amitav ghosh. great interview. a must read

The US and Australia are good examples—what happened was that European populations arrived on continents that were relatively underpopulated and had enormous resources. Basically, they created these extremely wealthy, but also extremely spend-thrift civilizations.

That quote echoes  what I have long believed.  The land grab, the plunder  of resources that actually belonged to   people  who were  wiped out is what created the wealth  of  so called western civilizations. 

The idea of "Nations" that narrowly define , contain and constrict people within narrow boundaries and narrower visions of themselves  is also an invention of  the West. 

I found this interview  worth every second i spend reading it.  It clarified some of my own thinking,  about  so many things. 

Guernica: You have written that in India, politics are a part of normal conversation; it’s not considered even talking about politics, it’s just speaking.

Amitav Ghosh: That’s right. When I call my mother on the phone—my mother is now 81—you would think that we would sit around asking “Oh, how are you? How is this?” Not a bit of it! The first thing she tells me, ‘Do you know what that demonstration was about yesterday?” I mean, it is just part of the fabric of our lives.

Guernica: That is a nice counter-balance to the US, which has a lot of apathy.

Amitav Ghosh: Yes, it’s true. Not just apathy, but a deliberate depoliticization.

Guernica: In a recent speech for the European Cultural Foundation, you addressed migration and climate change as factors contributing to the “crisis” and “catastrophe” our earth is now facing. You also said, “Nationalism is indeed one of the most pernicious threads in this helix of disaster.” How does nationalism contribute to our current situation? Is this the same patriotism that Captain Mukheriji spit in the face of?

Amitav Ghosh: Yes, I think it is in many ways a perfect example of that. If you take two examples, the US and Australia, both have made perfectly clear that they will make no move on climate change. At all costs they want to preserve their own standard of living if it be at the expense of destroying the whole world. It is nationalism carried to its greatest and most absurd extreme. Essentially what we are seeing is an absolute refusal to address any of the issues, to reach any kind of compromise geared toward the world community and absolute insistence on maintaining their own standards of living which are unbelievably wasteful and which have really essentially created the problem in the first place.

Guernica: Right. We know that if everybody in in the world were to live by the same environmental standards as people in the United States or Australia, it would be completely unsustainable. You mentioned in your speech that collective ideals and sacrifice for the greater good are values that have really disappeared from the US or Australia in that sense.

Amitav Ghosh: The US and Australia are good examples—what happened was that European populations arrived in continents that were relatively underpopulated and had enormous resources. Basically, they created these extremely wealthy, but also extremely spend-thrift civilizations that are just big predators; just sucking everything up. There has been incredible resource extraction, to a point where now their own ecosystems are collapsing. Most of all in the US, where the aquifers have been drained and they are no longer able to sustain agriculture. It all grew out of this idea that everyone should pursue their own profit at all costs and no value is attached to the common good. The common good is a principle that literally doesn’t exist in the US discourse anymore.

Ideas that developed in the new world have for the last 40 or 50 years been promoted as the model of a kind of ideal global civilization where every country and people everywhere are supposed to just squeeze out everything they can from wherever they are at the cost of everyone else.

Guernica: Do you think that we can come to a point where nations that have been in a position of supremacy could have some sort of a realization? What would it take?

Amitav Ghosh: At this point I have to say that I feel very despondent, as I think everybody does. I have friends who are scientists and climate scientists and, even though they won’t say so in public, they all recognize that the game is over. By 2030, they are going to see a catastrophic impact. Look at New York City last year, this year. Two freakish storms. Clearly there are global warming impacts on these two storms. But even the newspapers don’t mention it. It is just completely suppressed. So what can you say? The whole idea of free speech, free press, free expression, is that the truth is spoken. But what we see now is that the U.S. and Great Britain, these countries with so much clout, free speech and free press, have created a system of press and politics whereby what stares you in the face cannot be said. I would say it is even worse in a way than the sorts of things that we saw happening under forms of totalitarianism.

Amitav Ghosh: Two things have happened of late in the world of writing: One is that increasingly the world of literature/writing is becoming absorbed into this culture of diversion and entertainment, and I think some of these festivals are a part of that. Essentially, it is a part of the whole process of global distraction, which presents itself as a sort of contribution to writing, but it is nothing of the kind; it is just a field of distraction. I feel that it is important for writers like myself to have an interface with the public and I think the Internet does allow this. So why should I bother with festivals? I can address people directly through my blog. And my blog gets around half a million hits a month. I can address people directly without that sort of mediation which corporate media requires. The big media always wants you to tell their story and [my blog] is the clever way for me to talk about things that I want to talk about.

Guernica: You mention the dangers of an author becoming a spectacle or a performer from new sources of pressure—not from a tyrannical or suppressive government but from private interest groups, social groups, political groups who are disseminated through the internet. Do you still feel this pressure because you are actively using the internet and your blog?

Amitav Ghosh: The pressure doesn’t just come from the inside. What I would say today is that the primary threat to free speech and expression, the ways in which it has changed since the 20th century, is that the primary threat to freedom of expression comes from non-state actors. All the instruments that we have for defending free expression are essentially related to the state. We have various writers groups like PEN and so on, and they honed their skills and tactics to deal with repressive states. But they don’t have any tactics for dealing with extremist groups, and that is a much more real threat to writers today than it used to be. And in many ways, these extremists have actually won. There are many sorts of things that nobody will say anymore—or they have to find other ways of saying it. I feel that the way that people are addressing the question of freedom of speech and freedom of expression today continues to be rooted in the 20th century, that hasn’t made the transition to the 21st century.

What can you say? In a way our mammalian instincts have left us unprepared to deal with something so new.

I can tell you as a practicing writer that we feel much more alone today than we did ever before. Suppose someone writes something that is offensive to X group, and the X group says “we are going to do this and that to you.” What can we do? There is nothing to protect the writer. In fact, we live in a circumstance where the writer appeals to the state: “Protect me!” And, more often than not, it is the state that is providing that protection. We see this even in India, let alone in the West. So in a sense, the tools we have developed are tools that are geared toward something else. I don’t what the answer is, but it seems to me that if PEN were to pick up the problem, they should develop a fund where writers offer protection to other writers.

In societies like the ones we would like to live in, it is the journalists whose rights must be most urgently protected because they have to tell us what is going on. And of course that is one of the reasons we have to be very wary and suspicious of what the state does. But, what is perfectly clear now, is that we have to be much more wary and suspicious of corporations, because in fact so much of the suppression of freedom of speech comes from corporations rather than the state. Just consider the U.S. or Britain: they guarantee freedom of speech in their constitutions, but corporations routinely make their employees sign confidentiality agreements. How is that even possible?




 But, the thing is that it is a mistake to think that these things can be addressed at an individual level. And that is the catastrophic mistake that we have made in thinking about it. These things have to be addressed collectively. For me to reduce my own carbon footprint, while the oil industry is encouraging everyone to expand their footprint, it is incensed. It is like trying to cut down a tree by eating its leaves; it will never happen that way.

http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/amitav-ghosh-products-of-folly/