Trauma & Art

.Ignorance   /  ΄Αγνοια                                                                 Edited: June 10th, 2025

“If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be.” Thomas Jefferson

“The main scourge of humanity is not ignorance, because the ignorant often have excuses, but the refusal to know.” Simone de Beauvoir

“You will search the world over and not find a non-superstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution….” From The Spinoza Problem by Irvin D. Yalom,

“The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding…… Albert Camus

Today’s post is about ignorance and Peter Burke’s book, Ignorance: A Global History (2023). Peter Burke is a British polymath, historian, professor and writer.

Burke begins by telling us that in the past the ignorance of individuals was due to the fact that too little information was circulating in societies, and some knowledge was ‘precarious’ and hidden away because the authorities in both church and state rejected it. On the other hand, today it is abundance that has become a problem. This he says is known as ‘information overload’. People experience a deluge of information and are often unable to select what is useful and of value, which is described as ‘filter failure’. Therefore, he writes: “our so-called ‘information age’ enables the spread of ignorance just as much,” and so even though collectively, we know more than ever before, individually, we do not know more than our predecessors.

Burke believes that we need to think of knowledges and ignorances in the plural, and he discusses the necessity of ignorance in helping us shape our sense of what it means to know, the fact that knowing is not only passive, but also selective and active, and that ignoring facilitates our acquiring new knowledge, given the limits of our time and attention, and our individual and collective capacity to understand. We also need to decide what to keep, promote or discard. For instance, libraries and archives are the technologies by which we produce both knowledge and ignorance, hopefully, in a wise and judicious manner.

In the course of Burke’s exploration we encounter diverse, conflicting or / and complementary views around ignorance: Kant’s motto “Dare to know” as a reaction to forces that viewed curiosity and seeking knowkedge as a mortal sin, botanist Bernardin Saint-Pierre’s praise of ignorance on the grounds that it stimulates the imagination.  Philosopher John Rawl argued in favour of the ‘veil of ignorance’, a blindness to race, class, nation and gender that helps us see other people as morally equal beings. The term ‘virtuous’ ignorance has been used to describe the renunciation of research on nuclear weapons. Another kind of virtuous ignorance is the confidentiality and respect for privacy expected from doctors and other professionls, and democracy is protected by the secrecy of ballots, and so on. However, Burke concludes that the examples discussed in this book suggest that the negative consequences of ignorance generally outweigh the positive ones.

The book is divideδ into two basic parts. At the outset of his book Burke provides some beliefs and theories about ignorance and identifies the methodological problem of studying ignorance. In the first part he traces nearly every area of human activity and knowledge, mostly European, but not entirely, because as he explains that’s what he knows best, unified by the theme of what is not known / ignorance. Burke explores specialized fields like philosophy, religion, history, geography, natural sciences and the field of medicine. He makes his points through a plethora of historical examples and exploratory questions:

Who is ignorant of What, When, Where and with What Consequences? Who wants Whom not to know What and for What Reasons? Who has the power (the opportunities and the resources) to do this and what are the consequences of their actions? Or Who leaked What to Whom…..for What Purposes and with What Consequences?

At the end of the book Burke has provided a non exhaustive long list of types of ignorance. For instance he defines agnoiology, which is the study of ignorance, and agnotology, which is the study of the production of ignorance.  He explains that many forms of agnotology derive from social criticism, and the fact that ignorance can result from the operations of power, inequality, and prejudice. Studies have been conducted on the deliberate social production and maintenance of ignorance in our time. He explores the social forces that produce ignorance and the campaigns launched by industry and government to disinform the public, and further adds, that those with power often lack the knowledges they need, while those who possess those knowledges lack power. He explores public ignorance and claims that the absence or deprivation’ of knowledge, often invisible to the ignorant individual or group, is a form of blindness that has massive consequences. This is true both in our personal lives and the public arena since ignorance and secrets can often function as means of control and manipulation.

Examples are provided in relation to how ignorance runs through every historian’s work. Burke writes: “On the map of the past, there are many blank spaces.”  In relation to historiography he examines various aspects and problems, such as, bias and lack of evidence, the reliability of sources, the problem of standpoints, the need for critical thought and discernment of myths from true events. He describes the various phases it has gone through from the necessity for radical doubt to the discovery of the ‘selective ignorance’ and the realization that history has been written for the most part by elites, about elites and for elites. Burke writes the 20^th century focused on political events from the perspective of the leaders, but this kind of history was rejected by economic historians, who focused on structures and trends rather than events or individuals. Later social historians rejected economic history as reductionist, and in the1960s, history from below, focused on ordinary people, the ruled rather than the rulers, including the writers’ point of view, their lives and sufferings. He also attends closely to women’s past exclusion from scholarly professions, which had until recently led to ignorance of women’s social and cultural contributions. This reality has to some extent and in some places been partly remedied through the influence of feminist historians.

Burke goes on to discuss how ignorance plays various roles in both the theory and the practice of religion, and notes that “religion itself might be described as a response to human ignorance.” Historically, he adds, ignorance has been imputed to others, and others’ beliefs are often treated as an absence of knowledge rather than a different or rival knowledge. Agnostics [a Greek term meaning lack of spiritual knowledge], following the example of Socrates, impute ignorance to themselves. He also refers to the ignorance of the doctrines of people’s own religion on the part of both the clergy and the laity. At some point in history due to the immense ignorance of the lower clergy Lutheran and Calvinist pastors, for instance, were expected to have studied at university. He discusses the ignorance of Europeans about the peoples and places they conquered, and adds, that what has been discussed less than the ignorance of the laity is the reciprocal ignorance of the three groups involved in this process: the local or indigenous people, the missionaries in the field [although in the 20^th century, there was a shift and many missionaries might be described as amateur anthropologists], and their superiors at their desks at home [organizational ignorance].

Burke highlights the fact that in the absence of reliable knowledge, humans are prone to constructing stories to fill in the gaps, and while ignorance about the religion of others is often coupled with contempt, it has also, in different historical contexts lead to the spread of rumours. However, the circulation of rumours can solidify into long-lasting myths, beliefs or stereotypes about other groups or other religions leading to accusations and hostility.  Across eras rumours and false accusations have been used to legitimize violence, wars or pogroms against particular individuals and groups.

Finally, he traces the most important shifts in religious knowledge / ignorance over the centuries. In medieval Christendom, many had faith, but few knew much about their religion. From 1500 to 1900 there were movements of evangelization both in the Christian and in the Muslim worlds. And although since 1900 religious knowledge has more widely available than ever before, it has come to have a low priority, and more and more people, in the West mostly, choose to be ignorant of religion, in contrast to what is happening in the Islamic world, where a religious reformation began spreading widely in the later twentieth century.

In chapter seven Burke tells us that some of the most important studies of the history of ignorance have focused on the natural sciences. He quotes many thinkers to assert this point. The British physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, wrote that “Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.” More recently, in 2004, in his Nobel Prize speech, the American theoretical physicist David Gross said: “The questions we ask today are more profound and more interesting than those asked years ago when I was a student . . . back then we did not possess enough knowledge to be intelligently ignorant . . . I am happy to report that there is no evidence that we are running out of our most important resource – ignorance.”

Ignorance associated with science can be studied in relation to the history of science; its place in new research; the management of ignorance; resistance to new knowledge by both scientists and the laity; the ignorance of the laity, the loss of knowledge, and more. Scientists inevitably practise a ‘selective’ or ‘specified’ ignorance: the deliberate ignoring of some of the data in order to concentrate on a particular problem. Burke mentions that the neuroscientist Larry Abbott has talked about the importance of choosing ‘precisely where along the frontier of ignorance I want [he wants] to work’. He also refers to the medical field, which is a field in which ignorance was actually studied relatively early. He briefly touches upon how vast ignorance is in this field, and the reasons for this: the constant new knowledge and discoveries concerning illnesses, causes, remedies and diagnostic tools, physicians’ work overload, or disinterest in acquiring new information and invested interests.

Ignorance can be intentional and wilful, in other words not wanting to know, an‘active’ ignorance in the sense of resistance to certain ideas, especially new ones. Frequently, members of an older generation are unwilling to abandon theories in which they have invested their professional capital. One example in the book is that of a few well-known scientists, in the 1980s and 1990s, who cast doubt in public on what was becoming the scientific consensus about four threats to life and health in particular: the link between smoking and cancer, the problem of acid rain, the depletion of the ozone layer, and the trend towards global warming. Their wilful ignorance was not the healthy and necessary initial scepticism of new discoveries or theories, but the consistent ignorance of information that pointed to what they did not want to know. They were all politically conservative with links to industry and government.

Two other aspects of willful ignorance are: what he refers to as the chronic lack of funding the humanities [undone social science], and the collective ignoring of problems and areas of research that are left unfunded [undone science]. Burkes says this ‘systematic non production of knowledge’ illustrates the politics of science, the competition between groups with different agendas (government, industry, NGOs, foundations, universities, and so on). Ignorance can also be the result of loss of knowledge, a kind of collective amnesia. Burke provides examples, a classic case being Greek science (including mathematics), lost to western Europeans in the early Middle Ages, or the fate of the research on the transmission of hereditary traits in plants carried out by Gregor Mendel, who formulated his principles of transmission in a paper published in 1866. However, the international scientific community paid little notice to, so these discoveries had to be made all over again a generation later by a German biologist and a Dutch botanist.

Finally, Burke traces the shifts in knowledge and ignorance in this field. He writes that there was a movement for the popularization of natural science in the later 18th century, when some leading scientists participated in the spreading of scientific knowledge through lectures and performances that often included demonstrations of experiments carried out in public for lay audiences. He mentions, for instance, T.H. Huxley’s lecture on a piece of chalk to the working men of Norwich in 1868, introducing them to chemistry, geology and palaeontology.  There was some lay resistance to scientific theories, notably Darwin’s theory of evolution; however, Burke claims that despite the resistance to Darwin, the 19th century now appears to have been a golden age for lay knowledge of science, followed by a decline ever since.

More recent forms of popularization are scientific magazines, the dissemination of scientific knowledge via journalism, television programmes and documentaries, and via the Internet. He mentions that today there are gowing groups of citizens, who are mobilizing science in campaigns to defend the environment, to protect wildlife, to warn about the effects of climate change, and so on. However; Burke notes that science is becoming “more inaccessible to the general public than before, so much so that it maybe no exageration to speak of the rapid growth of ignorance in this large domain. This is due to many reasons, like the ever-increasing specialization, the increasing complexity and remoteness of scientific experiments from everyday life, political reasons and the ‘warfare of science with theology.”

There are many aspects through which to explore ignorance of geography, too. Burke begins with the ignorance of outsiders, the colonizers. He claims that the declaration of ignorance about the existence of indigenous peoples was convenient and was probably feigned. He writes: “Whether or not the phrase ‘no one’s land’ was in use, the assumption behind it was certainly current among white settlers from the 16th to the 19th centuries.” He explains that colonists did not want to know about the use of the land before their arrival, by the First Peoples in the Americas, the Maori in New Zealand and Aboriginal groups in Australia. This deliberate unawareness has been described as ‘the conceptual erasure of those societies that had been there before’.

However, there was also true ignorance of geography and many erroneous beliefs about places and cultures, like: the assumption that the earth was flat and square; the belief in medieval Europe that the world was divided into three continents;  the belief of the ancient Greek geographer Ptolemy that Scandinavia was an island; the common belief in ancient Greece and Rome that non-human peoples, the ‘Plinian races’ as they are now known could be found in distant parts of the world, stories that would have been a deterrent to travel; the fact that in Sicily, as late as the 1950s, an investigator discovered that some peasants did not know where Russia was, or that Columbus actually re-discovered America because around the year 1000, a Norse explorer, Leif Erikson, had reached part of the North American coast that became known as ‘Vinland’, a knowledge that was eventually lost; the belief that the Amazons, mentioned in the 5th century BCE in the Histories of Herodotus, were declared found by Columbus and other explorers in a variety of places; the myth of El Doarado; the ignorance of the existence of China and its civilization in Europe, and the Chinese ignorance of Europe, and on and on.

Moreover, often travelogues were innacurate and Burke claims that some writers “may have gone too far in the direction of fiction without admitting this to their readers.” Censorship often impacted what information was allowed to circulate or reach other places. Travelling, especially by land, was difficult and dangerous and some countries were officially closed to foreigners by the authorities, for political and religious reasons. For instance, Copernicus was introduced to the Chinese after the  ban on teaching heliocentrism was lifted in 1757, Korea, nicknamed ‘the Hermit Kingdom,’remained almost unknown in the West until it became a protectorate of Japan in 1905, and Mekka and Lhasa, resisted European knowledge and visitors well into the nineteenth century. Even when discoveries were made, often travel accounts were not allowed to be published and maps often remained secret [cartographic silences]. Even in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, some regimes and corporations have continued the policy of secrecy.

Finally, Burke tells us that in the 21^st century ignorance of the earth’s geography has been greatly reduced through exploration and scientific research, “our remaining ignorance and its tragic consequences concern nuclear weapons, pesticides, pollution, the decline of biodiversity, and above all by forecasts of climate change.” He quotes Bill McKibben, who wrote that one reason we mostly ignored the natural world around us is that ‘it has always been there and we presumed it always would’, but the threat of destruction, as a result of industrialization, awakened interest in what was threatened. Global warming and its denial, “has revealed new ignorance about the earth as well as presenting new challenges to all its inhabitants.”

In the second part of the book we read about the consequences of ignorance throughout history and across contexts. We soon become aware of how these can be dangerous, even lethal. Education, says Burke, is essential and less costly. This part of the book contains plethora disastrous forms of ignorance organized by types of human activity: ignorance in war, in business, in politics, and the strategic ignorance involved in industrial and political espionage and conspiracy.

Burke introduces the idea of relative ignorance in relation to war, claiming that “In war, both sides suffer from ignorance. …… The fundamental question whether battles and wars can be won by planning remains controversial.” Stendhal, Tolstoy and Zola, all wrote about the chaos and ignorance concerning war, and probably war is a combination of crass ignorance on many fronts, arrogance and a sense of superiority, deception, planning, adequate supplies and knowledge. He provides many historical examples to support his claims. For instance, he refers to Hitler’s lost touch with reality, the ‘multiple ignorances’ of the Vietnam War from the military to the press to the public, the lies, arrogance and disregard of the Vietnamese resistance to foreign rule and anti-colonialism stance.

In his chapter on ignorance in business, Burke explores ignorance in trade, industry and agriculture, organizational ignorance, advertising, unconscious desires, consumer ignorance and vulnerability, ‘financial illiteracy’ and ‘accounting illiteracy,’ the spreading of false rumours, the ignorance of investors and bursting of bubbles, which in serious cases like the South Sea Bubble in 1920 led to a wave of suicides and the fall of the government in England, clandestine business and the need of feigned ignorance.  Concerning agriculture, for instance, he refers to the ignorance that colonists had of the lands that had been colonized with dire consequences; the frequent campaigns to improve agriculture from above, and the dangers of imposing changes in defiance of local knowledge and the experience of those who worked the land; the aggressive plowing of grasslands or the emphasis on short term self-interest.

Burke begins his chapter on politics and ignorance by saying that Michel Foucault’s work has helped us to understand the relation between power and knowledge more clearly than before, but examining the relationship between power and ignorance is also illuminating. He explores the ignorance of ordinary people, which he claims  is an asset for more or less authoritarian regimes, and an anxiety for more or less democratic states, the ignorance of rulers and politicians, and the organizational ignorance built into the political system, the machinery of government. He also provides examples to explain strategic ignorance. One being that of The American Party that had acquired the name of‘The Know Nothings’ because members were advised to say ‘I know nothing’ when faced with questions about their organization.

He provides examples of views promoting the importance of keeping vast numbers of people uneducated and ignorant held, for instance, by Voltaire, initially, and rulers like Knig Louis XIII and Richelieu, King Frederick VI of Denmark, the Ottoman sultan or oriental despotism, and many more since. Polish journalist R. Kapuscinski’s (cited in the book) wrote in his report on Iran under the rule of the shah that “A dictatorship depends for its existence on the ignorance of the mob; that’s why all dictators take such pains to cultivate that ignorance.” Burke refers to William Lovett, who in the 19^th century proposed a reform of education and wrote: “the ignorance of the masses has made them in all ages the slaves of the enlightened and cunning.”

Ignorance and the spreading of rumours create problems both in people’s personal lives and bigger systems like democracies. John Kennedy had said that “the educated citizen knows that . . . only an educated and informed people will be a free people…(ctied in Burke).” Burke refers to ‘rational ignorance’ coined by Anthony Downs to describe those who think that informing themselves about politics is not worth the trouble, and how voters for Donald Trump make a series of choices to avoid knowledge that contradicts their opinions. He refers to what has been termed by philosopher Philip Kitcher ‘vulgar democracy’ described as a ‘tyranny of ignorance’. He gives examples of ‘voter ignorance,’ like, for instance, the widespread ignorance about the effects of Brexit. We could probably find examples of this type of ignorance in every country.

Concerning the rulers’ ignorance, Burke writes that the pre-modern state was, in many crucial respects, partially blind. However, there are plenty of examples of rulers’ ignorance both in the more recent past and in our current era. He writes that even though today most prime ministers have studied economics or social sciences, practised law or have served as ministers, diplomats or mayors, and therefore, have some knowledge of politics, the problem of ignorance arises from the fact that professional training involves specialization, while the job of president or prime minister requires wide-ranging knowledge. He refers to a long list of heads of states, who displayed notorious ignorance of geography, other countries and foreign affairs, and their unwise or detrimental decisions as a result. Burke also discusses “imperial or colonial’ and neo-colonial ignorance, and their often tragic outcomes. The famines in Bengal, Ireland and Africa are examples of this type of ignorance combined with other factors.

Burke explains how many catastrophies often ensue from willful ignorance of business leaders and politicians, like for instance, Presidents Jaοr Bolsonaro or Donald Trump, [who also suffers from ignorance in its acute form, that of not knowing that he does not know], who both refused to respond to the COVID 19 pandemic and are failing to acknowledge or confront climate change. In his chapter on catastrophies he distinguishes between inevitable ignorance of the future & culpable ignorance and lack of preparation. He moves across historical eras to shed light on “too many cases in history of natural disasters striking after dangers had been ignored.” It seems that we repeatedly neglect to prepare or take measures to prevent or reduce the impact of natural disasters. In areas vulnerable to floods or earthquakes lack of preparation is culpable. Burke writes that the more recent natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina, “revealed what might be called the ‘social distribution’ of ignorance,” a recurrent theme in history, when local knowledge is ignored not at one’s own peril, but at the peril of others.

Moreover, we neglect to take measures to prevent catastrophic events like Chernobyl. In 17^th and 18^th century Northern Europe, even though most houses were constructed of wood, arrangements to fight fires were insufficient, and thus, the burning of whole towns was common. All the great and traumatic famines in history point to the fact that they are both natural and man made disasters, a combination of ignorance, arrogance, indifference and incompetence. Burke also explores many examples of the consequences of ignorance that come from the long history of outbreak of disease and pandemics from the14^th century outbreak of bubonic plague to the Coronavirus, more recently. True ignorance, but also willful ignorance, hubris and resistance to new knowledge and technologies, have all been part of the story, and history seems to repeat itself. For instance, quarantine was resisted by business in the 19^th century cholera outbreak as in the 2020 pandemic. Ignorance and outdated beliefs have across time led to what is called the ‘Scapegoat Syndrome’. As for resistance against preventive measures, it goes back in time. For instance, he writes that inoculation against smallpox, “a practice long known in China and the Middle East, became the subject of vigorous debate before it was adopted in 18^th century Europe.”  Later in 1904 in Rio de Janeiro it led to the ‘Vaccine Revolt.’  Burke, however, warns against simplistic explanations, adding that it was not only the result of ignorance due to illiteracy and poverty, but an angry response to interference in people’s lives by the authorities and a clash between different cultures.

In the last few chapters of the book more important themes are explored, like secrets and lies in the world of science and scholarship, in politics and industry, denial and cover-ups of disasters, massacres and scandals, taboo historical events omitted from school history textbooks, deception of the masses by rulers, censorship and surveillance, and whistleblowers supporting transparency and divulging critical information to the public, in the age of the Internet. Publications have in different eras generally been subjected to censorship by authorities, to a lesser or greater degree depending on the country. In early Europe there was to a double censorship, both religious and political. However, writers have often been able to pass their messages or criticism of authoritarian regimes through the use of allegories, where animals stand for humans, by writing about other similar historical eras and events or by publications that are made and distributed secretly by hand.

Burke says that denial is a defence mechanism for both individuals and institutions, but public denial is also a form of disinformation. Denial and cover-ups go back a long way, but denial of atrocities in warfare, genocides, nuclear accidents, global warming became more frequent or at least better known, in the 20^th century. The Holocaust denial, one of the better known examples, is still with us even though by 1942 millions of Germans knew what was going on in camps. Suppression of research (tobacco companies), encouraging disbelief in what has been exposed, spreading doubt or false rumours, forged documents, are all methods of what has been described as the ‘manufacture’ of ignorance and the maintenance of ignorance.

Disinformation includes damaging others’ reputation, interfering in elections of another country, deliberate propagation of misleading information, which Burke writes: “has exploded in the past century, driven both by new technologies for disseminating information …..  and by the increased sophistication of those who would mislead us.” As for the prospects of truth, he notes: “The current proliferation of ‘fake news’ is an alarming one, but the prospects for truth are not completely black. Just as cover-ups are followed by uncovering, so the lies current in the media are regularly exposed by fact-checking agencies on their websites.”

And while scholars are interested in ignorance, business writers and consultants use ignorance and our fear of uncertainty to gain. We are all ignorant of the future and techniques for managing this ignorance and the fears connected to this uncertainty can prove lucrative for some. Burke remarks “if we read the predictions of futurologists decades after they have been made, the failures spring to our eyes.” Rather than our consuming futurologists’ predictions he suggests it would be wiser to study the past, not because the past is a source of precedent on which we can base our own predictions, but on the common sense grounds that it could prevent us repeating mistakes. Ignorance of history on the part of voters can function like a kind of collective amnesia with important consequences. Burke provides examples like the case of Spain. He writes that the return to democracy after the death of Franco was assisted by memories of the Civil War, and later when the Left was defeated largely because it was divided, memories of that defeat encouraged different parties to work together in the 1970s; however, now (2021) that the memory of the Civil War has faded, Spanish democracy appears to be becoming more fragile. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith coined the phrase immunizing memory believing that memory is a better protective measure than law.

Epilogue

Inevitably, each book we select to read, each film we watch, each field we decide to study or specialize in, each language or activity we choose to learn and engage with, necessitates our omitting or ignoring something else, and the more one learns and knows the more one becomes aware of the immensity of one’s ignorance. As knowledge shifts so does ignorance. And no matter how much we know or are capable of learning, our ignorance [even for the very smart, the highly educated, and polymaths], will always be greater than any knowledge we can hope to acquire in the short span of a human life.

It might be wise then to try to be somewhat selective as to where we want to spend our energy and time, in terms of the things we want to know, which is not that easy in an age where we are bombarded by information, and real and fake news, not to mention the overwhelming knowledge that has been acquired. As for my recent choice of this book, I have felt that it was worth the time and energy I invested in it. It increased my knowledge, refreshed my memory, and also, brought my ignorance to the forefront of my awareness.

Also, it is useful to bear in mind that everybody has knowledge, irrespectively of literacy and education, but of different things, and everyone is ignorant to a lesser or greater degree. Burke quotes Mark Twain, who said that ‘We are all ignorant, just about different things.’ And we can choose either to be generous in sharing knowledge or to withhold information that could otherwise benefit others and facilitate their decision making. Lies and the withholding of important information can often function either as tools of control or lead individuals or masses of people astray, decreasing their possibility of wise choice.

A box of colours                                                              Edited 18/ 05/ 2025

Extract from my more personal writing:

“‘The colour blue – that is my colour – and the colour blue means you have left the drabness of day-to-day reality to be transported into – not a world of fantasy, it’s not a world of fantasy – but a world of freedom where you can say what you like and what you don’t like. This has been expressed forever by the colour blue, which is really sky blue’ Louise Bourgeois

The season had come for me to lift the curtains and look at the light and the darkness and the colours and shapes of things from a place of new knowing of what I had implicitly always known. The white light, which at the time seemed as ‘the end of a tunnel’, when my breathing cracked, was not of a blinding pure fluorescent white, it was a milky, softer white. It is believed that white light contains all colours, whereas the white of pigment could be described as the absence of colour.  You can’t mix colours, you need to start with a white pigment. Thoughts about colour and art occupy my mind every now and then, and sometimes even during moments of duress.  Once as I was sinking from anaesthesia before a removal of fibroids surgery, favourite paintings emerged in my dazed awareness. I woke up accompanied by a particular painting with vibrant oranges and reds by Tetsis.

As a child I liked looking at pictures and the shapes light created on the surface of objects. I was fascinated by the dance between the shades of green and the sunlight on the porcelain tiles of the fireplace in the living room, and I wondered if there was a way to paint the light on surfaces. I found that grey produced from white and black seemed clean, strict and authoritarian, even though I did not know the word authoritarian then, but when it came about from mixing leftover paints one ended up with ‘dirty greys’, or the colour of quick sand and mud. The same happened to plasticine once I had mixed enough colours enough times.

Francis Ponge writes: ‘Our soul resents it. Our feet and wheels trample it. “Mud” is how we address those we hate, paying little attention to the injustice done to the mud. Does it really deserve the constant humiliation, attacked with such an atrocious persistence? Mud, so despised, I love you….’                        (Mud: The Unfinished Ode by Francis Ponge)”.                                   Tonya Alexandri-2017
 The Secret Lives of Colour, written by Kassia St. Clair, is a historical exploration of the world of colours. St. Clair illustrates how important colours have been in human history and what individual colors have meant throughout the centuries. She discusses how colours exist as much in the socio-cultural and political realm, as they do physically, and therefore, should also be understood as subjective cultural creations.

St. Clair initially introduces the basic science of colour and how we see colour. Around 4.5% of the world’s population are colour-blind or deficient because of faults in their cone cells.The phenomenon is usually genetic and is more prevalent in men: around 1 in 12 men are affected compared to 1 in 200 women. For people with ‘normal’ colour vision, when cone cells are activated by light, they relay the information through the nerve system to the brain, which in turn interprets this as colour; however, the interpretation stage is not that straightforward.

In a chapter with the title, Chromophilia, chromophobia: Politics of colour, she explains how a certain distaste for colour runs through Western culture, and that many classical writers were dismissive, believing that colour was a distraction from design / line and form. In art, she says, the tussle over the respective merits of drawing versus colour raged on through the Renaissance, and even today, though somewhat muted. Colour has even been viewed as sinful. The Protestants, for instance, writes St. Clair, expressed their intellectual simplicity, severity and humility in a palette dominated by black and white; bright colours like red, orange, yellow and blue were removed from the walls of their churches, houses and wardrobes, and pious Henry Ford refused for many years to produce cars in any colour other than black.

Also, during different historical periods there were laws that governed what class of people could wear certain colors. Difficult to create colors, like purple, “a greedy consumer of resources,” and red, and brighter colours, were reserved for kings and queens, cardinals, and the ruling class in general, while dull, earthy colours like grey and brown were confined to the poor, rural peasants and the working class. Tyrian purple dipped cloth, for instance, was worth its weight in gold, and by the 4^th century AD in Rome only the emperor was allowed to wear Tyrian purple; anyone else caught wearing it could face death. St. Clair writes that as colours came to take on meanings and cultural significance within societies, attempts were made to restrict their use, through the sumptuary laws. Such laws were passed in ancient Greece, China and Japan, and they found their fullest expression in Europe from the mid-twelfth century. These laws could touch on anything: diet, dress and furnishings, and they sought to enforce social boundaries by encoding the social strata into a clear visual system. Colour became a signifier in this social language.

The book is full of fascinating facts, stories and insights into the use of pigments, dyes and colours. Just to mention a few, Kohl, the black colour used by the Egyptians as eyeliner to make the whites of the eyes stand out was believed to have magical properties, and the Pharaohs valued it so much they buried themselves with it so as to wear it in the afterlife. Naturally, the quality of Kohl depended on the wealth of the wearer. Indigo comes from the Greek word indikon, which means “from India” because it was thought that the seeds of the plant used to obtain indigo blue came from India, which is not actually true, and in the 1500s, in Rome, the indigo pigment was so expensive (one kilogram cost 15x the average salary per day) that some merchants tried to sell a fake product made out of pigeon poop. Absinthe isn’t actually poisonous, but this was a story told to convince people to drink less, and mauve was accidently discovered in the search for a cure for malaria. In 1979, a colour with the name Baker–Miller Pink, first painted on the walls of a US Naval Correctional Centre, was praised for its calming effect on inmates reducing levels of violence within the centre significantly.This gave it something of a pop like status in the US, and as a result it was used for the seats of buses, houses, sports locker rooms, and so on. Subsequently, however, studies conducted by academia produced contradictory results.

Humans have been on an eternal quest to make pigments for artwork, dating back to prehistoric cave dwellers, who had figured out how to make long lasting pigments for their cave drawings. St. Clair writes that Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist writing in the first century AD, claimed that painters in classical Greece used only four colours: black, white, red and yellow; however, she notes the Egyptians had discovered a complex way of manufacturing a bright blue at least as early as 2500 BC., but still early artists were restricted.

As part of this endeavor to produce more colours and find more sources for pigments, a huge number of plants, insects, crustaceans and humans have been sacrificed. The food industry, for instance, uses cochineal (officially named E120) in foods. It was only in 2012 that Starbucks was forced to drop E120 after a vehement protest from vegetarians and Muslims. Cochineal is obtained using a pigment from a tiny bug that lives on cacti, which was a sign of power for the Aztecs. Using a version of the forced-labour system the Inca had used to build temples and roads, the Spanish insisted locals over the age of 18 put in a year’s work for subsistence wages. Along with gold and silver, cochineal provided the financial sinew of the Spanish empire. One of the two most profitable mines in the Spanish empire was Cerro Rico, which was viewed by the locals as ‘the mountain that eats men.’  Accidents and mercury poisoning were common.

Metals like iron, copper, silver and gold have a structure that contains mobile electrons that strongly reflect light, and this is what gives these metals their distinctive sheen. St Clair tells us that gold’s glimmer, coupled with its resistance to tarnishing, made it an emblem for divinity; although, it is also associated with greed and avarice, evident in the myth of King Midas. She writes: “The medieval Christian Church binged on the metal.” And for hundreds of years artists liked to use it (e.g. Giotto’s figures are not depicted in a room or landscape but lie on a smooth golden ground; in The Birth of Venus Botticelli wove gold through Venus’s hair; Klimt’s ‘Golden Phase’).

People also became ill or died from dangerous substances like lead and arsenic as colorants in everything from make-up to clothing to wallpaper. Scheele’s Green, and its toxic cousins, St. Calir writes: “were responsible for many deaths, as unsuspecting consumers papered their homes, clothed their offspring and wrapped their baked goods in an exciting new shade that contained lethal doses of arsenic.” Like most colours over the centuries green has been associated with positive and negative qualities, and there have been many irrational taboos and prejudices against colours in different eras. In the West from the 12^th century green started becoming associated with the devil and demonic creatures, maybe St. Clair notes, as a result of the increasing antagonism between Christians and Muslims, for whom the colour was sacred. Brown was also despised, and browns were used and valued mostly after the first period of the Renaissance, in Correggio, Caravaggio and Rembrandt’s great paintings. Anthony van Dyke, in the seventeenth century, became so skilled with one brown pigment that it later became known as ‘Van Dyke brown’.

Lead white was also deadly. In 1678, Sir Philiberto Vernatti described the fate of those involved in the production of white lead. But it wasn’t just the people grinding and producing the pigment that suffered from the effects of lead poisoning. White lead had long been used as a cosmetic to make skin look smooth and pale. St. Clair refers to Xenophon, who wrote disapprovingly of women wearing a ‘plaster of ceruse and minium ((white and red lead)’ in Greece during the 4th century BC. In China and Japan women were mixing a similar poisonous brew with rice powder to use as a foundation, and women in Queen Elizabeth’s court were painting blue veins over a similar very pale base layer. Similarly, two pigments used to produce yellow colours, orpiment and gamboge, were also highly poisonous. Orpiment, a naturally occurring mineral: a canary-yellow sulphide of arsenic (As2S3) is around 60% arsenic and it is deadly, and although it was occasionally taken in minute amounts as a purgative in Java, Bali and China, the risks of abusing it were well known.

Additionally, throughout the book there are references to the multiple associations we make between colours and other things. Let’s take white for instance. St. Clair writes white has an otherness to it, is considered positive or having a religious quality, and it is also connected to power and money. It is the Chinese colour of mourning, and in the West and Japan, brides wear it because it is a colour symbolic of purity. During the English Reformation, churches and parishioners used whitewash to obscure colourful murals and icons that depicted saints in ways they now deemed impious. But she mentions it can also be exclusive, autocratic and neurotic. White has long been connected with money and power, and in the past only the rich could afford to buy and maintain white fabrics because wool and cotton, had to be heavily processed in order to appear white, and then requied a lot of labour to be maintained in an era with no washing machines.

Yellow is another colour group that has been associated with many different positive and negative qualities. In humans, St. CLair writes, the colour betokens illness, sallow skin, jaundice, and when associated to ‘journalism’it indicates rash sensationalism. Yellow has also been associated with sensationalist literature and the “sinful” yellow book covers from the mid-nineteenth century. For others, these sunny covers were symbols of modernity and yellow books show up in two of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings from the 1880s, for whom, among other artists and thinkers of the time, the colour came to stand as the symbol of the age and their rejection of repressed Victorian values. The final decade of the nineteenth century became known as the ‘Yellow Nineties.’

The flow of immigrants from the East [particularly China] to the West, in the early twentieth century, was dubbed the ‘yellow peril’. The most notorious example of yellow as a symbol of stigma is the star the Nazis forced Jews to wear, but other marginalised groups had been forced to wear yellow clothes or signs from the early Middle Ages, and during the Tang dynasty yellow shades and hues were forbidden to common people and officials. In India however, the colour symbolizes spirituality, peace and knowledge, and is associated with Krishna.

As for the orange group St. Clair mentions that the Russian abstract artist, Wassily Kandinsky, described orange as ‘red brought nearer to humanity by yellow,’and wrote that ‘Orange is like a man, convinced of his own powers.” It’s also a colour used to draw attention to potential danger in diverse contexts and cultures, a warning symbols on roads, “in part because it forms a high contrast against the blue-grey asphalt, even in low light.” It is the colour of the Dutch. It was used by the Impressionists and artists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Munch, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Crocuses are one source of saffron orange dye. Traces of natural saffron have been found in paintings in Iraq made 50,000 years ago, and the ancient Greeks used crocuses / κρόκος to dye their clothes. It has also been used to dye Buddhist robes, but its scarcity and high cost has resulted in it being replaced by turmeric, and currently synthetic dyes.

St. Clair’s chapter on language and colour is especially interesting. She points out that the study of old texts by ancient Greeks, especially Homer, the Bible in its original Hebrew, the Quran, Vedic chants from India, and ancient Chinese and Icelandic stories, seem to exhibit “the same muddled references to colour.” She refers to the relativists’s view that supports that language shapes perception and that without a word for a colour we don’t see it as distinct, and to the universalists’s view that suggests that basic colour categories are universal and rooted, somehow, in our biology. She concludes that what is certain is that the language of colour is complex.

There is a plethora of information in the book, as St. Clair discusses 75 different shades, dyes and hues. And I think her book would interest anyone who loves colours or / and is interested in art, history, politics and culture, chemistry and interesting trivia.