Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

The Franco-Tunisian Jewish writer and social philosopher Albert Memmi died in the spring of 2020, having lived a full century, at least a half of which he devoted to developing an arc of thought with great relevance to some of the most vexing questions now facing the societies of the Middle East, the region where he was born, although he eventually found his intellectual and literal home in the West. We need him now. Memmi was born in 1920 in the Jewish quarter in Tunis, at the time a French protectorate. The eldest son of a poor Italian Tunisian saddlemaker and an illiterate mother of Bedouin Berber heritage, he spoke Judeo-Arabic at home and studied Hebrew in a traditional religious school. Ambitious and studious, he won a scholarship to the most prestigious French high school in Tunisia, and went on to study philosophy at the University of Algiers. Forced to return to Tunisia after Vichy France expelled Jews from public institutions throughout the mainland and the colonies, Memmi was interned briefly in a labor camp after the Nazi occupation of Tunisia in 1942. After liberation from Nazi rule in May 1943, he decided to continue studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he became deeply engaged in Jewish intellectual life and thought and embarked on a life of letters. Returning to Tunisia in 1949, he worked as a high school teacher teaching philosophy and literature, and three years later he helped to found the Centre de Psychopédagogie de Tunis, where he studied the psychological dimensions of colonial oppression. After Tunisian independence in 1956 he returned to France, teaching in a number of universities and eventually being appointed in 1970 a professor of sociology in the University of Paris. Memmi is remembered today chiefly for his research and his novels about the psychological impact of colonialism, which he produced when he was in his thirties, in the 1950s. He became a hero of the anti-colonial left with his novel The Pillar of Salt, a fictionalized autobiography of his childhood in French-colonized Tunisia that appeared in 1953, and his study The Colonizer and the Colonized, which appeared four years later. Promoted in the pages of Les Temps Modernes, the leading French intellectual journal that was edited by Jean-Paul Sartre, who also wrote a preface to the book, The Colonizer and the Colonized was a study of the sociological and psychological dimensions of the dependence and the privilege created by a colonial hierarchy.  This “lucid and sober” book, wrote Sartre, describes the predicament of its author as “caught between the racist usurpation of the colonizers and the building of a future nation by the colonized, where the author ‘suspects he will have no place.’” (He will have no place because he is a Jew.) The Colonizer and The Colonized made Memmi a giant of anti-colonialism, along with such writers as Frantz Fanon, Leopold Senghor, Albert Camus (who also wrote a preface to Memmi’s book), and Aime Cesaire; one of the key figures of what later came to be dubbed the postcolonial school of thought defined by works ranging from Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in 1961 to Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978. But slowly Memmi’s thinking began to change. His later works sought to generalize the insights from his early phase into a broader sociological account of dependence, privilege, and racism. (He published a deep study of racism in 1982.) Memmi came to view racism and colonialism as only one instance of the more general human trait of what he called heterophobia, the fear of difference, which motivates groups to dominate, to condemn, and to exclude other groups. Memmi’s understanding converged with thinkers such as Niebuhr, for example, for whom “the chief source of man’s inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men”; and his emphasis upon the challenge of heterogeneity anticipated an important theme in contemporary social and political philosophy.  I believe that Memmi’s work is a vital resource to make sense of contemporary failures of governance, not least in his own region, the Middle East and North Africa. The World Bank report of 1996 noted, for example, “a systematic regression