Books for our time

Books for our time: Leading thinkers choose past works illuminating crucial issues today.

ISMAIL SERAGELDIN: A mind for radical equality

Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1795)

We are challenged today by the results of our past actions and current lifestyles. They are complex and tangled: climate change, biodiversity loss, water shortages and regions beset by both swift population growth and potential famine. We are in a battle to live sustainably.

Some might say that this is a moment for English cleric Thomas Malthus’s 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population. Yet that book assumes that humans are no different from animals, and respond to resource availability in the same way. I look to a very different work by a contemporary of Malthus’s: the remarkably optimistic Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. Its author, the mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, saw no limits to the capacity of human intelligence, and called on his readers to use it to build a better society.

Condorcet wrote the Sketch while hiding from the extremist wing of the French Revolution. In March 1794, its forces captured him, and possibly murdered him. The essay was published posthumously.

Condorcet had a brilliant and far-ranging mind; his early work included the pioneering Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions, in 1785. His world view was a vision of what could — and should — be, if we aspire to a world of reason and respect for our common humanity. His views are striking even for the late eighteenth century, when sociopolitical radicalism abounded. Condorcet advocated the abolition of slavery and equal rights for women, including women’s suffrage. He wanted economic freedom, religious tolerance, legal and educational reform. In the 1790 essay On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship, he argued for human rights generated by virtue of our shared intellectual and ethical capacities:

The rights of men stem exclusively from the fact that they are sentient beings, capable of acquiring moral ideas and of reasoning upon them. Since women have the same qualities, they necessarily also have the same rights. Either no member of the human race has any true rights, or else they all have the same ones; and anyone who votes against the rights of another, whatever his religion, colour or sex, automatically forfeits his own.

Condorcet wanted a classless French republic of citizens protecting their freedom through voting. He designed voting systems, including one based on comparative ranking to satisfy majority rule (a method favoured by Nobel-prizewinning economists Amartya Sen and Eric Maskin).At the global scale, Condorcet called for equality among nations. That included improving people’s physical health and longevity, education and moral development. But he recognized that the equality he was describing, both for nations and for individuals, is not absolute: it is equality of freedom and of rights.

This remarkable thinker believed that human ingenuity can overcome all obstacles, and that human goodness can steer us away from tyranny and greed. In this time of global challenge and national turbulence, his wise, inspiring ideas deserve to be remembered.

Illustration by Richard Wilkinson

CHIKWE IHEKWEAZU: Localizing public health

No Time to Lose: A Life In Pursuit Of Deadly Viruses Peter Piot (W. W. Norton, 2012).

Peter Piot’s No Time To Lose is a passionate account of his leading roles in the discovery of Ebola, the most consequential emerging disease of this decade, and in the global response to HIV and AIDS. I find it speaks profoundly to the current situation in Africa.

As a public-health epidemiologist, I have grown up professionally in the era of AIDS. I have visited Yambuku in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, site of the Ebola virus’s first appearance, while supporting the response to a 2004 Ebola outbreak in what is now South Sudan. Thus, No Time To Lose felt very immediate to me. Piot draws you in as he describes the appearance of the then-unknown and unnamed Ebola virus in a sample delivered to his laboratory in Belgium in 1976; his first fact-finding trip to Africa; and his professional stint in Yambuku, treating infected people in a hospital run by Catholic nurses. Piot’s account of the conversation that led to the naming of Ebola seems almost too simple to be true; despite the virus’s severity, there was no naming convention at the time.

In the 1980s, he worked with other scientists investigating many infectious diseases, including HIV infection. As his career pivots to global health politics, he describes in lucid detail his role in the establishment of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), and his leadership of the agency between 1994 and 2008. From laboratories to field epidemiology, boardrooms and political chambers, the book charts an incredibly impactful career in science and the fine arts of diplomacy, communication and political engagement in difficult situations.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is now grappling with the second-largest recorded outbreak of Ebola, which began in 2018. Despite new tools, more than 3,000 people have been infected and over 2,000 have died in the past year.

New viruses, such as MERS coronavirus, continue to emerge; old ones persist. At the same time, the population of Africa grows and socio-economic progress has plateaued. As I reflect on the gripping descriptions in No Time to Lose, I try to make sense of the paradox of what is happening on the continent.

One of the biggest lessons from Piot’s book is that we must focus on building strong, resilient local institutions with a sustainable capacity for infectious-disease prevention, detection and response. Although it was exhilarating to read his account, I caught myself wishing for a different ending: the emergence of a great research institution in Africa. This could train the virologists, epidemiologists and public-health leaders of the future, on the continent where they are most likely to emerge.

A lot of progress has been made since Piot first travelled to Yambuku, more than 40 years ago. As we continue to experience large outbreaks affecting lives and economies in Africa, we must persist in blazing the path towards building local capacity. For that, there really is no time to lose.

Nature 576, 374-378 (2019)

doi: 10.1038/d41586-019-03840-6