The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

by Amitav Ghosh

Not till the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, in 1978, were native beliefs legalized.

Who indeed were the savages?

In the end the trees were saved not by superior European botanical knowledge, but by the practical expertise of an enslaved Bengali gardener by the name of Charles Rama.

Love the sarcasm, this is savage!

Not the least of Saddam Hussein’s offenses was that he had begun to trade oil in currencies other than the dollar.

That was in essence, the driving reason for the gulf wars.

The net result is a world turned on its head. Five centuries of history—going back to geopolitical rivalries over the control of cloves, nutmegs, and pepper—have given the world’s most “advanced” countries a strategic interest in perpetuating the global fossil- fuel regime. Conversely, this history has given rising powers like China and India an important strategic incentive to move to renewables.

And they waste their precious resources fighting over himalayan territory!!!

“Violence committed abroad, in service of imperial expansion, was central to the making of capitalist modernity.”

And that is the argument that kills it.

a country’s ability to project military force is directly connected to the size of its carbon footprint— and this has been true since the early nineteenth century.

Ever since we were able to harness the power of fossil fuels at scale, this has held absolutely true!

“We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth,” he told the leaders of the US in 1948, “but only 6.3 percent of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relations which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day- dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.”

A brutal admission of "we will do whatever it takes to keep our wealth intact".

But Africa’s Covid apocalypse never materialized, and a few sub-Saharan countries, like Senegal, had some of the best outcomes in the world.8 These outcomes suggest that contrary to received wisdom, the conditions that Western elites have long stigmatized as “backward” and “underdeveloped” may in fact create certain kinds of resilience. It was probably because African leaders had prior experience of infectious diseases, and were therefore well aware of the fragility of their health care systems, that they took prompt and decisive action, while their Western counterparts complacently assumed that the pandemic would pass them by.

This illustrates the arrogance of the "developed world" quite aptly.

They are, rather, products of an “imperial optic,” heavily influenced by nineteenth- century ideas of civilizational dominance.

Bingo!

what is at issue is not ultimately what is sustainable for the planet; what is at stake is a way of life, founded on high consumption and defended by military power, that can only survive if large numbers of poor, low- emitting people are eliminated.

The war of inaction and passive elimination.

To White settlers, one of the most offensive aspects of Native American culture was its incompatibility with the paradigm of ever- growing material desire.

It's the same dissonance they have with Indian philosophy.

To bring him out of savagery into citizenship we must make the Indian more intelligently selfish before we can make him unselfishly intelligent.

Intelligently selfish sums it up rather well.

It is the “divine angel of discontent” who has metastasized cars into SUVs, and houses into McMansions.

This has infected all of us.

The metaphor of the lifeboat was evidently chosen with great care, for the persuasiveness of the story (and it is exactly that, a story) rests entirely on the image of a few rich lifeboats staying afloat while vast hordes of poor, drowning people clutch at their gunwales.

This is the essence of Anglo American capitalism. In some sense this is Darwinian with a cruel twist. Survival of the greediest (nolt only the fittest).

But the analogy on which the argument rests is actually its greatest weakness: all it takes to expose its fallacies is a change of metaphor. What if, for instance, the human predicament were to be represented by a metaphor taken from an actual historical circumstance involving lifeboats: the Titanic, where, by common consent, women and children boarded the lifeboats first, rather than the strong and wealthy?

This is the essential difference, the deep cultural dissonance between polytheistic and monotheistic cultures.

Indeed, the ability to cooperate is now regarded by some scientists as a crucial evolutionary advantage.

This is the singular ability that separates primates (and man) from other animals.

the pursuit of individual interests at all costs, these ideas, and the behaviors they generate, could be described as forms of pathological or morbid individualism.

This is what Pema Lhaki tells Heinrich Harrer (about morbid individualism and the pathological desire for more) in Seven Years in Tibet.

When the idea that the selfish pursuit of individual interests is a universal feature of human nature is adopted as a basic tenet, it can become a self- fulfilling prophecy. Neo classical economics, in which that idea is a foundational creed, is a good example.

Very destructively self-fulfilling!

selfishness, uncooperativeness, and dishonesty are not “naturally” dominant aspects of the human personality; they become dominant only through processes of indoctrination into certain modes of thought.

Exactly what unnatural (read Abrahamic) religions have propagated.

far from reflecting anything universal, Lord of the Flies presents an image of human nature that Western elites want to believe because it is a product of the same imaginaries on which their own worldview is founded. That is why the book is taught to schoolchildren to this day.

And this is exactly what we need to dispel among our children in our large gated communities (microcosms of the first world in our third world countries).

Latin word for “border”— terminus.

Woah!

extermino, which means “drive over the border,”

Interesting!

exterminate, the exact meaning of which is “to drive over the border to death, banish from life.”

Kill 'em all!

The question of whether Amerindians had souls or not, were fully human or not, was one that divided not only soldiers and conquistadores, but also many thinkers and philosophers.

This is the issue with neanderthal western education and propaganda. It has always been intrinsically racist.

This is but one of many instances in which “History” as related by imperial chroniclers chose to foreground a story that could be turned into a tale of White English victimhood while obscuring another, much deadlier event that did not lend itself to that narrative.

History (or what we know of it) is usually the victor's or survivors' narrative, often obfuscating truths and ignoring evidednce which goes against the desired glorification or virtue signalling agenda.

The Indian scientist Jagadis Chandra Bose demonstrated long ago that plants can feel pain and fear, and even make audible responses to certain kinds of stimuli. His work was hugely celebrated for a while, but then the agents of official modernity struck back and silenced him as a “charlatan.”

Even the religiously bigoted advocates of vegetarianism hold similar views about him, because it suits their agenda well.

How were they able to establish the idea that nonhumans are mute, and without minds, as the dominant wisdom of the time?

Irrespective of HOW they did it, the tragedy is that it came to pass. The world is consequently much worse off.

the ideologues who laid the foundations of Hindu fundamentalism explicitly embraced fascistic theories of race, Aryanism, and so on. They may have invoked ancient symbols and images in their writings, but their ideas were very much products of colonial modernity, which is why they have now morphed so easily into an ideology of rapaciously extractivist nationalism.

And we are sliding down this slope with no hope of pullback or recovery. Add to all this, crony capitalism… and what have you!

I do not need to be Bandanese to understand what Gunung Api means to the islanders, just as I do not need to be Greek to be moved by the Iliad. It is empathy that makes it possible for humans to understand each other’s stories: this is why storytelling needs to be at the core of a global politics of vitality.

Well said!