When asked if this is the right time to speak directly to the younger generation, English-speaking essayist Naomi Klein, who has lived in Ontario, taught in the United States and Britain, replies that it was Greta Thunberg who gave her the inspiration, moving her to the very depths of herself. By learning, at the age of 11, the terrible consequences of global warming, the future Swedish activist stopped eating, talking, not understanding the apathy of the world.
Instead of blaming Greta’s violent reaction to the young girl’s autism the better to denigrate her, as Alain Finkielkraut, Pascal Bruckner, Michel Onfray and Luc Ferry did, Naomi Klein, with the American writer Rebecca Stefoff, publish How everything can change. Tools atuse of youth mobilized for climate and social justice (Lux, September 16). The book would summarize the sonorous voice of the planet: hurricanes, melting glaciers, forest fires, Earth soon uninhabitable …
French economist Pauline Grosjean continues, in its own way, on this mobilizing momentum in Patriarcapitalism. Ending gender inequalities (Threshold, October). At the end of the 1980s, she points out, women often no longer interrupt their careers to take care of their families. Despite this radical change, they generally remain confined to professions less paid than those exercised by men.
The intellectual hopes that the #MeToo movement and the denunciation of the charge of women at home will succeed in shaking patriarchal capitalism.
But the profound change of capitalism itself remains difficult. The Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), in the United Kingdom, unfortunately did not suggest that a woman could be better than a man to relax an inflexible economic system which seems insensitive to the complementarity of the feminine and the male.
As for Thomas piketty, a French economist too, he treats, in A brief history of equality (Seuil, October), of this capitalism whose humanization on the tortuous road of social justice has been achieved at the cost of struggles and revolts, including of course the contribution of women’s demands. The editor specifies: “It is certainly not a question of a peaceful history, and even less linear. »Crises (financial, political, health, etc.) run through it and it in no way prevents backtracking.
Universal history
Even servitude, the most blatant opposite of equality, haunts universal history. The historian Olivier Grenouilleau, a specialist also from France, wonders, in Christianity and slavery (Gallimard, October), why the Churches took so long to demand the abolition of this scourge in the name of human dignity. They have long put up with it, condemning it as a disgrace rather than a morally inexcusable crime.
The explanation would emerge from the book. Christians could not find in the Jewish Scriptures (the Old Testament), nor in their own scriptures (the New Testament), an explicit condemnation of this system, even if it was loath to biblical sensitivity. Despite several condemnations of slavery by the popes over the centuries, it was not until 1965, at the end of the Second Vatican Council, for the Catholic Church to judge it, bluntly, incompatible with human dignity.
One way of seeing things
It is also in a new way, but much more current, of seeing the things that the French paleoanthropologist tries to initiate us. Pascal Picq in Crisis, what if this was our chance? (L’Aube, October 13). In this dialogue with Denis Lafay, editorial advisor, Darwin’s exegete sees the global crisis caused by COVID-19 as organizational and health progress (teleworking, vaccine, etc.), like the biological adaptation of species.
His interlocutor, Lafay, explains: “The stake on the scale of humanity is to deploy a new policy of civilization, and this can only be imagined from, with, that for the benefit of the diversity. This policy would therefore fight the hierarchy of cultures, communities and individuals. Picq concludes: “This is the great anthropological lesson of the planetary pandemic crisis. “
Such a celebration of diversity makes Greta Thunberg’s autism a magical intuition, a salutary warning that the climate crisis risks summing up and concluding in fatality all other crises and all the injustices of humanity.
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