APF.[33] After decades of experiencing voter suppression, Black Alabama residents identified the right to vote as a key component in overcoming their status as second-class citizens. This desire to vote, however, was met with extreme violence from state and federal governments, in addition to the violence carried out by many white civilians who opposed the Civil Rights movement. The violence eventually culminated in the Bloody Sunday march on 7 March 1965, where over 600 Black residents gathered to walk from Selma to Montgomery to demand voting rights. Marchers, however, were unable to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma before state troopers began to massacre protestors.[34] Footage of the brutal attacks sent shockwaves throughout the country, but nothing spoke louder than the desire for Black people to gain voting rights.   The massacre incited public outrage and by 15 March 1965, President Johnson proposed a voting rights legislation that countered any legal barriers to voting such as literacy tests and poll taxes. For many scholars during the 1960s, the success of the Civil Rights movement and the accumulation of voting rights was attributed to the elites and politicians who helped pass the voting legislation.[35] As Lee argues, however, the change in federal policy and public opinion was largely due to the Black population that mobilised, against all odds, to demand the right to vote. The Black Insurgency was more than a mere disturbance within US social life; it was the product of endogenous grievances (ie, being treated as second-class citizens), and the subsequent desires borne out of those grievances (ie, accessing the right to vote) that enabled the cultivation of public emotions for social change (ie, legislation that combated voter suppression). In cultivating these emotions via endogenous desires, Alabama’s Black population was able to expand their participation in the political sphere, thus overcoming their limited choices and APF. Moreover, their voting power enforced more accountability among policymakers who could alleviate the material deprivation faced by marginalised groups. This exemplifies how the endogenous cultivation of public emotions is essential to solving APF within marginalised communities. But what makes community organising more effective in solving APF than outside forces, and how are these endogenous practices reflected in today’s voting campaigns?   Though it has been over 55 years since the Voting Rights Act was passed, racialised voter suppression has persisted, making it increasingly difficult to mobilise Black voters to the polls. Through repressive legislations, such as Georgia’s SB202 bill, policymakers have imposed stricter requirements on absentee ballots, limited the use of drop boxes in ethnically diverse areas, established earlier closing times for polls in Black and Brown communities, and have criminalised individuals who give food and water to those standing in notoriously long polling lines.[36] In 2021, US policymakers introduced over 360 restrictive voting bills mimicking many of the suppression practices enforced in the Jim Crow era.[37][38] These efforts have not only limited Black and Brown people’s capacity to vote but have invigorated community organisers who refuse to have voter suppression prevail. Organisations such as Black Voters Matter and Black Girls Vote are two of the many organisations that have led impactful community campaigns to mobilise disenfranchised voters.   Black Voters Matter (BVM) is a non-profit organisation dedicated to engaging voters by disseminating political information to underrepresented groups, marching in solidarity with suppressed voters, rallying communities to increase voter turnout, and organising campaigns with college students.[39] The organisation is run by Black women, known to be the most ‘effective organisers on the ground because they are trusted voices ’.[40] During BVM campaigns, such as their Freedom Bus Tour, organisers travel to different communities around the nation to ‘hear the challenges faced and solutions imagined’, thus giving community members the space to acknowledge their grievances.[41] As Janell Ross argues, ‘Black citizens’ concerns are often ignored [and] treated like a fallout of character flaws rather than policy failure,’ thus it is impactful when organisations treat Black voters as though they matter. BVM is as effective in their mobilisation efforts because they understand how it feels to have their voting rights negated, and for those who do not understand first-hand, they sympathise. The cultivation of public emotions and the mobilising efforts enacted by BVM ‘requires an understanding of Black life and culture’, thus it is necessary to understand the cultural context of a community before APF can be solved.[42]   Community, trust, and understanding are found within many local organisations that mobilise Black and Brown voters. Within Black Girls Vote, for example, organisers create and deliver locally themed engagement boxes that cultivate ‘a spirit of celebration about voting [and] capitalises…on Black attitudes about the power of the vote’.[43] This is achieved by understanding Black behavioural norms during election time, and the barriers—both legal and emotional—that may impede someone from voting.[44] Likewise, political organising committees that are housed in Black churches levy their social bonds to help mobilise voters, whilst Black political leaders use their established trust in communities to increase voter turnout.[45] In some cases, organisations provide transportation and food during election season so that voters are prepared to withstand any polling challenges.[46] These personalised touches enable community leaders to mobilise Black and Brown voters more effectively by being respectful of a community’s cultural context. This respect furthers the cultivation of public emotions around endogenous grievances and desires which are then used to change social structures and overcome APF within marginalised communities.     A conclusion beyond passivity   APF theories often conceptualise disadvantaged groups as being passive and deficient actors in need of direct intervention. Direct intervention assumes that disadvantaged groups are responsible for their suboptimal position, thus elite rational actors are needed to intervene on the group’s behalf. These assumptions place blame on marginalised communities and fail to recognise the role that institutions play in imposing APF. Because APF has significant consequences, such as material deprivation, APF must be solved, but it is also important to acknowledge that it cannot be solved by just any actor. When desires are being imposed upon a community by foreign actors, more effort goes into changing the community’s consciousness as opposed to changing their oppressive condition. This can result in more harm than good when a community’s needs are not being met. However, when a community’s endogenous needs and desires are acknowledged as legitimate reasons for mobilising, then the capacity to solve APF by changing social consciousness and structures increases. APF is, therefore, best challenged and solved when the cultivation of public emotions derives from a community’s endogenous desires, which enables a community to identify its own needs and fight to demand justice accordingly. Donari Yahzid Donari Yahzid is a Gates Cambridge Scholar and PhD candidate in the Centre of Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is also a former Fulbright Scholar and MPhil in Development Studies Graduate (Cambridge), through which she began her work on researching Indigenous land rights movements throughout the globe. Now as a PhD candidate, and in addition to working as an editor for the CJLPA , Donari researches land rights for Quilombo and favela communities in Brazil.  [1] Ben Colburn, ‘Autonomy and Adaptive Preferences’ (2011) 23(1) Utilitas 52, 52. [2] David Bridges, ‘Adaptive preference, justice and identity in the context of widening participation in higher education’ (2006) 1(1) Ethics and Education 15-28. [3] John E. Craig, ‘The Expansion of Education’ (1981) 9 Review of Research in Education, 151-213. [4] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed . (Continuum 1970). [5] Bridges (n 2) 16. [6] Amartya Sen, Development as freedom  (Oxford University Press 1999) 63. [7] Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge University Press 2000) 116. [8] Bridges (n 2) 16. [9] ibid 17-18. [10] ibid. [11] ibid 20. [12] Nussbaum (n 7) 74. [13] Elaine Unterhalter, James Ladwig, and Craig Jeffrey, ‘Decoding Aspirations: Social Theory, the Capability Approach and the Multiple Modalities of Education’ (2014) 35 (1) British Journal of Sociology of Education 133, 140. [14] Nick Wragg, John Robert Stoszkowski, and Aine Macnamara, ‘The Absurdity of Aspiration within Further Education in England: Where Much is Said but Little is Done?’ (2020) 11(9) Journal of Education and Practice 106. [15] Richard Adams and Sally Weale. ‘Ministers’ loan plans could stop poorer students in England going to university’ Guardian (London, 22 February 2022) < https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/feb/22/fears-that-minimum-grades-for-student-loans-in-england-could-narrow-access > accessed 27 January 2024. [16] Catriona Mackenzie, ‘Responding to the Agency Dilemma’, in Marina A. L. Oshana (eds),  Personal Autonomy and Social Oppression: Philosophical Perspectives  (Routledge 2015) 49. [17] Serene Khader, Adaptive Preferences and Women's Empowerment  (Oxford University Press 2011). [18] HE Baber, ‘Adaptive Preferences’ (2007) 33(1) Social Theory and Practice 105. [19] ibid. [20] Caroline Hart, ‘How Do Aspirations Matter?’ (2016) 17 (3) Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 324. [21] Anne-Catherine Guio and Isabelle Engsted Maquet, ‘Material deprivation and poor housing’ (2006) Draft paper for the conference ‘Comparative EU Statistics on Income and Living conditions: issues and Challenges’. [22] Richard Wilkinson, Unhealthy societies: the afflictions of inequality  (Routledge 1996). [23] James Jasper, ‘The Emotions of Protest: Affective and Reactive Emotions in and around Social Movements’ (1998) 13 (3) Sociological Forum 397. [24] Gerlie Caspe-Ogatis, ‘Cultivating Constructive Civic Emotions: Why Compassion Matters in Human Survival During the Covid 19 Pandemic’ (2020) 8 Mabini Review 150. [25] Rachel Abrams, ‘Police Clear Seattle’s Protest ‘Autonomous Zone’’ The New York Times (New York, 1 July 2020) < https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/us/seattle-protest-zone-CHOP-CHAZ-unrest.html > accessed 27 January 2024. [26] Amy Winans, ‘Cultivating Racial Literacy in White, Segregated Settings: Emotions as Site of Ethical Engagement and Inquiry’ (2010) 40(3) Curriculum Inquiry 475. [27] Martha Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice  (Harvard University Press 2013). [28] ibid. [29] Taeku Lee , Mobilizing Public Opinion: Black Insurgency and Racial Attitudes in the Civil Rights Era  (University of Chicago Press 2002) 6. [30] Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of the Black Insurgency, 1930-1970  (University of Chicago Press 1982). [31] James (n 23). [32] Joyce Ladner, ‘A New Civil Rights Agenda: A New Leadership Is Making a Difference’ ( Brookings , 1 March 2000) < https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-new-civil-rights-agenda-a-new-leadership-is-making-a-difference/ > accessed 27 January 2024. [33] Lee (n 29). [34] Christopher Klein, ‘How Selma's ‘Bloody Sunday’ Became a Turning Point in the Civil Rights Movement’ ( Sky History , 18 July 2020) < https://www.history.com/news/selma-bloody-sunday-attack-civil-rights-movement > accessed 27 January 2024. [35] Lee (n 29). [36] Zack Beauchamp, ‘Georgia’s restrictive new voting law, explained’ ( Vox , 26 March 2021) < https://www.vox.com/22352112/georgia-voting-sb-202-explained > accessed 27 January 2024. [37] Janie Boschma, ‘Lawmakers in 47 states have introduced bills that would make it harder to vote. See them all here’ ( CNN , 3 April 2021) < https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/03/politics/state-legislation-voter-suppression/index.html > accessed 27 January 2024. [38] Brandon Tensley, ‘America's long history of Black voter suppression’ ( CNN , May 2021) < https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/05/politics/black-voting-rights-suppression-timeline/ > accessed 27 January 2024. [39] ‘Our Purpose’ ( Black Voters Matter , 2020) < https://blackvotersmatterfund.org/our-purpose/ > accessed 27 January 2024. [40] Jessica Washington, ‘‘Whatever it takes’: how Black women fought to mobilize America's voters’ Guardian  (London, 12 November 2020) < https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/12/black-women-voters-mobilize-georgia-elections > accessed 27 January 2024. [41] Janell Ross, ‘A radical way to mobilize black voters in 2020: Work on issues, not voting’ ( NBC News , 20 October 2019) < https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/radical-way-mobilize-black-voters-2020-work-issues-not-voting-n1068681 > accessed 27 January 2024. [42] ibid. [43] Ashley Daniels et al., ‘Party at the Mailbox: Mobilizing Black Voters with Celebrations of Community’ (2020) American Government and Politics < https://preprints.apsanet.org/engage/apsa/article-details/614e0b9387a02d089d475063 > accessed 2 February 2024. [44] ibid. [45] Baodong Liu, Sharon D. Wright Austin, and Byron D'Andrá Orey, ‘Church Attendance, Social Capital, and Black Voting Participation’ (2009) 90(3) Social Science Quarterly 576; Christopher Clark, ‘Collective Descriptive Representation and Black Voter Mobilization in 2008’ (2013) 36(2) Political Behavior 315; Seth E Masket, ‘Did Obama’s ground game matter? The influence of local field offices during the 2008 presidential election’ (2009) 73(5) Public Opinion Quarterly 1023; Tracey Osborn, Scott D. McClurg, and Benjamin Knoll, ‘Voter mobilization and the Obama victory’ (2010) 38(2) American Politics Review 211. [46] Chelsea Floyd, ‘Nonprofit Organization Encourages Black Voters, Provides Transportation to Polls’ ( Spectrum News , 8 October 2020) < https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/triad/news/2020/10/08/nonprofit-organization-encourages-black-voters--provides-transportation-to-polls > accessed 27 January 2024.

Art has been part of our being for millions of years—possibly even before the beginning of our genus Homo—without being understood as what we now call art. From the beginning, it was simply another way of knowing, probably our first, of coping with what confronted us in our environment as a necessary way of surviving in it and sharing that knowledge with others. It sprang from an emotional reaction to what existed outside of us and how we translated that feeling to pass it on. Often that shock was significant enough for our ancestors to know instinctively to communicate it wordlessly, since it predates language, and to do so with the limited means at their disposal. They did this by creating sounds, movements, or things to represent those emotions—symbols, through things found or made, to pass on those feelings subconsciously. This is what we have come to call art.   We were not put on earth to master it as many religions and political systems espouse. We are a product of the earth and to continue that existence we must know our environment, the earth in all its dimensions. The ‘purpose’ of life is to know, to learn, and through knowing ensure its survival. To live is to learn, to learn is to live. The need to know our environment in order to survive in it is something we share with all living things. Each manifestation of life, from the simplest to the most complex, has evolved means of interacting with its immediate environment in order to find in it sustenance, protection, and whatever is needed to survive. We, as humans, have one of the most complex such manifestations, which has evolved to provide us with both our instinct and our intellect as ways of interacting with our surroundings and knowing in our own limited way.   Henri Bergson defined the two, instinct—feeling, emotion—and intellect—memory and reason—along with intuition, which he calls the instinct educated by the intellect, meaning that instinct is also something which evolves.[1]   As we did eventually with art, our species continued to split knowing into other categories, whether religion, philosophy, or science. This has been effective to some extent by focusing more deeply on different aspects of human behaviour, but it has also created boundaries to knowing. Because those categories are relatively recent human creations, they provide insights useful to understanding how humans express the different dimensions of their being, how they are communicated, and how that communication becomes expressed socially. That first way of knowing is through feeling, the response most living creatures have to their surroundings. In our case, it was a pre-intellectual reaction to those experiences which collectively evolved into symbolic thought and symbolic representation and eventually manifested as art.   The need to know, to which art is one response, is at the heart of existence, something we share with other species, each of which has its way of knowing and sharing. We started, as all living organisms do, by having an emotional reaction to something, whether positive or negative for our survival, and storing that memory as a mental sign, the root of instinct. As the genus Homo evolved, the accumulation of emotionally provoked memories became our intellect and retained knowledge passed on through generations, which in turn coloured our emotional responses to our environment and allowed us to eventually communicate them through speech.   In a long career in art, I often asked artist friends which came first in their minds, speech or art. They all responded, as if a given, that we had art in the way I have defined it before speech as a way of communicating our feelings to others.   The first ‘good or bad’ response to situations in nature was the primal emotional reaction to external stimuli. Is it something dangerous or useful to my survival? Is it something I can eat or will it eat me? That response and the memory of those responses is what allowed us to survive. It is seeing from another part of ourselves, our instinctive side, internal, founded on experience and memory, in an attempt to understand the world around us, survive in it, and share that knowledge with others. Sentient before intelligent.   That emotion and memory are located in the amygdala and the limbic system, this most primal part of our brains, is significant in understanding how ancient this process must be. We can almost see our ‘lizard’ brain’s head darting back and forth in response to possible pleasure or potential danger. That emotional response, a reaction between the individual and the external stimulus, is recorded in the memory as an image, a sign, a seed of a symbol, what Gilbert Simondon called a symbole-souvenir  or memory-symbol. [2] When one or another of those reactions enter our memory, the grounding of the intellect, we have the very primitive beginning of symbolic thought—one might say instinct. What we understand as art today is rooted in this early beginning; it was always there from the start and evolved in complexity and capacity as everything involving life and humanity did. As we embarked on that Bergsonian two-step, an emotional reaction to a confrontation, positive or negative, to something outside of us, we started building up experiences to guide us further. The fact that the amygdala is involved in memory gave our perception the information accumulated through experience to help decide what was good or bad by recalling reactions to past encounters. One might call this the evolving intellect.   Neuroscience has confirmed that role of the amygdala as proposed by James McGaugh several years ago:   The findings of human brain imaging studies are consistent with those of animal studies in suggesting that activation of the amygdala influences the consolidation of long-term memory; the degree of activation of the amygdala by emotional arousal during encoding of emotionally arousing material (either pleasant or unpleasant) correlates highly with subsequent recall. The activation of neuromodulatory systems affecting the basolateral amygdala and its projections to other brain regions involved in processing different kinds of information plays a key role in enabling emotionally significant experiences to be well remembered.[3]   This beginning of symbolic thought in embryonic form evolved to become art—founded on artists’ emotional reaction to the ‘real’ in their time and space, developed with the action of the intellect, and then communicated to others through their own emotional reactions to it.   When we are confronted with something we don’t know, something not already clearly part of our memories, we make up an answer, inventing something to explain what is in front of us from our limited experiences. This is essential to our being able to move forward. Edwige Armand and I propose that creativity is provoked by a crisis in perception caused when the givens we possess for understanding what we are experiencing are insufficient to explain it. When we don’t understand what we are confronting, we will make up an answer, linking things not necessarily related, but with an internal logic of its own through invented relationships with things already believed. British neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist has described this as ‘sensing the lack of fit between perception and cognition, and using this as a stimulus to shift the way we both see and think’. [4]  That stimulus is what we proposed as the crisis-provoked call to creativity in which our intuition dips into what Armand named ‘forgotten memories’ to find or invent a suitable explanation. [5]   The same process is what creates mythologies, the mental shorthand used to transmit an understanding our world: a solution pulled from our unconscious through reinvention that changes forever our perception, how we see, think, and imagine. Perception is what artist Robert Irwin calls the subject of art [6]  and why Marshall McLuhan called artists educators of perception. [7]  That being so, artists generally sense a change in perception before the rest of the population, which is why society takes time to digest and understand their proposals, sometimes as long as a century. It is also why artists have always been interested in what we’ve come to know as science, how we understand the world intellectually, knowledge which feeds our imaginations. If science defines our reality as is the case in our society, it becomes a major subject of art, in both its intellectual proposals—structures—and the technologies it produces—tools.   Bergson’s understanding of perception, its limitations and potential, led him to recognise the special relation between perception and the artist:   For hundreds of years there have been men [and women] whose function has been precisely to see and make us see what we do not naturally perceive. They are the artists. What is the aim of art if not to show us, in nature and in the mind, outside of us and within us, things which did not explicitly strike our senses and our consciousness […] The great painters are men [and women] who possess a certain vision of things which has or will become the vision of all […] Art would suffice then to show us that an extension of the faculties of perceiving is possible.[8]   That communication is triggered by the emotion of the creator connecting through the emotion of the receptor. Art is about emotion and emotion is about the body and the body’s encounter with the exterior. It is the other way of knowing, long before the evolution of our intellect pushed it aside, touting reason as the only way of comprehending, a limiting inheritance from the Enlightenment. Our emotional response to an artwork is our connection to the emotion of the artist who created it. That response literally incorporates it into us and makes it part of our being. Learning in depth must be more than intellectual to become truly part of us.   Art is born out of our curiosity toward our environment and an effort to engage with it and understand it on a first level, knowing it with the whole self. Art is an emotional engagement with our surroundings and calls on an emotional response from the receiver to complete the effort. Those emotions, even though overlapping, are as unique to the artist who created it as they are to each of us, a result of our life experiences, our physical make-up, a product of our embodied minds, as Varela put it. [9] Emotions cannot exist without a physical body to experience them. They can be communicated intellectually but not completely, which is what makes the artistic experience sometimes difficult to explain in words. Each person’s emotional response to someone else’s emotions is coloured by their own. Emotions can be imitated, which we have ritualised and even made into an art form. In theatre, in cinema, the performing arts, we have what we call ‘suspension of disbelief’, a convention by which we accept the imitation as temporarily real and offer our emotional selves to the spectacle to mix with the simulated emotions of the players.   Parenthetically, this seems also to apply to politics, which are never very far from theatre. It is in syncing our emotional experiences with others that a bond is made between humans and is how society functions. Our emotions can fool us and many societies have mistrusted them, often for good reason. When the emotions are faked it can cause confusion and a skewed response. We seem to be up to our eyes and ears in that today, in our contrived and manipulated communication space. If the shared emotions are negative the resulting pact will be negative, if not flat-out evil. We have seen many examples of the evil it can cause throughout human history, particularly in movements appealing heavily to emotion, as the twentieth-century authoritarian regimes— whether Fascist, Nazi, or Communist—did very effectively. In art the Italian Futurists demonstrated how precarious that borderline can be. That danger is present today with emotion gaining over reason in the public domain, as we at the same time add more and more dimensions to our communication space. The resulting social networks are full of fascist tropes of hatred for the other. They grew in an unregulated fashion, creating a media free-for-all focused on the violent and the shocking for financial gain through increasing the number of online users exposed to advertising.   I define communication space as the sum of all means we have of transmitting and receiving information as individuals and collectively. I have a personal communication space. My social group or nation has a collective communication space. It is made up of what we exchange with others, our education in its broadest sense, what we read and learn, and, in our time, mass communications and the media. It is where a society sees itself and where its members learn how to function, where we find our models of comportment.   My emphasis on emotion in art is not to dismiss the importance of the intellect to the artist’s search for solutions to the self-imposed problems—perceptual crises—leading to a work’s final form. That finality is a question of feeling, both an emotional and intellectual satisfaction with the work, and the artist’s first audience is the artist him- or herself. Art is not made in the first instance to communicate but to satisfy the personal need to record that feeling. In much prehistoric cave painting the images are often in obscure and inaccessible parts of the cave, limiting who saw them. Art is a very private thing until the moment when the artist dares to put it before a public. When does one arrive at the satisfaction of work completed, the solution to that self-imposed problem? One of hardest things for an artist is to know when to stop, when the work is finished, simply because there is no predetermined finality in art. Giorgio de Chirico used to sneak into museums to continue working on some of his paintings, which were still evolving in his mind.   In general, we give, consciously or unconsciously, an emotional weight and symbolic significance to what we perceive, another dimension depending on our reaction to it. Some of that might be based on new intellectual givens we have discovered, some uniquely on feelings derived from our culture and the need to fit what we see into our belief system. The new and the old are often in conflict. Some might eventually become superstitions. Many millennia ago, if I killed an albino bear and the next day a volcano erupts, I would never kill an albino bear again. We are always looking for links between things, patterns, and making up why things are related. This we share with every culture which ever existed. It is what we call culture and our first way of knowing together. Later, we try doing this in an objective and logical way, supposedly eliminating the emotional aspect, and we call that science.   Christianity as the dominant European philosophical, psychological, and moral guide throughout the Middle Ages and into the early Renaissance exhausted itself in the Thirty Years’ War of the early seventeenth century. The way was opened to fill that vacuum through the Enlightenment which codified the changed worldview wrought by the Renaissance, proposing a clockwork paradigm, the Mechanical Universe. It gave Western society a new model of how things work based solely on reason. The excess of emotion witnessed during those years of slaughter provoked an understandable mistrust of that side of humanity. What became the governing paradigm was founded uniquely on the material and measurable. The Mechanical Universe was invented as the ultimate explanation of how the world worked and reason the only accepted method for understanding. That gave birth to Positivism and its banning of emotion and total reliance on science. That mistrust exists to this day among ‘serious’ people, but as long as emotion is suppressed it will always find a way out and when it does the results are not usually beneficial. We ignore it at our own risk.   Eliminating emotion in the scientist is an illusion and a distortion of what science is, an unfortunate fallout from Positivism. Cogito ergo sum —I think, therefore I am— was a useful but limited approach to how humanity is defined . René Descartes’ formula helped promote the idea of individual agency, one of the defining elements of modernity, but its focus on reason as the only way of knowing ignored the other half of the human to the detriment of the model of how humans actually function. Sentio ergo sum —I feel, therefore I am—is how most people first react to sensory input. Recognising that aspect of humanity not only allows us to understand the whole human by recognising the other half, but also connects our species with the rest of the living world which reacts principally through feeling. Objectivity is a tool, an important one, but to imagine that scientists manage to eliminate their emotional side is a distortion. The scientists operate as all of us do with their fullest selves—indivisibly—but recognise when emotion colours the scientific search for answers. Peer review is the method developed to guard against just that.   In western history, Positivism, evolving from the debates of the Enlightenment, tried to deny the emotional side by declaring rationality the only approach to true knowledge, such that all else must be rejected. Anything coming from feeling was unreliable, even dangerous, and excluded from a mechanical quantifiable view of how things work. It has created a distorted perception for many human beings, a worldview based on a diminished idea of the human. That may work for understanding material processes but not how human beings function. Reason helps curb emotion’s excesses but emotion modifies reason’s rigidity. The interaction between Sentio…  and Cogito…  defines us and may be the space of Bergson’s élan vital , where life grows. Dualisms are useful only if we understand them as two points of a triangulation leading to a deeper understanding of what they address , the third point. In Bergson’s case his dualism of instinct and intellect defines understanding.   For over 40 years I have promoted the idea that we are living a new renaissance based on the premise that, historically, when art and science fundamentally change the definition of reality and its representation, we are confronted by a profound transformation which demands a reinvention of the institutions by which we interact and govern. Those new structures will eventually replace the older ones which no longer work or function in a degraded and decadent mode, a distortion of their original mandate. The new institutions will be based on a different operational schema, a new paradigm, which for me is the interactive network replacing the mechanical model which has dominated since the Enlightenment. That reinvention brings front and centre the relationship between individual and society and the foundation of the authority to govern—sovereignty, redefining both and their interaction. We are once again confronted by that need today.   The machine model recognised and credited the person, individuals as distinct parts operating together through opposing parts—friction between gears. The network model again recognises the individual as a singularity but as connected, cooperating members—the person and his or her network of others. The distinguishing fundamental definition of the new renaissance is the difference between opposition and cooperation.   A renaissance is always a violent period with the old order stubbornly defended by those that profit from it most and the so-called new often being promoted with equal energy. A renaissance takes time to move from destruction to construction which is the frontier we now inhabit. The new paradigm which replaces the clockwork of the mechanical universe is, I proposed, the interactive network, whereby everything is understood as connected and interdependent. Art and science, because they represent broadly the two principal ways of how human beings interact with their environment in trying to understand it, are our evolved tools for doing so, instinct and intellect. Both have pointed to that new schema for well over 150 years. [10]   In 2001, I organised a conference on art and science with Benoit Mandelbrot, father of fractal geometry, at the Rockefeller Conference Centre in Bellagio, Italy. [11] We brought together a small group of people from both fields to talk freely over several days about how we understand human creativity, which came up consistently during our five days together. One of the participants, Margaret Boden, a founder of cognitive science and an early explorer of AI and creativity, described creativity in an analysis as profound, complete, and intellectual as science would demand. Mandelbrot objected strenuously, proclaiming that ‘no, no, no, creativity was like a hand coming down from heaven touching you with inspiration’. The dispute between the two scientists was, of course, the core argument which still exists today, the pull between cogito  and sentio  in understanding humanity.   The capacity for symbolic thought, as I have explained above, has always been part of our makeup in its earliest primitive forms since the beginning of our genus and most probably well before. It comes from an instinctive and unintellectual operation of that curiosity which is part of every living being’s functioning as a way of exploring the environment. With our ancestors it often led to finding and keeping objects, stones, fossils, organic or inorganic, which excited that curiosity by whatever made the objects exceptional. When the found object, the first overt manifestation of what we now know as art, was kept and shared with others it acquired a symbolic sense for the group as well as the individual who found it, an unarticulated meaning but something felt to be important. We still have traces of this today when we come home from the beach with a bag of stones and shells which we found fascinating and decided to keep. Our keeping them gave them a personal, thus human, value, intangible but real. With the evolution of our intellectual capacity this process became more elaborate in providing a ‘why’ to that selection giving those objects an explanation of their symbolic value as a means of communicating it and the beginning of what can be seen as a belief system—the root of religion. In the beginning, this was not an intellectual exercise; the choosing came from feeling rather than understanding. It became more intellectually elaborated in time through the need to be communicated, probably diluting the experience of the first person to experience it but making it transferable to others and incorporating other reactions to it.   The found object is one of the first forms of artistic experience, going back some millions of years to when our ancestors were attracted to an object by its unusual appearance or whatever made it stand out for them. That attraction was instinctive, more feeling or emotion, not because it had any obvious utility. Keeping it and sharing it with others made it art.   Fig 1. This pebble was discovered in Makapansgat, South Africa, an Australopithecus site dated to three million years ago. The mineral matches a site several kilometres away where it was found, transported and kept. It is naturally worn and not sculpted. Duchamp resuscitated the objet trouvé  for our times and it has been a major motivation in art ever since. It is not hard to see its role in art using new technologies. They were designed for a specific reason and to accomplish a certain task. The encounter with artists took them somewhere else and changed their role. Again that explains why the public has often reacted negatively to that work as not doing what the technology was designed to do. That has been the history of twentieth-century art, as wave after wave of artistic invention has been met with scandalised reactions, only to become canon a generation or two later. It underlines what McLuhan called the education of perception in action.   The earliest toolmaking was never totally utilitarian; we can often see that artistic manifestation, the extra added to it which makes it art. One of the best ancient examples I know is a biface brought to my attention by paleo-anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin, dating from between a quarter- to half a million years ago.[12]   The maker recognised a shell fossil in the stone and shaped it to emphasise it—an aesthetic act. Many of those early tools were never used physically and tool making always went beyond the utilitarian to include the symbolic. We have consistently assigned that kind of meaning to our technologies ever since, seeing them as symbolically representing something prideful about ourselves. Fig 2. Handaxe knapped around a fossil shell, located centrally on one face, identified as the Cretaceous bivalve mollusc Spondylus spinosus. Found in West Tofts, Norfolk. © Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. This is the root of artistic creativity—an individual act of symbolic expression—and its eventual integration into culture, socially communicated. For most of human history, art was the external expression of religion and its means of communication. This process can be seen clearly in the elaborate cave art found world-wide. It was the symbolic representation of a group’s belief system, produced with enormous effort underlining its importance to the group. That role lasted for millennia and became the principal reason for making art.   As another end result of the Enlightenment, art broke from religion to express the symbolic sense of the individual artist rather than the collective belief of the group. Still, during the symbiotic relationship between art and religion there were certainly individuals who created for themselves and even in religious art the expressiveness of the individual artist is present, as more obviously so in the Italian Renaissance.   The symbolic is very much part of us and ignoring it or pretending it is less important or something to be overcome demonstrates a dangerous misunderstanding of how humans function. All of us operate under a mythology of sorts, recognised or not. Myths are shorthand symbolism of how things are, how people expounding them think the world works. We’ve eliminated myth as beneath our human intellect but in this we fool ourselves. Myths can actually unite people in a common emotional understanding of who we are and how we are connected. They are fundamental to any group, a kind of code expressing a shared and necessary value to its members. In the publication cited above, Edwige Armand and I proposed a new myth for society given what we know today, a kind of neo-animism whereby we understand that everything is alive and connected. [13] It was edited out of our chapter by the science publisher.   ***   Art, as mentioned above, is the very ancient way our species interacted with the world. What we understand as art today already lay in our lineage millions of years ago and evolved. It eventually became the symbolic recreation of an emotional response to the exterior before we had the intellectual resources available to explain what we were experiencing. We still act in that way when confronted with something we don’t understand by making up an explanation, by expressing in some way our feelings toward that experience, creating patterns and links which we alone imagine. That eventually became symbolic thought and its expression and, shared, grew in sophistication as our species evolved. The symbolic has always played a major role in our world view and art expresses a good part of it. It is an essential element to our survival in aiding our understanding even when that understanding is misplaced or erroneous. It is the emotional response, feeling, that colours what we know for good or for bad. This makes it a major field for human conflict, your symbol verses mine. It is not an unconscious reaction on our part, but a response coming from somewhere else in us but as important, and sometimes more so, as our intellect. If we ignore it in any human enterprise we witness or undertake we deprive ourselves of a fuller understanding.   Artistic exploration has been a manifestation of that need and produced the actual symbols in our cultures. For that reason, art has for many centuries and in many cultures been subservient to religion, since religion provided that symbolic content which art interpreted and a degree of its emotion impact. This is ironic since the symbolic sense of the world proposed through art predates religion by many millennia. Religion is a derivative of art as that symbolic sense increased in complexity, was codified and communicated to larger numbers, and became institutionalised.   Humanity always seems to search outside itself for some literal deus ex machina solution for guidance, some imagined or proposed superior force to which we bend the knee to a greater or lesser degree depending on our tolerance for superstition. We have seen in the West alone various gods, religions, and related divine-right sovereignties, science with Positivism, the market and its invisible hand, some automatic system into which we must put our full faith as something above us and accepted as infallible, the source of authority. To turn the bible around, our Gods, Golems, and Frankensteins are usually made in a misunderstood or limited image of ourselves. They have also been a convenient way to avoid personal responsibility for our actions and have been used as such often in history.   Artificial Intelligence is the latest saviour to be promoted to that role, as if algorithms came down to us from the mountain as a gift from who knows whom. This attitude is directly traceable to Norbert Wiener’s horror of the Second World War and the Holocaust which ‘proved’ to him that humanity was incapable of governing itself, a parallel to the reaction to the Thirty Years’ War. The pure logic of the machine was to provide a disinterested guide to our actions and we were supposed to accept it as neutral and just. No questions asked of course, about who built it and why, just as in previous ‘infallibilities’. Wiener himself saw the dangers in the blind trust in such mechanical solutions and warned against it. [14]   Art is never neutral. The goal of art doesn’t change over time but the means for making it do. The expression of our emotional reactions to our world is still central to art but the move from religious to the personal expression as its principal source is another product of the Enlightenment and relatively new in history. The tools that artists choose have always evolved and had an impact on artistic practice, whilst the resulting work starts a cycle of the effect of the technology on the artist and the artist on the technology. They help explore the world in a new way, to see new dimensions of it, and tell us much about ourselves who invented them. As the technologies of communication continue to expand at an ever increasing speed, artists will respond. Experimentation with their new possibilities and how they change our perception will continue. They will use them to express something more than an exchange of information, going beyond the ‘objective’ to a personal, emotional, and symbolic response to our changing environment and our place in it. In changing the way we think we see the world, artists open up other ways of imagining, thinking, and seeing.   The close analyses now possible of stone bifaces produced a half a million years ago reveal much about our ancestors and how they thought and acted. Sites have indicated that they organised production demonstrating how they interacted and communicated and has even pushed further into the past the development of language.[15] The tools, as in the case of artisans or anyone using tools to achieve their end, become an extension of the body, the technique a reflection of the mental process producing the work.   What was used to create art was what was at hand, from a found object in the beginning to sophisticated computers today and a long list of everything in between. Whatever is needed will be taken or invented to respond to that artistic drive which, because it is emotional and intellectual, is doubly compelling. With our expanded intellect, we eventually named it art to distinguish it from other forms of making and knowing.   Artistic experimentation was and is part of that process as each new technology appeared and expanded our communication space with the usual mix of information or entertainment. But artists were often taking it in a different direction, which is why society had such a difficult time dealing with the new work and the ideas it proposed. The belief that the image mirrored what was seen began to change artistically long before our era and continued to do so with the evolution of communication technologies. Man Ray’s filming in the 1920s with the camera on its side or upside down revealed that this was a tool to be manipulated and not a window on reality; it was rather a new proposed reality invented by art or whoever dominates its production.   There are four artists, two couples, whom I know personally who exemplify the artistic exploration of new technologies. Steina and Woody Vasulka began with video, analogue and digital, in the late sixties and spent their entire careers experimenting with its artistic potential in both tape and installations. Their work is finally being recognised in the depth it deserves more than two generations later, as more and more of the population lives in the mental space they created with the new tools. Another couple, Maria Barthélémy and René Sultra, have been doing the same with a newer technology, photogrammetry, creating images, fixed and moving, from multiple photos of a situation from several angles. They create new spaces which challenge the habitual Euclidean space we inhabit and help us see differently. All four have demonstrated how artists in a highly personal and subjective manner open a new means of expression to new and different levels of understanding. They set a pattern for exploring new potentials in the new tools in a non-objective open-ended way, learning and teaching at the same time. This exploration is essential to any new means of expression and pertinent to AI today.   The idea of total art has been with us for centuries, as different artistic endeavours attempted to unify all forms of creativity into a coherent whole. This was especially so in music and architecture in the nineteenth century, becoming more common in the twentieth. Evolving technologies made experimenting with it possible and, in spite of different ingrained habits and market pressures, it has never stopped. Many gatekeepers of traditional artistic expression try to keep the arts in their habitual spaces, but they tend to leak out naturally. In virtual space, total art is a given, where visual arts approach performance and the performing arts become recorded images in time. It is challenging in many ways, particularly in how we bring the public into the work—a question throughout the history of art. I have always proposed that prehistoric caves were our first multi-media spaces where image, music, and dance were performed together. Artists carry within themselves that total space as they create.   The previous century witnessed an explosion of possibilities that were more than ways of making art, which changed the practice of it fundamentally. First, we had duration added to the image with cinema and all the other image technologies to follow. This brought it closer to performance. Adding time made it easier to involve the spectator and bringing in the spectator’s reactions to the work became an early ambition. New technologies made it possible to reach out to people instead of waiting for them to show up in some designated space. Kupka, one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, said in the 1940s that wireless transmission was the future of art anticipating the so-called media arts. [16]  Each new wave (tool) was open for artistic exploration which needs to be increased exponentially as the technologies play an even bigger role in our lives. But support for that is drying up in both public and private domains. We have actually accomplished Plato’s goal of barring artists and poets from the Republic by making them irrelevant and marginal. Plato saw them as people who create imagined ‘realities’ disturbing and dangerous to the dominant world view and therefore necessarily banished. What is lost is the understanding that that is the role of art and often those ‘realities’ reflect coming changes and help us adjust to them, once again a change in perception.   The art world is now dominated by the market; the saleable object is what counts, and this is usually not the experimental. Monetising art, as we have, kills it, making it a carcass, a shadow of itself, devoid of the life it is supposed to reflect. Monetising anything to make it more ‘pertinent’ reflects a society whose dominant value is money. Art no longer informs but simply exists and its importance is determined by marketing. We no longer have gatekeepers, no connoisseurs, for good or for bad, who give their lives to trying to understand what artists are saying. We may agree or not, but at least they were operating from human judgement and not some artificially neutral mechanism, yet another ‘invisible hand’ divorced from human interference. Even art institutions no longer fulfil that role, taking their direction from the market on who is and isn’t an artist. The ‘stars’ are stars because they say so and people buy it. Museums will inevitably defend it as art to justify their purchases, and the game of smoke and mirrors goes on. Art stars like J eff Koons are to art what Donald Trump is to politics, devoid of all sense, spectacle without meaning. In that regard they are, unfortunately, a reflection of contemporary society: as Macbeth lamented, ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’.   It is time our society understands that art is not the plaything of the rich or the raw material of financial markets and finally acknowledges how absolutely essential it is to us and our survival, which should make its exploration of our social evolution a priority. When governments cut budgets, the first thing to go is the no-longer affordable ‘luxury’, art and culture. Why is it then that when governmental institutions rescue children from traumatic situations, they give them materials to draw, to express the emotions they cannot put in words. Art is our essential emotional educator.   A friend, a Parisian galeriste , opened a branch in New York. In his many meetings with other gallery owners there he would ask questions about meaning and was usually mocked for being philosophical, French, and not business oriented. His response was, ‘You want to make money. I want to make sense’.   Art using AI and the overhyped world its creators propose cannot operate through Sentio —feeling. It can only do so through being understood as the tool it is in the hands of a human where the necessary feeling exists. On its own, it can trigger emotions by appealing to emotional memories, rehashing the past, but it cannot itself create new emotional reactions since a body is needed to do so. That is how we respond to newness, provoked by something never before experienced which calls on our creativity to respond accordingly by pulling an explanation from our subconscious. AI must still be explored by art as a communications tool to better understand it, how it interfaces with us, and if it has the potential for kind of creativity we understand as art. It remains a tool but the tools artist uses affect the artist as much as the artist affects the technology, exposing dimensions of it not anticipated by the developers.   ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is an oxymoron, since intelligence is a living thing and anything artificial an imitation and not the real thing. Intelligence is informed by bodily experiences, the emotional responses to outside stimuli, which is key to how the memories, good or bad, are coloured and stored. A key part of intelligence is the memory of those experiences recalled when needed, usually when a similar emotional reaction is provoked. AI is based on massive past memories, plus pattern recognition drawn from that pool but without the emotional responses which triggered the retention. The bigger the memory, the bigger the base for identifying patterns, but the missing values which memories have for us become a product of programming and cannot evolve in a situation the way humans do. If it does, it is reacting with programmed responses—but whose responses and whose values? Even stocked with thousands and thousands of human emotional responses, they will be responses from the past and not something new.   Emotion demands a body capable of feeling. Would AI be an imitation of the perfect emotional response based on an averaged ideal system of values—statistical emotions? Averaged emotions would belong to everybody and nobody. Even when we know something intellectually it has an emotional dimension to it based on who we are. And when we know emotionally it becomes a little bit more than simply knowing and more a part of our value system which evolves through both reason and emotion.   With humans, pure reasoning usually happens within a set of established parameters and is an attempt to overcome the emotional associations, making it more objective and communicable to a greater number, which we consider rational. Yet rationality is an attempt to overcome subjectivity by removing those emotional dimensions, a nearly impossible task because of the intricate reaction between emotion and values, more a goal than an achievement.   The need to know, what might be popularly referred to as curiosity, is something shared with all living creatures. Every living thing continually pokes, smells, probes into all corners of its surroundings to assure its survival. We need to know our environment in order to survive in it. Human beings share that with all other life forms but with an abundance which has taken us further than most living creatures. The depths of our consciousness, memory, and feelings have allowed us to advance further and we have developed several directions in which to apply them: art, science, religion, and philosophy. All are answers to the need to know and to understand and explain. That abundance is apparent in both art and science as elaborate manifestations of that curiosity in operation, two important ways of trying to probe what is out there, what we understand as real, how we fit into it, and how it can serve us. What we, as a culture, are finally beginning to understand is the ancient wisdom of serving it in exchange.   Art and science each bring to a situation their own methods of looking—or rather seeing—and from each comes something new to understanding. The experiences and practices of each prepare them in different ways to ask questions and propose solutions. A work of art is a proposed solution as much as any scientific proposal, albeit coming from the personal perspective of the individual artist. Science operates from a generally accepted worldview applied to specific examined situations and artists from a personal worldview expressed through specific works. Both change and evolve and that evolution results in change, which affects the world view of us who experience them.   We need both and in situations where both are operative that approach provides better, richer, and more complete answers. They are complementary like two legs for walking or two eyes for depth. They are the two angles of a triangulation, as mentioned, where together they give a more complete understanding of what is being pursued, the third point, our being in the world.   Communicating information is one form of fundamental communication. Another, central to art, is communicating emotion. Art was probably our first effort in trying to pass on an experience, before language, the emotional reaction we had to something, good or bad, which gave it an urgency, the need to be transmitted to others. Today, when our many forms of communication manage to transmit emotion we react to them with a higher degree of attention, recognising something special in itself.   Bergson, as mentioned, called intellect and instinct the two sources of how we know and evaluate our exterior and our place in it.   This fuller way of knowing is by becoming one with what we perceive. It is the opposite of standing outside as a disengaged observer, but means incorporating what is perceived by joining with it for the duration. That demands the fullest participation of the person. This is what the artist does which does not mean that others don’t. But for art it is the metier. Art is perhaps the most misunderstood activity of the human being and, in our highly educated society, that misunderstanding, as profound as it is, is incomprehensible. Art is a way of knowing in order to survive.   We live in a time of necessary experimentation to reinvent ourselves and the institutions which represent us. Art has always been a major way of doing so, particularly in the last 200 years, the sine qua non  of the new renaissance I propose. It evolved from representing the powers that be and became the expression of individuals who made it from their interaction with the world.  The collection of those individual expressions is an important part of that experimentation taking place and fundamental to it.   Art is a proposition coming from the individual and sum of those individualities is what we call culture. The open-ended approach of art is essential now as we rebuild our institutions on a new model of interactivity and without hype, without self-serving salesmanship, without the conviction that we hold the truth but with openness and honestly in building back the trust essential to any social order.   ‘Aux arts citoyens’. Don Foresta Don Foresta is a research artist and art theoretician who incorporates new technologies in his art. He holds a Sorbonne doctorate in Information Science and is a Chevalier of France's Order of Arts and Letters. [1] See Henri Bergson, Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion  (Félix Alcan 1932). [2] Gilbert Simondon, Imagination et Invention, 1965-1966  (Presse universitaire de France 2014) 4. [3]  James L McGaugh,  ‘The amygdala modulates the consolidation of memories of emotionally arousing experiences’ (2004) 27 Annual Review of Neuroscience 1-28. [4]  Private correspondence (2015). [5]  Edwige Armand, Don Foresta et al, Sapiens : métamorphose ou extinction?  (Humensciences 2022) 176 [6]  Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin  (University of California Press 1982) 184. The title of the book is an expression of the reverse of the operation, a necessary step to really ‘see’. We must forget the name of something, its intellectual designation, to ‘know’ it in another way. [7]  Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media  (Signet 1964) xi. [8]  Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (Citadel 1998) 135. Translation has been lightly altered based on original at La perception du changement : conférences faites a l'université d'Oxford les 26 et 27 Mai 1911  (Oxford 1911). [9] Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind  (MIT Press 1993). [10]  Don Foresta, Mondes Multiples  (Edition BàS 1991). [11] See ‘Bellagio Report and Conclusions’ ( Don Foresta , 21 December 2015) < https://donforesta.net/conferences/bellagio/start > accessed 23 September 2025. [12] See image at < https://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/art/exhibitions/object/id/3147-535 > accessed 23 September 2025. The biface handaxe was found in West Tofts, England in the 19th century and is in the collection of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of Cambridge University. [13] See Armand, Foresta et al (n 5). [14] Norbert Wiener, God & Golem, Inc  (Boston 1964). [15] Michael Pitts and Mark Roberts, Fairweather Eden (London 1997). [16]  Pascal Rousseau,   Le Rêve de Kupka: La vérité nue de la peinture  (Institut national d'histoire de l'art 2022) 21.

As a theorist, economist, politician, author, and co-founder of two transnational democratic and progressive movements, Yanis Varoufakis is a political Renaissance man who has captured some of the main social, political, and economic movements of our times. He catapulted to fame as Greek finance minister in 2015 where he displayed a strong opposing voice to European powers in a time of turbulent financial crisis. Varoufakis has continued to be a leading voice for change. In 2016, Varoufakis co-founded the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), and in 2020 he co-founded the international organisation Progressive International. Currently, Varoufakis is a member of the Hellenic Parliament in Greece representing MeRA25, The European Realistic Disobedience Front, an electoral branch of the DiEM25 movement.   In this interview, Varoufakis provides an honest and enlightening account of the shortcomings of today’s politics, the rise of techno-feudalism, and the challenges and achievements that he has encountered while leading and participating in new democratic movements.   CJLPA : Could you perhaps talk a bit about your personal trajectory, and how you got to where you are today?   Yanis Varoufakis : I moved to England when I was 17 to study mathematics and economics. I tried to abandon economics for mathematics, but then eventually ended up doing a PhD in Economics, so I was dragged back into the mire of the dismal science. I taught for decades in Britain, in Australia, in the United States. You would never have heard of me—unless you wanted to read esoteric stuff on game theory and political philosophy—if it wasn’t for the fact that the 2008 global crisis spearheaded the bankruptcy of the Greek state and the sequence of bankruptcies across the Eurozone, because as a commentator, I kept saying that all the European Union was doing was extending the bankruptcy into the future, reproducing it and magnifying it. At some point, my counterproposals were sought out by a young man who was going to become Greece’s Prime Minister [Alexis Tsipras], who then said, ‘You’ve got to put your money where your mouth is and you’ve got to be finance minister’. Thus, I spent six months being the finance minister of the most bankrupt European country, saying no to more loans, the purpose of which was, again, to extend and pretend the crisis.   CJLPA : What would you say is the main motivation behind your work, or has it changed across your career paths?   YV : Curiosity. Not taking epiphenomena for granted. Not accepting that the way things look is how they are. As the Royal Society’s motto has instructed us, not to take anybody’s word for it, to keep searching for deeper causes and to discover that those in power have a vested interest in creating a narrative that obfuscates rather than enlightens us regarding the circumstances in which we live.   CJLPA : Do you think there was a moment when this became clear to you, or is it something you have had since the very beginning?   YV : It was something I had since the very beginning. I was blessed and cursed by a highly political life from a very young age, because I grew up in a tempestuous period for Greece’s history. Mind you, Greece has this capacity of stirring up a lot of tempests. But, I was only six when the secret police broke down our front door to abduct my father. And then I was nine when my mother’s brother was sentenced three times to death by a military court during the military dictatorship. If you have that kind of environment, it doesn’t take too much to start querying power, sources of authority, and what constitutes the difference between democracy and oligarchy. At the same time, it wasn’t that terrible. It was, as a boy—I think it would have been different for a girl because of patriarchy—all very exciting, never a dull moment.   CJLPA : You have commented a lot on the happenings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What is the biggest misconception that political commentators, observers, even some of your followers, have of you and your perspectives?   YV : It depends on who you are talking about. The misconception on the right wing of politics is that I am an unreconstructed Marxist-communist who wants to see the transition to a state-run system. I consider myself to be a liberal, even libertarian, who is as scared of the state as I am of Google, Microsoft, and ExxonMobil. The misconception on the left is that I’m a stooge of the establishment who is peddling left-wing ideas only in order to ensure that the status quo is reproduced.   CJLPA : Have you attempted to mediate or address these misconceptions through dialogue, or do you continue to progress and express your views?   YV : I think dialogue is everything. This is constantly what I’ve been doing, and I never say no to an opportunity to have a vigorous debate with my worst critics, whether they come from the right or the left or the centre or wherever. I’m very proud of one thing that I’ve managed to maintain: a very civilised, even friendly exchange with people both from the left and the right. There aren’t that many politicians, economists and so on, who count amongst their friends both Lord Norman Lamont, former finance minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer of the Tory government under [John] Major—he’s a friend of mine and we have wonderful debates about everything—and Julian Assange, and Rafael Correa, the former president of Ecuador, the left-winger. It’s wonderful to be able to have these relationships and not to allow them to fall prey to differences of opinion.   CJLPA : You wrote in your book The Global Minotaur  that politicians can’t be theorists for three reasons: they are rarely thinkers; their frenetic lifestyle does not allow them to give them time to think big ideas; and because theorists have to admit the possibility of being wrong. How have you been able to translate these features of a thinker and a theorist into your role as a politician?   YV : By being a bad politician. I think it’s important to be a bad politician. I take pride in being an awful politician. And what do I mean by this? The beauty of an academic environment is that what you do, whether you’re writing an essay, or presenting a talk in a conference, is you are putting forward a hypothesis and your audience has a job to shoot it down, to find its weak spots. That’s what you do in a lab as a physicist: you have a hypothesis and you allow nature to take shots at it. If nature does not bring it down, it means that there is something to this theory that it is useful. So similarly, whether it is anthropology, literature, or whatever, you put forward a hypothesis, you have the best minds in the audience (you hope), and they try to bring it down. If they don’t completely destroy it, it means that there is some merit to it. But if they bring it down, it’s also very pleasing to say, ‘See I was wrong. My hypothesis was interesting, but it wasn’t up to it.’   In politics, by definition, you’re not allowed to do that. Think of BBC Question Time. I’ve been in that environment or similar environments many, many times, whether it’s in parliament or in a studio. So you’re representing the Labour Party or the Tory Party or the Libs, whoever, and you have the opposite side, and you put forward a hypothesis: your theory, your position, is a hypothesis. Could be right, could be wrong. Now, imagine for a moment that your opponents this week think, ‘Oh my God! They’re right.’ If you say so on air before the programme is over, you’ve been thrown out of the party. You have to resign as minister or shadow cabinet. This is what really suffocates me in politics: that whenever I am sitting around the table with political opponents, I know that even if I convince them, they cannot say so. As Upton Sinclair once said, it’s very hard to convince people whose salary depends on not being convinced. How do I manage that? By admitting it when somebody says, ‘by the way, this is a bad point’ and they can prove it. I constantly struggle not to fall into the trap of defending a position just because it is our party’s position, which means that I’m a terrible politician, because there have been many times when I confessed to the other side having a point.   CJLPA : What can be enforced so that politicians who are perhaps afraid to admit that they are wrong can do so without their livelihood depending on it?   YV : That’s up to you. It’s up to the vote. To vote out anyone who wants to be a minister. This is, of course, highly utopic. What we’re trying to do in DiEM25 and MeRA25, my party here in Greece, we have this saying that if you want the position, you’re disqualified from having it. If somebody really wants to be a Member of Parliament, it means that there’s something wrong with them, because nobody in their right mind should want to be a Member of Parliament. There’s nothing more boring, believe me. It’s mind-crushingly boring. So, anybody who really wants to do it—they have a screw loose. There’s a problem. But of course, it’s a dirty job and somebody has to do it. I keep using the awful analogy of taking the rubbish out at night. If a friend of yours really loves taking the rubbish out, you should ask them to go and see a psychiatrist, a psychologist, to reconsider their ways, because there’s something wrong with them. But of course, they have to do it. So you’ve got to treat politics, electoral politics, as a chore. It’s up to voters to ensure that they do not vote for people who are keenly eager to be politicians. It should be public service. It should be something that you do as a sacrifice.   CJLPA : You mentioned the DiEM25 movement that you founded in 2016. First of all, what is the main motivation behind the movement?   YV : Beginning with the realisation that the crisis we have in Europe is not a crisis of Greece, of Germany, of France, of Italy, but it is a pan-European crisis. It’s got to do with the architecture of the EU. So, if the problem is EU-wide, the solution must be EU-wide. The problem with our governments is that they are all elected on the basis of nation-state-specific parties, who go to the voters with an agenda that is completely pie in the sky because they are all nation-centric agendas that can never be realised by a nation-state government. We don’t have the levers, at the level even for Germany, to do that which German political parties are proposing. So you have fake politics in a sense, you have democracies at the nation-state level that do not have the power to do that which they promise, and you’ve got EU-wide political decision making which is not democratic.   Once we had that analysis, the obvious thing to do was to create a pan-European political movement, a unitary transnational political movement. We’re not talking about an alliance of a Greek party, a Polish party, a Dutch party, and so on, because those alliances really don’t work like confederacies. They don’t have a common programme. They just share jobs in Brussels, and that’s neither here nor there. We’re the first movement that doesn’t have a Greek chapter or a German chapter, and on our Coordinating Committee we don’t have the Greek representative, or the German representative, or the Dutch representative. We are all elected by all of the members, independently of our nationalities. Some of us happen to be Greek, German, and Italian, but we’re not representing Greece, Germany, and Italy on the Committee. We’re representing the whole membership across Europe. To run electorally, for example, we created the Party in Greece. But all the decisions regarding the Party, the manifesto—ie what is our policy regarding refugees in Greece? What is our policy regarding VAT in Greece?— are voted for by everyone, including the Germans and the Dutch, not just the Greek members. That’s never been tried before.   CJLPA : What does it take to create such a political movement? How does one go about it? What are its challenges?   YV : It’s very hard. It’s very hard work, let’s face it, because of the geography as well. Europe is vast, so before COVID-19 we were always in an airplane running around, having meetings and so on. But the way we did it was, when we started the movement in 2016, we booked a very nice theatre in central Berlin, the Volksbühne theatre, and we invited people who come from all over the place. We had the website, and we said: join. From that moment on, we decided the process of policy-making: on the one hand, at a pan-European level, a lot of which was digital of course; the local campaigns; and then the setting up of local committees—we call them DSCs, ‘DiEM25 Spontaneous Collectives’—in Poland, in Greece, and so on and so forth. It’s been hellish trying to organise that and then running the elections. In the European Parliament elections in May 2019, we ran in eight countries, which was hard, especially for a movement that had no money. We had five euros here and five euros there from our members, and that’s why you don’t see us in the European Parliament. We got very close to getting MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) elected in Greece, in Germany, and in Denmark, but we just missed out by very little. But still, we got one and a half million votes across Europe—which is not that much, but at the same time it’s not negligible—and we’ve influenced many other people. It’s a constant struggle. We have not succeeded, but we have not withered. The fact that we are alive and kicking is a great success for us.   CJLPA : What would you say is DiEM25’s biggest achievement? Would you say it was the electoral prominence that it had?   YV : No. The biggest achievement is the Green New Deal for Europe—our policy agenda—which fills us with a great deal of pride, because we all talk about the green transition and green politics, how to combine the social with the environmental, and about green new deals, but we were the first ones to actually come up with one, and one that is comprehensive, radical, and realistic at the same time. And also the way we did it. Back starting in 2016, we had a committee of about 20 economists, environmentalists, and experts who put together a questionnaire, just questions, which we distributed across Europe and beyond Europe, amongst our friends in America and elsewhere, which were very specific. Key questions like: how much should we spend on green energy? Figures, not pie-in-the-sky stuff. Where is this money going to come from? Which part of it will be public finance, which part of it will be taxes? How will it be distributed? What will it be spent on? What about public debt, which is a huge issue especially the European Union and the Eurozone? What about private debt? What are we going to do with the banks? How do we regulate the banks? What about universal basic income? Do we want it? And if we want it, how do we pay for it? I’m just giving some examples. These were all questions, and it was a logistical nightmare because we’ve got, as you can imagine, thousands of answers, and had to sift through all of them. From all of those answers, that committee of 20 people had to put together a draft Green New Deal proposal, which then went out for consultation. More answers came, we fixed it again and we brought it back together, and then we put it up for an all-member vote across Europe. That was voted in. Then we formed the alliance with which we stood in the May 2019 European Parliament elections, so we brought in other parties that had not been party to this European Green New Deal and they had to contribute themselves, so that changed the game. Now we have a document which, if you compare it to what comes out of the European Commission—the Green Deal of Mrs Von der Leyen—I’m very proud of, because what they have is really not worth the paper that it is written on, I think, compared to ours. I mean, of course, there are things that could be improved and will be improved and are being improved because we are constantly adapting it to the post-COVID-19 era.   That’s a major success in the sense that the worst enemy of progressive politics is the belief deep down, even of progressives, that [Margaret] Thatcher was right, that there is no alternative to what is being carried out. Even progressives, even people who demonstrate on the streets, deep down they worry that maybe the adults in the room know what’s best, that maybe we don’t like what we see but maybe we don’t have an alternative to what’s going on. This Green New Deal for Europe is the alternative. You read it and you think, ‘OK, now we could implement this tomorrow.’ It’s not like, ‘In another world, in a better world, we could do this’, no, because part of our blueprint is what you can do this week, in six months’ time, in 12 months’ time, in five years, and ten years. Maybe we’re wrong, but at least we thought, ‘OK, we put this on the table’, and we say to others, ‘Come and tell us where we’re wrong’, in an academic kind of fashion. ‘Come and shoot it down, tell us what your ideas are.’ Whenever we had political parties from Italy, from France, and so on saying, ‘Let’s collaborate’, and we say, ‘OK, let’s collaborate, but look, we have a program here for Europe, tell us where we’re wrong’, at that point we realised that most political parties, if not all, said, ‘No, let’s agree on how we’re going to stand together and who’s going to become a Member of Parliament.’ But we are not interested in that. We want to agree on what needs to be done. If we are in office, then we discuss who will be in office. We are trying to change the direction of movement from talking about who is going to get what position to, say, what needs to be done if we get the position. This is not very appealing to the existing political system. Not even to the left, or even to the Greens.   CJLPA : You mentioned this inevitability that Thatcher was right. You recently said that we’re entering a post-capitalist world—what you termed ‘techno-feudalism’. Could you perhaps elaborate on, firstly, how we finally reached this post-capitalist society, and then on this new concept of ‘techno-feudalism’?   YV : When I was your age or even younger, I remember being schooled into the great schools of thought that were clashing with one another. And the main two at the time—it was, of course, the Cold War back then—were the liberal democratic capitalist school, harking back to Adam Smith, with elements of Friedman and von Hayek, who were representing capitalism as the ideal system, on the basis that you have a minimal state providing security and everything else is left to individuals. These individuals are free, through the market, to pursue their own private interests, with the market operating as if by an invisible hand behind our backs—a kind of divine providence—synthesising our greedy individual self-interests into the good of society. As nobody can know what people want or what people are capable of, certainly not the state, allowing this decentralised decision-making process to progress is the best way of combining private liberty with the public good. That was one view. According to that view: the state is there, it is minimal; investment is private, and comes out of savings; households save; firms borrow and invest; and you let a Darwinian process decide who survives and who dies with a state playing a minimal, safety-net kind of role. That was one view.   The other view, which was the socialist view, the left-wing view, even the communist view—from the side of those who were in favour of central planning Soviet-style—the view was that capitalism and the market fails, it creates inequality and injustice, and you need a state representing the public will to coordinate both incentives and constraints so that you achieve the public good. That was a big clash, and I was very interested in this clash. The pro-capitalist view versus a kind of socialist view. This is irrelevant now, and it has definitely become irrelevant after 2008. In 1991, the socialist tradition collapsed because the Soviet Union collapsedand with it social democracy collapsed as well, even though the Social Democrats were very anti-Soviet. The left lost its mojo, so to speak, in 1991.   In 2008, the Thatcherite School, the liberal, libertarian tradition, had its comeuppance because the private capital combusted and dissolved. Since then, what we have had is the state keeping capitalism alive. So the central bank—the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve—keeps on pumping money, giving it to the private bankers who are completely bankrupt otherwise, who are giving it to companies that would be completely bankrupt otherwise. So you have the zombification of the private sector by the states. It’s no longer the clash between the private and the public. The public is keeping the private zombified, in a state of being undead—not alive, but not dead either—because if the Bank of England pulls the plug, the whole thing collapses. If the Fed pulls the plug, it’s all gone. It’s no longer this juxtaposition between the state and the private sector. The state is producing the fuel that keeps corporates alive. At the same time, the old story that households save and corporations borrow to invest has died as well. Now you have a situation where corporations are saving. Apple has $220 billion of savings. Every large corporation is saving. Why do they have savings? Because they are too scared to invest. They are scared to invest because they look at you and say, ‘She will not be able to buy stuff from me at a price that will give me profits, so I’m not going to invest.’ They don’t invest, they don’t create good quality jobs, and they instead create crap jobs. Crap jobs means that people like you then don’t have enough money to buy their stuff, so that confirms their decision not to invest. But how do they keep themselves alive? They get huge loans from the private banks that get the money from the central bank. What do the large corporations do with the huge loans they get from the private banks? They go to the stock exchange and buy their own shares. Share prices are very high, bonuses to the members of the board of directors are very high because they are linked to the share price, so they are doing really very well. Financial markets are booming, but profits are zero. This is a complete disconnect between the financial world and capitalism. That’s not capitalism. The model of capitalism, and the heads of those who supported capitalism when I was growing up, has gone.   Now what you have is certain companies like Tesla, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and so on, based on remarkable new technologies—and they are remarkable, I love them—that creates huge power for them. Those companies are no longer operating within a capitalist framework: the moment you go into amazon.com, you are outside capitalism, and you are inside a platform that provides everything for you. It’s equivalent of walking down the high street only to discover that every shop is owned by the same man, every product sold is distributed by the same company that owns the shops. The tarmac is owned by the same company, the air you breathe is owned by the same company, and what your eyes see is directed by the same company. This is what happens on Amazon. What you see on Amazon right now is directed by the company. That’s not a competitive market. That’s not a market at all. This reminds me of feudal times, because if you were a peasant and you lived in some estate, in a Downton Abbey-like estate, you lived in a place which belonged to one family. You had a dwelling, you ploughed the land, you went to festivals, but it was all within a fiefdom owned by one person. That’s more or less where we’re moving now, where we already are. If you combine that with the fact that all the money comes from the state, from state printing presses—the Bank of England, or the Federal Reserve—and it’s all technologically kept together and promoted, I think that we can’t talk about capitalism anymore. ‘Techno-feudalism’ is a better term for it.   CJLPA : Seeing as the state essentially funds this techno-feudalism, how can we maintain democracy and accountability when it is already tough to maintain it between the public and the state, let alone the public and the corporations?   YV : Through a series of steps. The first thing we need to do is to cut out the middleman, and I’ll be very specific here. I already described how the central bank prints money, gives it to Barclays, or the Royal Bank of Scotland, or to Deutsche Bank. They then pick up the phone. They don’t call you. If you go and ask for a loan, you won’t get it because they don’t trust you to pay it back. So what they do is they pick up the phone and they call a large company and say, ‘I’ve got these millions here. Zero interest rate. Do you want it?’, and they give it to them for zero interest rate because they themselves pay negative interest rates. In other words, the central bank pays them to take the money, so even if they give it away for free to the large corporations, as long as they take it back, they’re laughing. So the large corporation which is too scared to invest because little people do not have the money to buy stuff, then take this money and goes to the stock exchange and buys back its own shares. Their shares go up. But this is wasted money. It’s not feeding economic activity, especially the green transition, investment in renewables, and so on. So we need to cut out the middleman. Imagine if whenever the Bank of England printed £100 billion, instead of giving it to Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland, imagine if they credited every bank account in Britain with £5,000. Then you would go out there and buy stuff, and suddenly there would be economic activity. Businesses would start saying, ‘Hang on a second, she can buy stuff now. I’ll produce things. I will employ people.’ So this is one step. It’s not the only one, but it would be a significant step to cut out the middleman. That’s the summary.   The second step is that we need public investment in the green transition, because the market cannot be relied upon to do that which is necessary in order to save the planet, because the market can never price things that don’t have prices. The air we breathe doesn’t have a price, so it can never be rationed through the market. It has to be done by us, by a political process. For that, we need a public investment bank that soaks up excess liquidity in the financial sector and presses it into the service of the green transition. Britain used to have one when I lived in Britain a long, long time ago. It was called the Post Office Savings Bank. Jeremy Corbyn had this programme in his manifesto in 2019, for creating a national investment bank. Boris Johnson talked about it again recently, but I haven’t seen what they’ve done or whether they’ve done it. The Germans have it: it’s called KFW, and it’s a very good investment bank. Imagine you have a national investment bank. They issue bonds—in other words, they borrow—they soak up liquidity from the financial sector, the Bank of England can guarantee those bonds and say, ‘If their price goes down, I’ll buy them’, so suddenly everybody who has money will want to buy those bonds because the Bank of England is standing behind them, and then you create a kitty from which you pay for the Green Industrial Revolution. I’m using those terms because they were first used by Jeremy Corbyn, but Boris Johnson has taken it now and he talks about the Green Industrial Revolution. So, go spend the money, go and create the green technologies. And what are they? We need to invest in hydrogen, to take over diesel. We need more renewable energy, from windmills and so on in the North Sea. We need batteries, because the Chinese are completely monopolising the battery technology. I’m not against them. Good on them, except Europe is not doing it, and we’re going to increasingly rely on battery technology coming from China. Other technologies are already being experimented with elsewhere, like compressed air, so you use renewable energy to compress air so its decompression can be used during peak times when other renewables are not available. There’s some artificial intelligence. These are some things that you can direct the investment to.   Those two steps, they’re not even that radical, they’re just using existing institutions and existing tools and weapons against the common problem. So you create good quality jobs. People have more money to spend. You’ll be able to end the constant humiliation of needy people who have to go through the wringer of Universal Credit and all those mechanisms that crush their soul to give them a penny. If everybody gets it, the Bank of England credits everybody with £5,000, and then the rich people can be taxed on this money at the end of the year anyway, so their money goes back to the state.   But finally, if you really want to democratise the economy, you have to rethink the whole notion of tradable shares. My view is that that’s a very bad idea. It started in 1599 in London with the British East India Company, where you had the notion that you take the ownership of a company and you break it down into little shares that are anonymous and that can be traded like confetti. We need to rethink that, because in the end what we’re saying is that somebody who has money can effectively own all the power of the large corporations. We would not tolerate that when it comes to politics. We would not have tradable votes in politics. Why do we have them in the general assembly of shareholders? But this is a much longer-term and a more radical rethink that I am proposing.   CJLPA : You mention that these two steps are not that radical. Do people in influence or in power know this? And if they do, why is it so hard for them to implement it?   YV : Of course they know. It’s not hard for them. They don’t want it because they make a lot of money at the moment due to the fact that it’s not being implemented. When I say cut out the middleman, I’m effectively saying cut out the commercial banks. Commercial bankers understand the importance of that, but they would rather die than see it happen. They will do anything. They will kick and scream and threaten us with blue murder if we dare do it. So the question is: who is running the show? Is it the bankers, or society? At the moment, it is the bankers.   CJLPA : I was wondering if we could turn just for a brief moment to your home country, Greece. You are a politician in the electoral branch of DiEM25, MeRA25. What do you think we—as Europeans or just as world citizens—should know about Greece at the moment, and are there any opportunities or challenges that you think Greece will face in the future?   YV : The challenge is never-ending. We are now in the eleventh year of our long winter of discontent, our Great Depression. Greece went bankrupt in 2010 and is more bankrupt today than it ever was. What I think is quite instructive, especially for young students of political economy and politics more generally, is: why don’t you hear about this anymore? Because up until a few years ago, Greece was front-page news. Its bankruptcy was almost on a daily basis on the front page of every newspaper around the world. Everybody considered it to be insolvent and a threat to the global financial system. That is no longer the case. It’s no longer appearing on the front page. Does this mean that it has been mended, as the powers that be claimed the case to be? No. We are even worse now than we were in 2010. You can ascertain this very easily. When we went bankrupt, we had a debt of, say, 300—forget the zeros. Now we have a debt of 380. Our income then was 240, now it’s 165. We are far more bankrupt today than we were in 2010, which proves that politics determines who is considered insolvent and who not, that insolvency is a political issue in the end, especially when it comes to countries. When I was finance minister, we were being discussed left, right and centre every day—on the BBC, everywhere—because I was putting up a struggle against our official lenders, the European Union in particular, who wanted us to take another credit card to pretend that we were repaying the previous credit cards. And I was saying no to that. They shut down our banks in order to force us to do it, and that was big news. It’s like a riot in an awful prison camp: when prisoners have had enough of awful conditions and they stage a riot, that becomes big news. Television vans arrive and you’ve got all the shots of the fracas in the prison. When the riot is put down by riot police, the television cameras leave, but that doesn’t mean that the situation in the prison is good. It means that it is no longer newsworthy. This is the same thing.   The lesson, I think, is that it’s not a technical question, the bankruptcy of a state. It’s a political question, and that has repercussions for Britain, it has implications for the United States. In the 1970s, Britain had to go to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) for a loan, and everybody said Britain was bankrupt. But Britain was not bankrupt. It was a political decision to go to the IMF. Britain had no reason to go to the IMF. There was no obligation to go to the IMF. The government at the time was a Labour government, the James Callaghan government, and they decided that they wanted to keep the exchange rate between the pound and the dollar steady. If you have an outflow of money, you can’t keep it steady unless there is an inflow. If you put, above all else, the maintenance of the exchange rate between the pound and the dollar, then you go to the IMF and you declare yourself bankrupt. But that was a political choice. There were losers and there were winners as a result of that. Those who had reason to be able to convert their pounds into dollars and not to lose money, especially large companies or Brits that had investments in the United States or outside Britain—they benefited from the declaration that Britain was bankrupt. Workers and weaker people suffered immensely without getting any of the benefits of having declared Britain to be bankrupt. These are, I think, especially talking to students in an academic environment, the lessons from Greece. When it comes to a corner store, bankruptcy is more or less a technical problem. If the corner store’s revenues are not up to it, then of course at some point you have to close down. It’s an inevitability. It’s a technical point. But when it comes to the bankruptcy of a nation, and therefore the questions about public debt, and deficits, and austerity, and whether Rishi Sunak is right to say that we will have to start repaying now because otherwise we will be in trouble—none of that is a technical issue. All of it is political. It is a question of which social groups’ interests those in authority are prioritising.   CJLPA : Are we already seeing this sort of politicisation with the pandemic at the moment?   YV : Absolutely, we already see it. You already see that, including the pandemic, as a result of the process of creating money that I described before—where the central bank prints money for the banks and the banks give money to the corporations—you have a gigantic increase in inequality because little people suffering from COVID-19 or COVID-19-related ill effects on their economic circumstances are absolutely desperate. They’ve lost their livelihood. Their revenues have gone down by 80%. They’re worried about furlough: is it going to end? When will it end? But those who are in receipt of wealth injections, as a result of the Bank of England’s money printing, they’ve seen their income and their wealth multiply at ridiculous   levels. The Swiss bank UBS came out with a report that, only in the United States, since the beginning, between March and December of 2020, during the first nine or ten months of the pandemic, the richest Americans increased their income and wealth combined by $1 trillion as a result of doing nothing. Just by sitting there, in their sleep. So yes, we’ve already seen that. Now that Britain, due to a rather decent vaccination process, is facing exit from the pandemic and the opening up of the economy and so on, austerity is coming back as the chosen policy of the Conservative Party. And austerity is just another form of class war, and it is more plundering of the victims of a crisis on behalf of those who benefited from it.   There will be a post-pandemic. Maybe we’ll have another one later on, but this one is going to die. The Spanish flu died after 1918 even though there were no vaccines. Now we have vaccines as well, so it will go. But what will be left behind? If you think about it, we do have some recent evidence. 2008 was a catastrophe for global capitalism, especially Western capitalism, and it got its effects. Those who caused the crisis, the bankers, exited the crisis with more power than what they had before the crisis, and the little people were even weaker than they were before.   CJLPA : I wanted to quickly ask you about Progressive International. I wanted to specifically ask: why does Progressive International believe that the time is now to create a collective, international, progressive front?   YV : I think the time was in 2008. We are late, and the reason why I think that is because, as I mentioned before, 2008 was our generation’s 1929. It ended capitalism as we know it, or as we knew it, and created a new regime which I call techno-feudalism. This is the result of regressive international coming together. This is, if you want, the G20 decision of April 2009 under the chairmanship of Gordon Brown, when all the bankers, central bankers, finance ministers, prime ministers, and presidents got together and decided to save capitalism. The way they did it—I’m not criticising it, just describing it—was to create huge solidarity between bankers. The bankers of the world got together and saved each other by transferring their losses onto the public ledger. That was a clear demonstration that internationalism works for the bankers, and then once this was combined with austerity for everybody else, you had discontent. And discontent breeds populism, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, all those things that come out of humiliation and deep-seated discontent, just like it happened in the 1930s. We saw that with the success of Brexit, of Donald Trump, of Bolsonaro, of Modi, of Le Pen, of Salvini, of the Alternative für Deutschland, and so on. The bankers got together, created their international, and worked. Then the fascists got together and internationalised, and they’re a huge power around the world, even if they lost the White House. Trump is gaining strength, as far as I’m concerned, in America. Fascism is solidifying, if anything, under Biden even more than it did under Trump. The bankers and the fascists internationalised. It’s time for progressives to internationalise. That’s what Bernie Sanders and I thought in November 2018. We met in Vermont and asked, ‘Will anyone join us?’ So we started.   CJLPA : Have there been any challenges or any achievements thus far with Progressive International?   YV : The problem was that we had the American presidential campaign intervene between November 2019 and now, which meant that Bernie could not be part of it for legal reasons. Senators cannot participate in international [organisations], especially candidates for the presidency, so that went into abeyance for a while. Then Bernie’s involvement with Joe Biden—and he was running his economic policy through the Senate—meant that he could not be part of it. So we were delayed by this. Then we launched about a year ago properly, and we did this on the basis of bringing together people. The organisations that are part of the Progressive International have about 200 million members around the world. Our first major campaign was called ‘Make Amazon Pay’. It started on the day of Black Friday last December. It’s a beginning. I’m very proud of what we did. We had a rolling strike in warehouses of Amazon pushing for better wages and conditions for workers around the world, and it started in Bangladesh, it moved to India, shifting time zones, then to Germany, then to New Jersey, then to Seattle, then to Australia. This was the first attempt to do anything like that. It had never been done before, and we’re very heartened by that. Now, we need to bring in consumers with boycotts, not just against Amazon. The philosophy is this: we need local action in support of communities that need it, with a global perspective and global solidarity. This combination is hard and essential at the same time.   And also, we have gone from the model of campaigns and collective actions of the nineteenth century, where you combined maximum private personal sacrifice by participants with minimal personal benefits, [to a system where you have minimal  private personal sacrifice and maximum  personal benefits]. If you think about it, a gold mine going on strike back in the nineteenth century was a maximum sacrifice because it meant no food on the table, no wages. It meant that some of them were victimised, some of them were beaten up, arrested. It is like asking people to sacrifice themselves. What was the benefit to themselves individually? On average, very low. Even if they got a wage rise, everybody got it, including those who didn’t strike and those who broke the strike. This cost-benefit analysis at the private level of early reforms of action has been very detrimental to the common cause. Maybe we need to do things differently. So we have minimal personal sacrifice, especially if it’s a global campaign like, for example, don’t visit amazon.com for a day—it’s a tiny sacrifice for you, I don’t want to say never buy from Amazon, but, for a day or a week—with maximum impact. As well as campaigns, we were represented in Bolivia during the election campaign, now in Ecuador. We are running a campaign in Turkey against the banning of the third-largest party and the torture of Members of Parliament. We are being active everywhere, as far as we can.   CJLPA : In the introduction you wrote for the Communist Manifesto , you poignantly wrote that a dilemma faces young people today, similarly to that faced in the time of Marx and Engels. The question is: conform to an established order that is crumbling and incapable of reproducing itself, or oppose it, at considerable personal cost, in search of new ways of working, playing, and living together? In light of this, what piece of advice would you give to young people today who will likely set foot in positions of influence or who seek change?   YV : Make this choice with a clear understanding that you are making this choice. Don’t allow yourself to drift into a kind of lifestyle by default. I’m not a moralising kind of guy. [George] Bernard Shaw, I believe, put it like this: there are people who try to adapt themselves to the world, and there are other people who try to adapt the world to their view of what the world should be like. The latter, of course, means sacrifice. It means that the world is not going to take kindly to being told by you that it should be different. But you’ve got to make this choice consciously, you’ve got to weigh up the pros and cons and know what kind of deal you are ending up with. If you choose to go against the grain, you are probably not going to make a lot of money, you are probably going to have quite a lot of heartache, maybe threats and so on, if you go against the insiders as I say. But at the same time, you will have the immense satisfaction that you are autonomous, that you are not simply reflecting the terrain around you like a chameleon. On the other hand, I’m not going to be sitting in judgment of somebody who says, ‘There’s only one life, I’m not going to be struggling all the time, I want to get a cushy nice job and I want to have the money and the time to go travelling or go skiing.’ I highly respect that too. But make that choice consciously. Don’t simply drift into the default position. This interview was conducted by Teresa Turkheimer, a final-year undergraduate in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, working towards an MSc in European and International Public Policy at the London School of Economics in the 2021-22 academic year. Her interests lie in European politics, European Union foreign and security policy, and political philosophy.

Nancy Hollander is an internationally recognized criminal defense lawyer from the Albuquerque, New Mexico, firm of Freedman Boyd Hollander Goldberg Urias & Ward PA, and an Associate Tenant with Doughty Street Chambers, London, UK. The inspiring story of her efforts in freeing Mohamedou Ould Slahi from Guantanamo Bay, where he was held from 2002 to 2016 without charge, were recently captured by the legal drama film The Mauritanian , in which she was played by Jodie Foster. CJLPA : Welcome today, Nancy. I’d like to begin by thanking you again for taking the time to come and interview with The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art , to discuss your career as a human rights criminal law defence lawyer. Throughout your career, you’ve been involved in the most high profile of cases, representing clients in a wide range of criminal cases, involving white collar crime, drug trafficking, murder, and terrorism. Equally, you are a highly respected and renowned lawyer in international human rights law, having represented clients before the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Inevitably, there are many legal topics to discuss based on your work, but in the interests of time I thought that in today’s interview we could focus specifically on your work in defending terrorism, and in particular the implications protecting human rights, or really the lack thereof in such cases. Based on that, I’d like to begun by asking you why you think it is that when dealing with the crime of terrorism it is treated so fundamentally different in a court of law compared to other barbaric crimes such as murder, rape, or kidnapping. Nancy Hollander : The fundamental difference between terrorism and other crimes, and why I don’t think we should have the crime of terrorism, is that it always looks at a community, either a racial community, an ethnic community, or some other community. It’s not a crime involving one person, so even if one person is charged with terrorism, it tends to include the whole community. That to me is the difference. It is a crime on top of another crime; It’s vague and it’s unnecessary. There has never been an international definition of terrorism and I doubt that there ever will be because no one can agree on exactly what it is. CJLPA : That’s interesting. Do you think you have this perspective in retrospect after working on terrorism cases or is that a thought that you had before taking on the cases? NH : Before I took on the cases I did not really think about it to tell you the truth. I was asked to talk about the history of the crime of terrorism at some seminar I was at in the Hague, and I looked into it and realised that my thoughts are not new on this. People have been saying for many years that we should have never had the crime of terrorism and I started looking into it more and I realised…You know you’ve heard people say one man’s terrorist is one man’s freedom fighter. Well, there is truth to that! And if you look at history, who is a terrorist and who is not? The founder of the US, George Washington, was considered a terrorist. Nelson Mandela was considered a terrorist. Jerry Adams, Yasser Arafat, I mean how many more do we need who were considered terrorists at one time but at the same time became heroes. So if you just charge people with what they’re accused of you don’t get into that issue. CJLPA : I’d like to get more specific in some of the cases that you have worked on, beginning with the Holy Land case. In this case you defended Shukri Abu Baker, who was charged with terrorism alongside other co-defendants. Could you briefly walk me through the main ways where justice and the rule of law were denied in this case? NH : There was no justice in that case. It’s the worst case of my entire legal career as far as I am concerned. Shukri and one of his co-defendants, Ghassan Elashi, are each doing 65 years in jail for the crime of feeding children. That is essentially what they were doing. The Holy Land case…I can send you an article I wrote, if I haven’t already sent it to you; which really outlines the whole history. It was a talk that I gave, that I made into an article. But they’re a case where they are charged with material support for terrorism. There was never any accusation that Shukri and any of his co-defendants committed any what we would call even ‘terrorist acts’. They didn’t blow up anything. They didn’t bomb anything. They were not accused of making antisemitic remarks, even. They were just accused of providing charity to people in Palestine and other countries and according to the government, by providing that charity they were somehow assisting Hamas. It was vague, there was never any allegation of them being related to Hamas. It was simply that they were changing the hearts and minds of the people, by the people they were feeding. It’s a tragic case and it’s an example of how they were accused of something that other people did. So during these trials, I can’t tell you how many times it showed the same bus being blown up. The same American flag being trampled on. But they were never accused of doing those things and during the trial it was clear that they didn’t do those things. Other people did those things. And that’s an example of how terrorism has become so broad that under an American case, humanitarian law, I can’t even assist some organization or individual who’s been designated as a terrorist on how to change that, how to come into the democratic process. By assisting them, I’m committing acts of material support. It’s a terrible case and other things happened in that case. It’s the first case in American history, US history, where an expert was allowed to testify in secret. Basically, we were not allowed to know his real name, we were not allowed to know who he was, we were told we couldn’t research him and yet he was supposedly an expert on Hamas. And that meant that there was no right to real cross examination and certainly no right to confrontation, which is something that is required in the US Constitution. The Sixth Amendment says everyone has the right to confrontation. Well, you can’t confront someone if you are not allowed to know anything about them. CJLPA : Based on what you have just mentioned about not being able to cross-examine the expert and also the video of the bus being blown up but there being no actual linkage to the defendants, how and why was that even admissible and what would you do in those situations when it is quite clearly against the law, but the judges are enabling it. Is there any way around it? NH : You can only do what you can do. You can try to convince the jury that the government is wrong; which we did in the first place. We got a mistrial. But then the government came back with four, maybe five, different pieces of evidence that were clearly more prejudicial than probative. That the appellant court said should not have been admitted, but then said it was a harmless error, which probably was a political decision on the part of the court. How do you confront that? I don’t know. You know, we will never give up on this case, we’ve gone everywhere we can with the courts but we can just hope for a miracle, clemency or something that happens, where they get out eventually. CJLPA : Further to how you said that this case seemed to be more political, does this experience make you feel that some legal decisions are pre-determined when the government gets involved, despite lawyers’ best efforts? And do you think there the rule of law can still prevail in such circumstances? NH : I don’t think the cases are necessarily predetermined, but throughout the process, the decisions that prosecutors make, judges make, are weighed against the defendants, certain defendants. Certainly Muslims in the US now, black people as far as we can remember, Native Americans. The US has never been a democracy for all the people. It’s a misnomer. People believe that at one point it was a great country and we have to get back there. Well, when was that? When was the rule of law applied to everyone? Native Americans were slaughtered, genocide. We started with slaves. It’s very hard to accept that the rule of law really exists for everyone in the United States. It’s true in other countries too. What we want to do and what we have to keep doing as defence lawyers is keep pushing, so that the rule of law does apply to everyone. And so in the case of the US, the US legal system does become a justice system, which it isn’t now. It’s not a US justice system, it’s a US legal system that provides justice sometimes and sometimes doesn’t. CJLPA : Based on that, how does a lawyer operate in a justice system where they cannot always trust it, because as you said the rule of law is not always going to be applicable to everyone? You take on a case and the case process that is occurring in the courts is going to be prejudiced. Decisions are going to be made that aren’t necessarily reflective of the justice system that the US is meant to embody. How does a lawyer take on that case knowing that that’s what’s going to happen? NH : There is always a point because there is always the possibility of a miracle, and I don’t mean miracle in a spiritual sense or religious sense. I mean that there are people within the legal system on both sides who are good people and want to do the right thing. I represented a woman for many years in New York and the way I got her out of prison was through the help of the prosecutor. Mohamedou Ould Slahi is a good example of the assistance of the prosecutor. There are people on both sides in the criminal legal system who do want to see justice prevail and there are judges who want to see justice prevail. And when you don’t have those, you just have to keep fighting, and when you do have those you fight together to do everything you can to provide for the rule of law, and that’s what we have to do. You know, fortunately, in the US system, everyone is entitled to a lawyer. Everyone is entitled to have at least one person stand with them and fight against the power of the government. And that person can make a difference. It happens, it doesn’t always happen. Doesn’t happen enough, but we have to keep pushing so it will happen more and more, in the international system as well. CJLPA : Transitioning to a different high-profile case that you worked on, Mohamedou Slahi. After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration promised to find the terrorists responsible, no matter what the costs. Mr Slahi was arrested and was ultimately transferred to Guantanamo Bay Detention camp in 2002 and you got involved in 2005, I believe, to defend him. What prompted you or what intrigued you to take on this case specifically? NH : I wanted to do a Guantanamo case and I wasn’t really looking for one specifically. But this one fell into my lap when a lawyer in France, whom I knew, wrote and said he been requested by a lawyer in Mauritania to look into this case and was I interested. And I said yes. I knew virtually nothing about Mohamedou when I started. I knew what he was accused of and that was it. But this was the one that came to me, so this is the one I took. CJLPA : What would you say, when you began this case, were the key elements in your case strategy to prove his innocence? NH : You’ve got to remember he was never arrested, he was captured. There was no legal process happening here. There was no legitimate US court happening here. He was captured in Mauritania. He was taken to Jordan, where he was tortured for seven or eight months. Then rendered to Jordan, rendered to Afghanistan, rendered to Guantanamo, tortured in Guantanamo, interrogated in Guantanamo, and ultimately the court said that he and others could file petitions for writs of Habeas Corpus. But the government’s position was, well they can file them but we are never going to answer them. And it wasn’t until 2008 that the Supreme Court ruled in the Boumediene case that the government actually had to answer these petitions. And then we at least had a legal forum in which to conduct the case. But there was never a real one; other than the Habeas case, which we won in 2009, there was no legal process happening here. CJLPA : As you said, it was based on the Habeas Corpus, that you were able to take on this case and essentially go to court because the US actually never charged Mr Slahi for the crimes that they alleged. Do you believe that, based on that, it was irrespective or irrelevant whether or not, particularly Mr Slahi but also other detainees in Guantanamo Bay, do you think it was irrelevant in such circumstances when such due process was denied? NH : Yes, it became irrelevant and it’s still irrelevant. There are still thirty or thirty-one of them in there. Seventeen of whom I believe are already cleared for release and all but five, six, seven, eight maybe have never been charged with any crime. They have been there since 2002. That’s not a legal process. That is not the rule of law being carried out. If some American/US citizen is in a foreign country and being held for 20 years without being charged, the US government would go crazy. And yet that’s what it is doing and has been doing and people have been tortured. We were able to get a number of those people out and people were tried. One person has been tried, convicted, his case reversed. Another one pleaded guilty, his case was reversed. I have another one there who is facing the death penalty and there are 9/11 guys that are there and are a couple of others who are facing charges in this military commission. But the military commission is not like any court that is structured under US law; it’s under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for Soldiers. It’s not under the federal rules for the US. It’s a made-up court, and due process doesn’t apply. How do you have the rule of law when due process doesn’t apply? CJLPA : Why do you think, after everything is exposed in Guantanamo Bay, that this prison system still exists and how does the US government get away from that? NH : The US is the bully of the world. The US has troops on over 150 of the 200 odd countries on this planet, on the ground. So the US gets away with whatever it wants, basically. And that’s how it has gotten away with this. The US stands up and talks about the human rights violations in China, the torture of the Russians, Cuba, and yet the US is as guilty or more guilty than any of these other countries but it just can get away with it because of its power. Of its economic power, of its strategic power, and that’s how it gets away with it. Empires rule. That’s been the history of the world. CJLPA : So in terms of the next steps for Guantanamo Bay and supposedly shutting it down. Do you think it means more lawyers needing to get involved in these cases and trying them or is it more starting at the root of the problem and trying to work with the politicians and putting more pressure on them? Where would you see the ultimate change factor? NH : Everyone in Guantanamo who wants a lawyer now has one and has had one for many years. And these lawyers keep fighting and that’s how we end up with one or two getting out once in a while. President Biden promised to close Guantanamo, President Obama promised to close Guantanamo. Neither one took decisive action. President Obama is responsible for Mohamedou spending another seven years in prison, because we won this case, A lot of people were winning the Habeas at that time and all the government had to do under Obama, Obama’s Justice Department, Obama’s Attorney General was just not appeal. They go home. They wouldn’t have to worry about what country they go to or where they go. They would get out, And yet most of them were appealed and so Mohamedou sat there for another seven years. And even after he won the second thing which was not a court, the Periodic Review Board, which was six intelligence agencies that found unanimously that he was not a significant threat to the US or its allies, it took several more months to get him out. And then he did not get a passport for three years because the US, as it did with all the countries, told Mauritania they couldn’t give him a passport. So, the US just has its claws everywhere and all you can do is keep fighting and that’s what we continue to do. I fight for my other client, Ibrahim Al Nasiri, in the international court and the Commission lawyers fight for him in his criminal case. The other lawyers who represent the defendants in the criminal cases or in the Habeas cases continue to fight for them. We continue to try to find places that will take them under these strict US rules. And you know there were a number of, and still are, Yemenis in Guantanamo. And they at one point were beginning to go home. And then a Nigerian guy tried to light his underwear on fire in an airplane over Detroit. And he had been recruited and got the equipment that he had from a Yemeni guy. So President Obama said, no more Yemenis go home. Well, that’s collective punishment. And that’s what happened and they got stuck there. And now there is almost no Yemen for them to go home to. They have to go to other places. CJLPA : Despite the disappointing outcome with Mr Slahi and how the Obama administration appealed it, how do you remain motivated in those circumstances? What did you learn from that case and defending Mr Slahi that you can now apply in these current cases where you are continuing the same fight, where you are working for a system that does not always respect the due process and the justice system? NH : I learned a long time ago, in the law, that you just keep going and hope for a miracle, as I told you. With the woman I represented, Precious Paddel, all of a sudden we had a different judge and the prosecutor said now we have a chance and we did. In Mohamedou’s case, all of a sudden he was called up to the Periodic Review Board, one of the last ones called up. After years of thinking what we going to do, we’ve run out of things to do. Something appeared. That’s always possible. So you just keep going, and that’s what I tell lawyers, you just keep going. You keep thinking of new things, thinking of something else. What else can we do? How can we do something that brings this to people’s attention? In Mohamedou’s case, I believe his book, Guantanamo Diary , helped get him out. And the film, The Mauritanian , we now hope will help others get out because it gets the conversation back. People are speaking about it, thinking about it, talking about it. In all criminal cases, which is what I have been involved with, internationally or domestically. You just do everything you know to do, you investigate every corner. You do everything you have the time, energy, finances to do, so that you don’t miss anything. And it won’t work all the time. It won’t work a lot of the time, but it will work sometimes and you’ve got to keep pressing for it. You know, we recently celebrated the anniversary of a case called Gideon v Wainwright. Gideon was a guy in Florida who wrote a handwritten letter to the Supreme Court of the US and said ‘I didn’t have a lawyer’ and as a result of that case, everyone who is charged with a felony in the United States is entitled to a lawyer. Anyone who is going to go to jail, even for a misdemeanour is entitled to a lawyer. But that wasn’t the case before. Before Brown v Board of Education said separate is not equal and said there shouldn’t be segregation in the US schools; there was segregation. So people have to fight that fight. People still have to fight to make sure that a lawyer means a breathing lawyer, an awake lawyer, a not drunk lawyer. So those cases keep happening. But you just keep building on them and fighting for due process in the rule of law and that’s what lawyers do. That’s what we do. It is hard and it is depressing sometimes, often, and its dispiriting but you just keep doing it. CJLPA : Is there a way to also increase accountability of the US government? So to, say, sue certain officials in such circumstances? NH : Yes, there is a way to increase accountability through lawsuits and civil cases against police departments and against police, but those cases are also very difficult. I don’t do them but those are cases where things do change. Police departments have been forced to change through pressure. Pressure on politicians. Getting a politician who is on your side, to focus on those. Electing different people can make a difference. And in the case of Mr Al Nasiri the accountability that he wants, for people to know what happened to him because he was tortured in the CIA black sites. We had to go to the International Courts. And we have had a success. We won two hundred thousand euros for his family, through the European Court of Human Rights. We have a case in front of the International Criminal Court, a case in the UK, a case in front of the UN working committee on arbitrated detention and that will never get him out, but it will get accountability, where other organisations, people, politicians in other countries will see what happened to him. The US is never going to answer to any of those courts. Recently we heard that there was an arrest warrant against Putin from the ICC and I was reading quite a bit about it. And I noticed, they didn’t say ‘well, Russia doesn’t acknowledge this court’. Well, they also didn’t say that the US doesn’t acknowledge this court either… CJLPA : Why do you think it is that the US would never sign to these courts and these Treaties? NH : Because the US is afraid that that will bring out things that happened which the CIA did. That the US will find itself getting arrest warrants for individuals in the US who have committed war crimes. In fact, there is a law in the US that is euphemistically called the Hague Invasion Act and it is a law in the US that says if any American is locked up in the Hague as result of an ICC arrest warrant, US soldiers can go in and get them out. The US worked very hard to get the Rome Statute passed and then said ‘not for us, doesn’t apply to us’. CJLPA : On that point then, what do you think are the implications of the way the US currently operate in outside the international law by committing torture. Could this impact Americans that are currently wrongly detained in other countries such as Iran, where there is also torture? NH : Of course it can apply to other Americans and it has. We’ve seen other countries say ‘the US does this, so we can do it’. There have been numerous amicus briefs written by former admirals, former generals, saying this is dangerous for Americans in other countries. And of course it is because if the US can do it, why can’t others do it to Americans? And yet that argument doesn’t seem to ever get anywhere because the US is the world police and there is a lot of arrogance that goes with that. CJLPA : I’d like to also talk a bit about a common theme that comes up in criminal law, amongst lawyers about innocent versus guilty and I think this is a question that often comes up from, I suppose, academics and people when they ask a criminal lawyer, defense lawyer ‘what if you know your client is guilty?’. How do you, from your perspective as a criminal defense lawyer, explain this, even in the context of defending the most barbaric crimes? NH : It is not my job to decide who is guilty and who is not guilty. It’s never my job to prove someone is innocent. The concept is, is the person guilty or not guilty and it’s up to the government in the US to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s the standard in most places: proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but that’s the government’s burden. My burden is to defend my client zealously against the government. If, in the end, if the government uses fair tactics, follows the rule of law, provides for due process, and the defendant is convicted, then we will argue about sentencing. But my job is not to be the jury. That’s not my job. My job is to, in the US, essentially defend the US Constitution for everyone, because if it doesn’t apply to my client, it might not apply to someone else, and I don’t think anyone can ever say they won’t be accused of a crime. Someone can say they would never commit a certain crime; they can never say they won’t be accused of committing it. So, that person wants to have the same protection that my client has. I had a client once who I was defending, he was a Republican, who was an oil and gas man and he called me and said, ‘I pulled the lever on the voting booth straight Democrat because I was scared you would find out’. And I said well, the quickest way to turn a Republican into a Democrat is to get him accused of a crime and all of a sudden, ‘What? What is the judge thinking?’. Now you know. You have to approach it that way. I tell people who say, ‘well I could defend certain crimes but not others’, that they’ve got to a really rethink whether you can be a criminal defence lawyer. There are clients I don’t want to defend and I have; I can make that choice. But public defenders don’t get to make that choice. They shouldn’t, they have to represent everyone and everyone the same. And that’s the way it must be. Just because you represent someone who commits a murder, or child abuse, or fraud, doesn’t mean that you did it. It just means that you are providing what the Constitution requires and making sure that there is a rule of law in the country. If we don’t have a rule of law at all, we have a police state. CJLPA : Absolutely. I think inevitably, it doesn’t matter guilty or innocent, every individual has the right to his protection and the right to be treated with human dignity. And that goes back also to Guantanamo Bay. I think a lot of people spoke about the prisoners, whether or not they did it or were they involved. From my point of view, and from what I have read about Guantanamo Bay and the cases, it doesn’t matter if they did do it or they didn’t do it. You read into the torture that they have endured, that the government was responsible for. It’s despicable. No human, no matter what they have done, should ever endure that treatment and they should have had that protection and the justice system failed them because that ever occurred. And so on that point then, I thought it was quite interesting, watching The Mauritanian , which I thought was a fantastic film, I did notice as well that there was a lot of discussion of innocence versus guilt and did he do it, did he not do it. Do you think that was important in the film? NH : I think it was important in the film. It was never important to me. Teri [Duncan] actually, is a death penalty lawyer who represents people on death row and would never have cared in real life whether someone was guilty or not, but the role she took in the film was kind of to be a proxy for the audience. We know that is what the audience is thinking at that point and that’s when I kick her out, you have to leave. Which never happened by the way. There was another lawyer involved who quit but not Teri. But Teri agreed to do this for the film’s sake, to combine these people, so that the audience would have someone to identify with. That whole scene is really interesting because I really would tell someone who took that position, you need to rethink whether you want to be a criminal defence lawyer and you are not on this case anymore. That would have happened. I wouldn’t have been as rude as Jodie was. Jodie has said she was much meaner than I am and ruder. But I did say the last words that are in that scene and those were my words and I must have said them to Jodie when we were talking at one point because she mouthed them. ‘You’ve gotta believe your own shit’, and it’s something that we call trial psychosis. When you get into it you really got to believe, wow, I can really win this. Even when you know you can’t. You’ve got to believe it, you’ve got to believe it and work towards it. And in Mohamedou’s case, there were overwhelming allegations against him that we had to fight one after the other and it turned out that they were all made of nothing. But if you read the police, the first reports you would think he was guilty. Which is true in all criminal cases, if all you do is read the police reports you would think everyone is guilty. And then you got to start parsing it. But I did think it was important for the audience to see how that debate worked out. CJLPA : Reflecting back on your work in that case, today, what would be your advice to present-day lawyers defending a client in a similar situation, not necessarily Guantanamo Bay case, but cases where they are accused of terrorism and confined in the most inhumane prison? Would you have approached the case differently now, thinking back of how it worked through all those years? NH : I don’t know what I would have done differently in Mohamedou’s case, other cases where I have re-thought what I did. But in that case, I think we did everything we knew how to do. I wish we had done some of the investigations that we weren’t able to do, that we didn’t have the funds to do. And maybe things would have moved a little faster. And I am not sure anything would have made a difference at that point at that case. But you know, my advice to people is just don’t give up, turn every corner, be a lawyer, take care of your client. Clients’ stories are the most important and most crimes that are committed by people are the worst five minutes of their lives and they would never do it again. Everyone should be treated with human dignity. And that is the bottom line. Treat your clients the same way you would treat everyone else and care for them, listen to them, listen to what they have to say and do everything you possibly can to win the case. As long as you do it ethically. CJLPA : You mentioned that in Mohamedou’s case you wouldn’t have done something different, but potentially in other cases. Could you expand a bit more on that? NH : Yes, in my first cases. I tried a whole bunch of felony cases when I was a brand-new lawyer. And I know, if I looked back and I did those cases, the ones I lost, and most of them as a public defender, I would say ‘wow, why didn’t I think of this’, ‘why didn’t I think of that’. I didn’t really have very many people to help me at that time, I had some. I went in, I was thrown in and there are other cases where I just feel like I missed something along the way, and I wish I could go back and do them again. CJLPA : What was the most memorable case you have done and why particularly it is that one? Not necessarily the most important, but the most memorable that stuck with you over the years. NH : I really thought about this question, Nadia. There are cases that no one knows about, and I suppose they might be the most memorable, because people know about Mohamedou’s case, they know about Chelsea Manning’s case, they know about Precious Padel’s case, they know about other cases I have won. Lots and lots of high-profile cases, but I was thinking about it. I represented people where we were able to get the charges dismissed and no one ever knew about it. And isn’t that really the best for the client. I remember representing a lawyer who was charged with child abuse. Two people who were charged with child abuse. In both cases they were completely innocent, completely innocent and the cases were dismissed after investigation, and no one ever knew that they were charged. It was the end. Came and went. There was this other guy who was accused of 13 murders and that case people did know about because he got arrested. So it was really high profile, so that case was dismissed. The ones where no one ever knew about them I think are the best. Because that’s where I did my job, because that’s where the criminal legal system worked. Somebody is charged with a crime and then the case goes away because it should and to me those are the most memorable. CJLPA : Do you think that also corresponds with the fact that there was a less of a public eye on it, which in a way offered it more of a due process, having the media cut out of it and the politicians not involved? NH : I do think that matters, a lot. I know that the child abuse cases that I was involved in twenty years ago were a lot different than if I were to be involved in the same case today. The press would be all over it. And it would be a real tragedy for both the complaining witness, who needed some psychiatric care, and for my client, who needed not to have to go through this in the public eye. So I think in many cases that would be different. And that is unfortunate because, you know, there is so much, so much news now about things we never used to know about. We have amber alerts, which we never used to have. We have twenty-four-hour news. We have draconian sentences. And so all of this goes against in many ways the rule of law. Yes, of course we need to protect real victims of rape, real victims of child abuse. But there are times where you don’t know who the real victim is, when the case starts. Is it the defendant or the complaining witness and who is the real victim here? And that is often true in the sex related cases. And those are the ones where they keep the complaining witness’s name and you don’t get to know who that person is, if it is a child. But you know who the defendant is and maybe they shouldn’t, maybe neither one be public until we know where these cases are going. The news is different now than it was twenty years ago. And in many ways that is unfortunate. We don’t have more crime, I keep telling people this. I tell people who say ‘well, it was safer when your son was young’, that, no, it wasn’t, it was actually less safe in the eighties in the US than it is now. Except for murders which went up in the US, during the pandemic, and nobody quite knows why. I mean if you leave the pandemic and the peculiarities of that time out of it. Crime is down, but we never hear more about it. So you’ve got these helicopter parents who won’t let their kids go outside alone. And yet, they are safer than when I let my son go out alone, forty years ago. CJLPA : What would you say is an appropriate balance between having that privacy in the courtroom and the trial taking its course and then equally the public also having awareness of what’s going on around them and their surroundings and the crimes occurring in their neighbourhoods? NH : Well, it is a balance and the public has right to know, and that also benefits someone who is accused because you want the public to be aware, you don’t want to have trials in private, and so there is a balance. But in the balance the defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to protection in favour of confrontation, in due process, the right to a fair trial, always has to be the balance that you look for, always, that balance has to be the one that tips the scale. CJLPA : It would be interesting to know from your experience as a lawyer and working with various other lawyers, what have you noticed makes a good lawyer or a distinguishing one? NH : A good lawyer, in my view, and I tell this to people coming out of law school and people I have been about to hire over years, is someone who is for lack of better words a full-service lawyer. If my client is going to jail and my client says ‘but there is nobody home to take care of my cat’, it’s my job to make sure that the cat gets taken care of. Whenever people go into prison to meet to the client, talk about the crime, talk about the defence, but also make sure that the client is okay, make sure that the client is getting the medicine, and getting the visits he needs, or she needs, make sure that everyone is alright all the time, and listen to the client, listen to the client’s stories and make sure you understand who they are, go visit the crime scene but also visit the family, talk about the history, talk about who this person is, get to know that person, and just be everything that person needs, because the lawyer is ultimately the only person between the defendant and the accused and the world and the government. It’s pretty simple. CJLPA : Absolutely. One more question, just to wrap everything up: in your legacy of defending human rights law throughout your career, how would you want this fight to continue by your successors and what do you hope is going to improve over the years in the justice system? NH : If I were starting today, I’d be figuring out how to represent migrants and refugees around the world. There are people in refugee camps all over the world that we don’t know anything about. Hundreds and hundreds of people who were born, live, die in camps where they get no services, no UN services, no NGO services, they don’t even know they exist. They’re huge, they’re all over the place. And that’s where I think that’s where I would devote my time if I were starting now. I work in an organisation, I’m on its advisory board at the International Bridges to Justice and a goal is to provide lawyers to everyone, and making sure that people who are in prison in countries that have very few lawyers get lawyers, to make sure lawyers are trained all over the world, make sure that the world understands why we need lawyers, and why people who think they will never commit a crime need to make sure that everyone has a lawyer to protect them, and their families, and the rule of law for everyone. But I tell lawyers now when they say ‘what would you do?’, I say I would do immigration law and migrant law, refugee law, because that to me is becoming the biggest issue around the world. CJLPA : Absolutely. I agree on that. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today. This interview was conducted by Nadia Jahnecke, Legal Editor and Founder of Human Rights Volume of CJLPA 3. In addition to her role at CJLPA, Nadia is currently working as a Trainee Lawyer and will qualify as a lawyer in England and Wales in March 2024.

The United Kingdom has experienced two major political crises in the last five years. Brexit and COVID-19 are crises of very different kinds. But they have a significant feature in common whose implications will live with us for a long time. They are milestones in the demise of liberal democracy.   The model which will replace liberal democracy is already emerging. It will be more authoritarian and less dependent on Parliamentary deliberation. It will view our society as a great collective with a single collective notion of the public good, and treat dissent as antisocial, even treasonable. It will be less accepting of the idea that there are islands of human life in which, extremes apart, individuals are entitled to make their own decisions irrespective of the wishes of the state. The defining feature of totalitarian societies is a model of the relations between the state and the citizen in which individuals are first and foremost instruments of collective policy. This once distinguished them from democracies. The distinction will become less important, as formerly liberal societies move closer to the totalitarian model.   The first symptoms of this change were apparent well before anyone had heard of either Brexit or COVID-19. The Pew Research Centre has been tracking attitudes to democracy in different countries for some 30 years. Dissatisfaction with democracy has been rising in advanced democracies for most of that time, especially among the young, and particularly in the oldest democracies: the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. The UK has one of the highest levels of dissatisfaction in the world, at 69%. Only in Bulgaria and Greece is it higher. Dissatisfaction with democracy does not necessarily imply a preference for some other system. But more disturbing findings emerge from the regular surveys of political engagement conducted in the UK by the Hansard Society. In the 2019 survey 54% of respondents agreed that ‘Britain needs a strong leader willing to break the rules’, and only 23% disagreed. As many as 42% thought that the government ‘shouldn’t have to worry so much about votes in Parliament’.   These attitudes are closely correlated to economic performance. People who are dissatisfied with the economy, people who feel economically left behind or pessimistic about the future, are more likely to reject democracy. This is not altogether surprising. Historically, democracies have always been heavily dependent on economic good fortune. Western democracy was born in the nineteenth century, in an age of creative optimism, economic expansion, and European supremacy. Except for two short periods, the United States has enjoyed continuously rising levels of prosperity, both absolutely and relative to other countries, until quite recently. Britain’s economic history has been more chequered, but the trajectory has generally been upward. In the life of any community, the shattering of optimism is a dangerous moment. Disillusionment with the promise of progress was a major factor in the 30-year crisis of Europe which began in 1914 and ended in 1945. That crisis was characterised by a resort to autocracy in much of Europe. Three-quarters of a century have passed since 1945, years marked by rapid economic growth and exponential improvements in standards of living. But today, the outlook is darker. Most Western democracies face problems of faltering growth and relative economic decline, of redundant skills and capricious patterns of inequality, most of them the legacy of past successes. These trends are likely to be aggravated in the UK by Brexit, and nearly everywhere by COVID-19. Climate change is a future challenge the implications of which are only beginning to dawn on people. Most of the measures proposed for dealing with it involve curtailing economic growth. Economic pessimism generates feelings of disempowerment which tend to discredit democratic institutions.   Against an unfavourable background like this, what will Brexit and COVID-19 contribute to these trends?   The Brexit crisis proved to be a watershed moment for British democracy. The first task of any political system is to accommodate differences of interest and opinion among citizens, so that they can live together in community without the systematic application of force. Democracies operate on the basis that although the majority has authorised policies which the minority rejects, these differences are transcended by their common acceptance of the legitimacy of the decision-making process. It is legally and constitutionally possible for a bare majority to take all the political spoils without engaging with the minority. But a democracy which persistently did that would not accommodate differences, but brutalise them. It would cease to be a political community, and could hardly function as a democracy.   For this reason, thoughtful democrats have always recognised that too much democracy is bad for democracy. They have been able to avoid the self-destructive tendency of democracy by spurning the direct decision of contentious issues by the electorate, and opting for representative politics instead. Representative politics are essentially an institutionalised system of compromise. The rigidity of party discipline in the House of Commons means that compromise is rare across the House. But it happens indirectly because political parties have to accommodate a broad spectrum of opinion and interests if they want to be elected. People are naturally averse to compromise about issues on which they feel strongly. They prefer not to engage with the views of those with whom they profoundly disagree. Parliamentary systems force them to do so. Although political parties can exploit a single issue in a moment of national emotion to carry them to power without compromise, in the medium and long term they cannot afford to become ideological sects. If they did, they would move to the margins of politics where they would have limited influence and no prospect of power. This is what nearly happened to the Labour Party in 1983 and again in 2019.   The Brexit referendum of 2016 was adopted as a way of circumventing the Parliamentary process. The theory is that once the answer has been supplied by the majority, it is the answer of the entire community. This notion is both false and profoundly damaging. It is false because the minority still exists and has no reason to alter its opinion simply because it is a minority. It is damaging because it creates a sense of entitlement in the majority, which dispenses them from the need to engage with those who disagree. Referenda have often been used as the tools of tyrants. Napoleons I and III, Hitler, and Putin have all used them as a license to institute authoritarian governments. In Britain, the effect of the Brexit referendum was more subtle. It did not bring a tyrant to power. What it did was to undermine representative politics and prevent it from accommodating differences among our people on one of the most contentious issues of modern times. Since an ability to do that is essential to the long-term survival of a democratic constitution, this has impoverished our politics and destroyed the tolerant conventions by which we had previously been governed.   The natural consequence has been the election of a government with a strong authoritarian streak, characterised by a resentment of opposition and dissent. At what earlier stage in our history would the Attorney General have told the House of Commons, as Geoffrey Cox did in all seriousness in September 2019, that it was ‘unfit to sit’ because it would not allow the government to leave the European Union until it had made satisfactory alternative arrangements? This was not an isolated event, but part of a consistent pattern. Other symptoms of the rejection of our pluralist traditions include: the brutal political purge of the once-dominant Europhile element in the Parliamentary Conservative Party; the threat of revenge against the Supreme Court for its temerity in insisting, in the two Gina Miller cases, on the constitutional authority of Parliament; the overt hostility to the BBC for its alleged failure to share the government’s outlook, coupled with a threat to destroy its financial model; the insistence on filling positions in the government’s gift from the Cabinet to the Trustees of the British Museum with loyalists and placemen regardless of their qualifications for the job, or lack of them; and the contempt for civil servants who dare to give expert but unwelcome advice. These have all been attacks on national institutions which stand for a plurality of opinion. They represent something new and unwelcome in our political culture.   The constitutional baggage carried over from the Brexit debacle proved to be the starting point for the government’s response to the next crisis.   At the root of the problems generated by the pandemic was the public’s attitude to the state and to risk. People have remarkable confidence in the capacity of the state to contain risk and ward off misfortune. An earlier generation regarded natural catastrophes as only marginally amenable to state action. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–21 is the event most closely comparable to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. It is estimated to have killed 200,000 people in the United Kingdom at a time when its population was about two thirds what it is now. The UK government took no special steps to curtail its transmission, apart from isolating the infected and the sick, which had been the classic response to epidemics from time immemorial. No one criticised it for this. COVID-19 is a somewhat more infectious pathogen than Spanish flu, but it is significantly less mortal. It is also easier to deal with because it mainly affects those with underlying vulnerabilities due to age or certain underlying clinical conditions. A high proportion of these people are economically inactive. By comparison, Spanish flu had a particularly devastating impact on healthy people aged under 50. Yet in 2020 Britain, in common with most Western countries, ordered a general lockdown of the whole population, healthy or sick, something which had never been done before in response to any disease anywhere. These measures enjoyed substantial public support.   In the intervening century, something has radically changed in our collective outlook. Two things in particular have changed. One is that we now expect more of the state, and are less inclined to accept that there are limits to what it can do. The other is that we are no longer willing to accept risks that have always been inherent in life itself. Human beings have lived with epidemic disease from the beginning of time. If one can imagine a hypothetical world in which every community had a sterile space into which it could withdraw at the onset of disease, humanity would have become extinct. It would have no natural immunity and would simply be wiped out the next time that a new pathogen struck too quickly or silently for flight.   COVID-19 is a relatively serious epidemic but historically it is well within the range of health risks which are inseparable from ordinary existence. In Britain, bubonic plague, smallpox, cholera and tuberculosis were all worse in their time. Internationally, the list of comparable or worse epidemics is substantially longer, even if they did not happen to strike Europe and North America. The average age at which people die with COVID-19 is 82.4, which is not significantly different from the average age at which they die without COVID-19. The change is in ourselves, not in the nature or scale of the risks that we face.   In the first of my 2019 Reith lectures, I drew attention to the implications of our aversion to risk for our relationship with the state. I referred to what I have called, then and since, the Hobbesian bargain. The seventeenth-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that human beings surrendered their liberty completely, unconditionally, and irrevocably to an absolute ruler in return for security. Hobbes was an apologist for absolute government. In his model of society, the state could do absolutely anything for the purpose of reducing the risks that threaten our wellbeing, other than deliberately kill us. Hobbes’s state was an unpleasant thing, but he had grasped a profound truth. Most despotisms come into being not because a despot has seized power, but because people willingly surrender their freedoms for security. To resist this tendency requires of us a collective restraint and self-discipline, an appreciation of the complexity and interconnectedness of human affairs, and a willingness to resist the empire of fear. Our culture has always rejected Hobbes’s model of society. Intellectually, it still does. But in recent years it has increasingly tended to act on it. The response to COVID-19 has taken that tendency a long way further. I could not have imagined in 2019 that my concerns would be so dramatically vindicated so quickly.    Until March 2020, it was unthinkable that liberal democracies should confine healthy people in their homes indefinitely, with limited exceptions at the discretion of ministers. It was unthinkable that a whole population should be subject to criminal penalties for associating with other human beings and answerable to the police for the ordinary activities of daily life. In a now-notorious interview in February 2021, Professor Neil Ferguson explained what changed. It was the lockdown in China. ‘It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought … And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’ It is worth pausing to reflect on what this means. It means that because a lockdown of the entire population appeared to work in a country which was notoriously indifferent to individual rights and traditionally treats human beings as mere instruments of state policy, they could ‘get away with’ doing the same thing here. As I write this, the British government has published an ‘Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy’ which identifies China as presenting a ‘systemic challenge to our values’. Liberty and personal autonomy are surely among our most fundamental of those values. They are also essential conditions for human happiness and creativity. Yet we have been willing to jettison them in favour of the Chinese model. Entirely absent from Professor Ferguson’s analysis was any conception of the principled reasons why it had hitherto been unthinkable for Western countries to do such a thing. It was unthinkable because it was based on a conception of the state’s authority over its citizens which was morally repellent even if it worked.   This is not, as many people appear to think, a phase which will pass when COVID-19 disappears (if it ever does). Governments rarely relinquish powers that they have once acquired. Wartime controls were kept in being for years after the end of the war. Some wartime powers continued to be exercised right up to the 1990s. But the problem is more fundamental than that. The government has immense powers, not just in the field of public health, but generally. These powers have existed for many years. Their existence has been tolerable in a liberal democracy only because of a culture of restraint which made it unthinkable that they should be used in the intrusive and abrasive manner in which the government has used its public health powers. Before 2020, it was only culture and convention which prevented us from adopting a totalitarian model. If something is unthinkable until someone in authority thinks of it, the psychological barriers which were once our only protection against despotism have vanished.   In the circumstances, we can hardly be surprised that this fundamental change has been accompanied by a deliberate and persistent attempt on the part of the government to limit Parliamentary scrutiny or any real political accountability. It has issued ‘guidance’ going well beyond its legal powers, and issued ‘orders’ at press conferences which had no legal basis. It has rammed complex legislation through Parliament without serious debate. It has absolved itself from any real Parliamentary control over public expenditure. It has evaded statutory requirements for advance Parliamentary approval on grounds of urgency which are difficult to justify. It has deliberately waited before making supposedly urgent statutory orders until Parliament was not in session. It has taken steps to prevent activities which its own regulations expressly permit, such as visits to doctors and dentists. In many respects, Parliament itself has not been willing to live up to its high constitutional calling.   However, at least as serious as the implications for our relations with the state are the implications for our relations with each other. The pandemic has generated distrust, resentment and mutual hostility. Authoritarian governments fracture the societies in which they operate. The use of political power as an instrument of mass coercion fuelled by public fear, is corrosive. It is corrosive even, perhaps especially, when it enjoys majority support. It tends to be accompanied, as it has been in Britain, by manipulative government propaganda and vociferous intolerance of the minority who disagree. These are the authentic symptoms of totalitarianism.   There is no inevitability about the future course of any historical trend. Social controls can become unpopular. There is an analogy in the fate of food rationing after 1939. It was necessary during the Second World War and enjoyed general public support. Belief in the efficacy of social control was an important part of the appeal of the Labour Party in the general election of 1945 which brought it to power with a huge Parliamentary majority. But people wearied of it over the following years. The insistence of the post-war Labour government on retaining it indefinitely cost it its majority in the general election of 1950 and put the Conservatives in power in 1951. Nevertheless, I am not optimistic about the future of my country. The changes in our political culture seem to me to reflect a profound change in the public mood, which has been many years in the making and may be many years in the unmaking. We are entering a Hobbesian world, the enormity of which has not yet dawned on our people. The Rt Hon Lord Sumption   Jonathan Sumption, The Rt Hon Lord Sumption, is a retired Supreme Court Justice and was the first to be appointed from outside of the judiciary. He is renowned for his lucid and methodical judgments.

Introduction COVID-19 should not have struck us so unawares: similar viruses, SARS and MERS, had emerged within the last 20 years, and global pandemics had been widely discussed. So why were even rich countries so unprepared? It’s because politicians and the public have a local focus. They downplay the long-term and the global. They ignore Nate Silver’s maxim: ‘The unfamiliar is not the same as the improbable.’   Indeed, we’re in denial about a whole raft of newly emergent threats to our interconnected world, that could be devastating. Pandemics and massive cyberattacks, for instance, are immediately destructive. Their probability may seem low, but they could happen at any time. The worst of them could be so devastating that one occurrence would be too many. And their probability and potential severity is increasing. Indeed, I fear we are guaranteed a bumpy ride through this century. COVID-19 must be a wake-up call, reminding us—and our governments—that we’re vulnerable.   Humans are now so numerous, and have now such a heavy collective ‘footprint’, that they can transform, or even ravage, the entire biosphere. The world is growing, and a more demanding population puts the natural environment under strain. Our collective actions could trigger dangerous climate change and mass extinctions if ‘tipping points’ are crossed—outcomes that would bequeath a depleted and impoverished world to future generations. We’re familiar with these threats, but fail to prioritise countermeasures, because their worst impact stretches beyond the time horizon of political and investment decisions. It’s like the proverbial boiling frog—contented in a warming tank until it’s too late to save itself. We have endured a ‘plague year’, and it remains unclear when, or indeed if, the world will revert to anything close to its ‘old normal’. The ‘global spasm’ that we have collectively experienced—a spasm that is, at the time of this writing, far from over—shows clearly that the ability to make wise decisions based on science has a direct impact on survival—not just personally, but collectively. Because our entire world is so interconnected, a catastrophe in any region can cascade globally, making our society vulnerable to breakdowns. But well-directed, internationally deployed science and technology can offer salvation.   The potentials of biotech and the cyberworld are exhilarating—but they’re frightening too. We are already, individually and collectively, so greatly empowered by rapidly changing technology that we can— by design, or as unintended consequences—engender global changes that will resonate for centuries.   Climate and environment   There are some things we can confidently predict. For instance, there’s firm evidence for climate change. Even within the next 20 years, regional shifts in climatic patterns, and more extreme weather, will aggravate pressures on food and water, and enhance migration pressure. Moreover, under ‘business as usual’ scenarios we can’t rule out, later in the century, really catastrophic global warming, and tipping points triggering long-term trends like the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet. But even those who accept these statements have diverse views on the best policy response. These divergences stem from differences in economics and ethics—in particular, in how much obligation we should feel towards future generations.   The Danish campaigner Bjørn Lomborg has bogeyman status among environmentalists—somewhat unfairly, as he doesn’t contest the science. But his ‘Copenhagen Consensus’ of economists downplays the priority of addressing climate change in comparison with shorter-term efforts to help the world’s poor. That’s because he applies a ‘standard’ discount rate—and in effect writes off what happens beyond 2050. But if you care about those who’ll live into the twenty-second century and beyond, then, as economists like Lord Stern and Professor Martin Weitzman argue, it is worth paying an insurance premium now, to protect those generations against the worst-case longer-term scenarios.[1]   So, even those who agree that there’s a significant risk of climate catastrophe a century hence, will differ in how urgently they advocate action today. Their assessment will depend on expectations of future growth, and optimism about technological fixes. But, above all, it depends on an ethical issue—in optimising people’s life-chances, should we discriminate on grounds of date of birth?   That the world will get warmer is a confident prediction. And with similar confidence we expect that it will get more crowded during this century. 50 years ago, world population was about 3.5 billion. It’s now about 7.7 billion. The growth has been mainly in Asia and Africa. The number of births per year, worldwide, peaked a few years ago and is going down. Nonetheless, world population is forecast to rise to around nine billion by 2050. That’s partly because most people in the developing world are young. They are yet to have children, and they will live longer. The age histogram in the developing world will become more like it is in Europe. By mid-century, Africa will have five times Europe’s population. Lagos and other megacities could have populations of around 40 million.   Population growth seems under-discussed. That’s partly, perhaps, because doom-laden forecasts in the late 1960s—for instance, by the Club of Rome and by Paul Ehrlich—proved off the mark. Also, some deem population growth to be a taboo subject—tainted by association with eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s, with Indian policies under Indira Gandhi, and more recently with China’s hard-line one-child policy. As it’s turned out, food production and resource extraction have kept pace with the rising population. Famines still occur, but they’re due to conflict or maldistribution, not overall scarcity.   To feed nine billion in 2050 will require further-improved agriculture—low-till, water-conserving, and GM crops. It may also require dietary innovations—converting insects, highly nutritious and rich in proteins, into palatable food; and making artificial meat. To quote Gandhi—enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed.   Demographics beyond 2050 are uncertain. It’s not even clear whether there’ll be a continuing global rise, or a fall. Urbanisation, declining infant mortality, and women’s education trigger the transition towards lower birthrates—but there could be countervailing cultural influences.   If, for whatever reason, families in Africa remain large, then according to the UN that continent’s population could double again by 2100, to four billion, thereby raising the global population to 11 billion. Nigeria alone would by then have as big a population as Europe and North America combined.   Optimists may note that each extra mouth brings two hands and a brain. But the potential geopolitical stresses of runaway population growth are deeply worrying. As compared to the fatalism of earlier generations, those in poor countries now know, via the Internet etc, what they’re missing. And migration is easier. Moreover, the advent of robots, and ‘reshoring’ of manufacturing, mean that still-poor countries won’t be able to grow their economies by offering cheap skilled labour, as the Asian tiger economies did. It’s a portent for disaffection and instability—multiple megaversions of the tragic loads of boat people crossing the Mediterranean today. Wealthy nations, especially those in Europe, should urgently promote prosperity in Africa, and not just for altruistic reasons.   And another thing: if humanity’s collective impact on land use and climate is too deep, the resultant ‘ecological shock’ could cause mass extinctions. We’d be destroying the book of life before we’d read it. Already, there’s more biomass in chickens and turkeys than in all the world’s wild birds. And the biomass in humans, cows, and domestic animals is 20 times that in wild mammals.   Biodiversity is a crucial component of human wellbeing. We’re clearly harmed if fish stocks dwindle to extinction. There are plants in the rain forest whose gene pool might be useful to us. And insects are crucial for the food chain and fertilisation. But for many environmentalists, preserving the richness of our biosphere has value in its own right, over and above what it means to us humans. To quote the great ecologist EO Wilson, ‘mass extinction is the sin that future generations will least forgive us for’.   Prospects for technology   It would be hard to think of a more inspiring challenge for young scientists and engineers than devising clean and economical energy systems—and sustainable, humane agriculture—for the entire world. Nations should accelerate R&D into all forms of low-carbon energy generation, and into other technologies where parallel progress is crucial—especially storage (batteries, compressed air, pumped storage, flywheels, etc) and smart grids. If carbon-free energy gets cheap enough, then India, for instance, can leapfrog to it. The health of the poor is jeopardised by smoky stoves burning wood or dung, and there would otherwise be pressure to build coal-fired power stations. Likewise, public health should be a global priority.   But we need wisely directed technology. Indeed, many are anxious that innovation is proceeding so fast that we may not properly cope with it—and that we’ll have a bumpy ride through this century. We’re ever more dependent on elaborate networks: electric power grids, air traffic control, international finance, just-in-time delivery, globally dispersed manufacturing, and so forth. Unless these networks are highly resilient, their manifest benefits could be outweighed by catastrophic (albeit rare) breakdowns that cascade globally—real-world analogues of what happened in 2008 to the financial system. Air travel can spread a pandemic worldwide within days.[2] And social media can spread panic and rumour, and psychic and economic contagion, literally at the speed of light.   Biotech offers huge prospects for enhancing health and food production. But there are downsides, from both ethical and prudential perspectives. It offers, for instance, the ability to modify viruses. In 2012, experiments done in Wisconsin and in Holland showed that it was surprisingly easy to make the influenza virus more virulent and more transmissible. This seemed a portent, and in 2014 the US federal government ceased funding these ‘gain of function’ experiments. Similar manipulations can be carried out on coronaviruses. There is of course no suggestion that COVID-19 was malevolently engineered, though there is an ongoing debate about the possibility that it could have been an accidental release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where it is known that gain of function experiments were being done.   The new CRISPR-Cas9 technique for gene editing is hugely promising, but there are already ethical concerns—for instance, about Chinese experiments modifying embryos—and anxiety about possible runaway ecological consequences of ‘gene drive’ programmes to wipe out species as diverse as mosquitos or grey squirrels.   Governments will surely adopt a stringent and precautionary attitude to the applications of biotech—and even to the kinds of experiment that can be legally pursued. But I’d worry that whatever regulations are imposed can’t be enforced worldwide, any more than the drug laws or tax laws. Whatever can be done will be done by someone, somewhere.   An atomic bomb can’t be built without large-scale special-purpose facilities. But biotech involves small-scale dual-use equipment. Indeed, biohacking is burgeoning even as a hobby. The rising empowerment of tech-savvy groups (or even individuals), by bio-as well as cyber-technology, will pose an intractable challenge to governments and aggravate the tension between freedom, privacy, and security. The global village will have its village idiots, and they’ll have global range. These concerns are relatively near-term—within ten or 15 years.   By mid-century we might expect two things: a better understanding of the combinations of genes that determine key characteristics of humans and animals; and the ability to synthesise genomes that match these features. If it becomes possible to ‘play God on a kitchen table’, our ecology (and even our species) may not long survive unscathed.   And what about another transformative technology: robotics and artificial intelligence (AI)? DeepMind’s ‘AlphaGo Zero’ computer famously achieved world championship level in the games of Go and chess in just a few hours—it was given just the rules, and learnt by playing against itself over and over again. Its processing speed allowed it to complete several games every second.   Already AI can cope better than humans with complex fast-changing networks—traffic flow, or electric grids. It could let the Chinese gather and process all the information needed to run an efficient planned economy that Marx could only dream of. And in science, its capacity to explore millions of options could allow it to discover recipes for better drugs, or a material that conducts electricity with zero resistance at room temperature. Computers learn to identify dogs, cats, and human faces by ‘crunching’ through millions of images—not the way babies learn. They learn to translate by reading millions of pages of multilingual text—EU documents, for instance (their boredom threshold is infinite!).   The implications for our society are already ambivalent. If there is a ‘bug’ in the software of an AI system, it is not always possible to track it down. This is likely to create public concern if the system’s ‘decisions’ have potentially grave consequences for individuals. If we are sentenced to a term in prison, recommended for surgery, or even given a poor credit rating, we would expect the reasons to be accessible to us, and contestable by us. If such decisions were delegated to an algorithm, we would be entitled to feel uneasy, even if presented with compelling evidence that, on average, the machines make better decisions than the humans they have usurped.   AI systems will become more intrusive and pervasive. Records of all our movements, our health, and our financial transactions, will be in the ‘cloud’, managed by a multinational quasi-monopoly. The data may be used for benign reasons (for instance, for medical research, or to warn us of incipient health risks), but its availability to internet companies is already shifting the balance of power from governments to globe-spanning conglomerates.   There will be other privacy concerns. Are you happy if a random stranger sitting near you in a restaurant or on public transportation can, via facial recognition, identify you and invade your privacy? Or if fake videos of you become so convincing that visual evidence can no longer be trusted? Or if a machine knows enough about you to compose emails that seem to come from you? The ‘arms race’ between cybercriminals and those trying to defend against them will become still more expensive and vexatious when drones, driverless cars, etc proliferate.   Many experts think that AI, like synthetic biotech, already needs guidelines for ‘responsible innovation’. But others, like the roboticist Rodney Brooks (creator of the Baxter robot and the Roomba vacuum cleaner), think that for many decades artificial intelligence will be less of a concern than real stupidity. And machines are still clumsy compared to children in sensing and interacting with the real world.   The incipient shifts in the nature of work have been addressed in several excellent books by economists and social scientists. Clearly, machines will take over much of the work of manufacturing and retail distribution. They can supplement, if not replace, many white-collar jobs: routine legal work, accountancy, computer coding, medical diagnostics, and even surgery. Many ‘professionals’ will find their hard-earned skills in less demand. In contrast, some skilled service-sector jobs—plumbing and gardening, for instance—require non-routine interactions with the external world and will be among the hardest jobs to automate.   The digital revolution generates enormous wealth for innovators and global companies, but preserving a healthy society will surely require redistribution of that wealth. There is talk of using it to provide a universal income. It is better when all who are capable of doing so can perform socially useful work rather than receive a handout.   Indeed, to create a humane society, governments will need to vastly enhance the number and status of those who care for the old, the young, and the sick. There are currently far too few, and they’re poorly paid, inadequately esteemed, and insecure in their positions. Such work is more fulfilling than a job in a call centre or Amazon warehouse. I can foresee this benign redeployment happening in Scandinavia, though there might be ideological barriers in some other nations. We surely hope, when old, to be cared for by someone with real, not synthetic, empathy. We want young children to be told stories by real people who can share and understand their emotions. It is likely that society will be transformed by autonomous robots, even though the jury is out on whether they will be idiots savants  or display superhuman capabilities.   If robots become less clumsy in interacting with the world, would they truly be perceived as intelligent beings? Would we then have obligations towards them? Should we feel guilty if they are underemployed or bored? Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines , even foresees that humans could transcend biology by merging with computers. In old-style spiritualist parlance, they would ‘go over to the other side’. We then confront the classic philosophical problem of personal identity. If your brain were downloaded into a machine, in what sense would it still be ‘you’? Or are the input into our sense organs, and our physical interactions with the real external world, so essential to our being that this transition would be not only abhorrent but also impossible? These are ancient conundrums for philosophers, but practical ethicists may soon need to address them.   Not even Kurzweil thinks this will happen in his lifetime, so he wants his body frozen until immortality’s on offer, and he can be resurrected into some posthuman world.[3] But of course research on ageing is being seriously prioritised. Some think it’s a ‘disease’ that can be cured. Dramatic life extension would plainly have huge ramifications, for society and population projections.   It’s certainly credible that human beings—in their mentality and their physique—may become malleable through genetic and cybernetic technologies. Moreover, this future evolution—a kind of secular ‘intelligent design’—would take only centuries, in contrast to the thousands of centuries needed for Darwinian evolution. This is a game changer. When we admire the literature and artefacts that have survived from antiquity, we feel an affinity, across a time gulf of thousands of years, with those ancient artists and their civilisations. But we can have zero confidence that the dominant intelligences a few centuries hence will have any emotional resonance with us, even though they may have an algorithmic understanding of how we behaved.   Prospects in space   And now I turn briefly to another technology: space. This is where robots surely have a future, and where I‘d argue that these changes will happen fastest and should worry us less.   We depend every day on space for satnav, environmental monitoring, communication, and so forth. These are in large part now commercially funded, though projects with a focus on scientific research and planetary exploration are bankrolled by national or international agencies.   During this century the whole solar system will be explored by swarms of miniature probes, far more advanced than the probes that have beamed back pictures of Saturn’s moons, of Pluto, and beyond—20,000 times further away than the Moon. Think back to the computers and phones of the 1990s, when these probes were designed, and realise how much better we can do today. The next step will be deployment in space of robotic fabricators, which can build large structures under zero gravity—for instance, solar energy collectors, or giant telescopes with huge gossamer-thin mirrors   What about manned spaceflight? The practical case gets weaker with each advance in robots and miniaturisation. Were I an American, I would only support NASA’s un manned programme. And I certainly wouldn’t support a manned programme done by the European Space Agency. I would argue that private ventures like Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin—bringing a Silicon Valley culture into a domain long dominated by NASA and a few aerospace conglomerates—should ‘front’ all manned missions. They can impose higher risks than can a Western country on publicly funded civilian astronauts, and thereby slash costs. There would still be many volunteers—some willing to accept the risk of ‘one-way tickets’—driven by the same motives as early explorers, mountaineers, and the like.   By 2100, courageous thrill-seekers may have established ‘bases’ independent from the Earth—on Mars, or maybe on asteroids. Elon Musk says he wants to die on Mars (though not on impact). But don’t ever expect mass emigration from Earth. Nowhere in our solar system offers an environment as clement as even the Antarctic or the top of Everest. Here I disagree with Musk and my late colleague Stephen Hawking. It’s a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth’s problems. Dealing with climate change on Earth is a doddle compared to terraforming Mars. There’s no ‘planet B’ for ordinary risk-averse people.   But those pioneer adventurers who escape the Earth could be cosmically important. This is why. They’ll be ill-adapted to their new environment, and beyond the clutches of our terrestrial regulators. They will use all the resources of genetics and cybernetics to adapt. They will change faster and could within a few centuries become a new species. Moreover, if they make the transition to fully inorganic intelligences, they won’t need an atmosphere. They may prefer zero-G. They’ll also be nearly immortal. So it’s in deep space—not on Earth, nor even on Mars—that non-biological ‘brains’ may develop powers that humans can’t even imagine.   This raises the question that astronomers are asked most often: is there life out there already? Or is a sterile cosmos awaiting our progeny? We know too little about how life began on Earth to lay confident odds. We don’t know what triggered the transition from complex molecules to entities that can metabolise and reproduce. Moreover, even if simple life is common, it is not clear whether it’s likely to evolve into anything intelligent or complex.   Maybe we’ll one day find ET. On the other hand, Earth’s intricate biosphere could be unique. But it’s important that this wouldn’t render life a cosmic sideshow. That’s because there’s abundant time ahead for posthuman life seeded from Earth to pervade the Galaxy. We’re the outcome of four billion years of Darwinian evolution, but the Sun is less than half way through its life. And the universe may continue for ever. To quote Woody Allen, eternity is very long, especially towards the end.   But even in this ‘concertina’ed’ timeline, extending billions of years into the future as well as into the past, we’re living in a special century. The century when humans could jump-start the transition to entities that far transcend our limitations, and eventually spread their influence far beyond the Earth. Or—to take a darker view— the century where our follies could foreclose the immense future potential and leave an anarchic and depleted planet.   On our future, this century   Zooming back closer to the here and now, one can offer some tentative hopes, fears, and recipes.   Technologies offer huge promise. But our society is brittle, interconnected, and vulnerable. We fret unduly about small risks— air crashes, carcinogens in food, low radiation doses, etc. But we’re in denial about some newly emergent threats that could be globally devastating. Some of these are environmental—the pressures of a growing and more demanding population. Others are the potential downsides of novel technologies.   And, of course, most of the challenges are global. Coping with potential shortage of food, water, and resources—and transitioning to low-carbon energy—can’t be achieved by each nation separately. Nor can regulation of potentially threatening innovations. Indeed, a key issue is whether nations need to give up more sovereignty to new organisations along the lines of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Health Organization, etc.   Scientists have an obligation to promote beneficial applications of their work and warn against the downsides. Universities and academies need to assess which scary scenarios—eco-threats, or risks from misapplied technology—can be dismissed as science fiction, and how best to avoid the hazards that cannot be so dismissed.   The trouble is that even the best politicians focus mainly on the urgent and parochial. They do not focus on long-term global issues, or on averting possible catastrophes that haven’t yet happened, unless such policies feature sufficiently prominently in the press and in their inboxes that they are confident they won’t lose votes by endorsing them.   So concerned scientists must enhance their leverage—by involvement with NGOs, via blogging and journalism, and by enlisting charismatic individuals and the media to amplify their voices. Here are two recent instances:   The Papal encyclical Laudato Si’  had a worldwide influence in the lead-up to the Paris climate conference in 2015. There’s no gainsaying the Catholic Church’s global reach, long-term vision, and concern for the world’s poor.   And I doubt that we in the UK would have legislated against non-biodegradable plastic waste had it not been for the BBC’s Blue Planet II  television programmes fronted by our secular pope, David   Attenborough. The images of albatrosses returning to their nests and regurgitating plastic debris are as iconic as the polar bear on the melting ice floe was in the climate debate.   It’s encouraging to witness more activists among the young, who can hope to live to the end of the century. Their vocal commitment is welcome. It gives grounds for hope.   I’ll end with a flashback, right back to the Middle Ages. For medieval people, the entire cosmology—from creation to apocalypse—spanned only a few thousand years. They were bewildered and helpless in the face of floods and pestilences, and prone to irrational dread. Large parts of the Earth were terra incognita .   But they built cathedrals, constructed with primitive technology by masons who knew they wouldn’t live to see them finished—vast and glorious buildings, that still inspire us centuries later.   In contrast, our horizons in space and time are now vastly extended, as are our resources and knowledge. But we don’t plan centuries ahead. This seems a paradox. But there is a reason. Medieval lives played out against a ‘backdrop’ that changed little from one generation to the next. They were confident that they’d have grandchildren who would appreciate the finished cathedral. But for us, unlike for them, the next century will be drastically different from the present. We can’t foresee it, so it’s harder to plan for it. There is now a huge disjunction between the ever-shortening timescales of social and technological change and the billion-year time spans of biology, geology, and cosmology.   ‘Spaceship Earth’ is hurtling through the void. Its passengers are anxious and fractious. Their life-support system is vulnerable to disruption and breakdowns. But there is too little planning—too little horizon-scanning. This ‘pale blue dot’ in the cosmos is a special place. It may be a unique place. And we’re its stewards at a specially crucial era. That’s an important message for us all, whether or not we’re astronomers.   We need to think globally, we need to think rationally, we need to think long-term. We need to be ’good ancestors’, empowered by twenty-first-century technology but guided by values that science alone can’t provide. Professor Lord Rees Professor Martin Rees, Lord Rees of Ludlow OM FRS, is the UK’s Astronomer Royal. He is based at Cambridge University where he is a Fellow (and former Master) of Trinity College. He is a former President of the Royal Society and a member of many foreign academies. His research interests include space exploration, high energy astrophysics, and cosmology. He is co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University (CSER), and has served on many bodies connected with education, space research, arms control, and international collaboration in science. In addition to his research publications he has written many general articles and ten books, including most recently  On the Future: Prospects for Humanity (paperback version due in October 2021). [1] I’d note that there’s one policy context when an essentially zero discount rate is applied: radioactive waste disposal, where the depositories are required to prevent leakage for at least 10,000 years. This is somewhat ironic, since we can’t plan the rest of energy policy even 30 years ahead. [2] Pandemics also cause far more societal breakdown than in earlier centuries. English villages in the fourteenth century continued to function even when the black death halved their populations. In contrast, our societies would be vulnerable to serious unrest as soon as hospitals were overwhelmed– which would occur before the fatality rate was even one percent. (And there’s likewise huge societal risk from cyberattacks on infrastructure, etc.) [3] I was surprised to find that three academics back in England had gone in for these ‘cryonics’. Two had paid the full whack; the third had taken the cut-price option of wanting just his head frozen. I was glad they were from Oxford, not from my university. For my part, I’d rather end my days in an English churchyard than an American refrigerator.