coe019_chakrabarty.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Oh, yes, friends, we are back with the Cultures of Energy podcast, here we are at Sound Control Houston Rice University Digital Media Commons Thanks to all our friends. Thanks to you. Since thanks to the DMC, thanks to everyone who makes this podcast possible, especially you, dear listeners, we have by this point, I think over 8000 downloads of our episodes, which is great and all your feedback and all your warm wishes are really appreciated and make it just a joy to do this. We have a terrific episode. Surprise, surprise. Someday we're going to say we have a really terrible episode, but not today. Today we have a Dipesh Chakrabarti, the Lawrence A. Kempton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the college at the University of Chicago on the podcast. Dipesh, I got to know his work first years ago through a book that was at once a really important and a bit controversial in European studies called Provincial Housing Europe. And and then, oh, you have got a I got a co-host. Yeah, oops. Yeah, she's like waving at me. Well, I don't know. You didn't have your sunglasses on, but I didn't even have why.

Speaker2: [00:01:37] It's tough when you're in sound control. You got to. But I'm glad you liked that neologism, actually, because you wanted to go for ground control.

Speaker1: [00:01:45] But I said, no, it's sound controls. Much better. I agree with you, but I can't even recognize you because you're not wearing your sunglasses, and that's why I wasn't sure who was over there. So what do you want to say about it anyway? So you talk about this important article because you had an article that really was important in our field now.

Speaker2: [00:02:02] Yes. Well, so this depression is actually working on a book right now that we talk about during the podcast, and that'll be forthcoming at some point in soonish. But one of the things that we talk about a lot is the super important article that he wrote for thesis on the climate of history, right? And this article for those of you who have not read it. Run the to a screen and find it somewhere online because it's fully accessible. And it's a really brilliant article, obviously, that has four theses, but what it's done is it's really set many of the foundations for thinking about the Anthropocene in the humanities and the social sciences. It is a much cited and much circulated piece. And you know, Dipesh is a really, really well known postcolonial theorist and historian of India and capitalist processes, a very erudite, brilliant man. And he's really brought his thinking to bear upon these questions of Anthropocene. So he's kind of asking the question in this essay Where do we begin with history? You know, do we begin, you know, with the advent of, you know, so-called civilizations, do we begin with the advent of sort of the capital formation? Do we begin with industrialization? And he wants to trace it and track it much, much further back and to to deep history and starts asking those questions about deep history, deep time?

Speaker1: [00:03:27] Yeah, because really, I mean, I think what's been so provocative about the piece is written as a historian. How does the the recognition of the Anthropocene change, how we have to think? As about history, as historians or not as historians, right?

Speaker2: [00:03:41] Right. That it can't be. We can no longer sort of count on a certain form of human history that we've been that we've been working with really for many centuries now. So he kind of he he pushes back the historical timeline and starts to question, you know, where those beginnings happened.

Speaker1: [00:03:59] So for example, like one of the theses is, you know, the the age old distinction between human history and natural history used to go bye bye. It's got of. We've got to get past that right.

Speaker2: [00:04:10] Yeah. So like global histories of capitalism have to be in conversation with the question of the history of the species of humanity, whether humans as a species. So anyway, it's a very it's a very important, provocative piece, but we don't just sort of, you know, talk about the essay either. We have some good conversations about the beta scene, for example. Oh yeah, we talk about getting air conditioning and getting air conditioned outside. Yeah, that's important.

Speaker1: [00:04:39] Yeah, although that's pretty cryptic how you laid it out there.

Speaker2: [00:04:42] Well, I don't know. I don't want to spoil it. Yeah, I don't spoil it. It comes early on,

Speaker1: [00:04:45] So it's a funny thing that happened to him in Houston. So you won't have to wait long to hear about it.

Speaker2: [00:04:50] Yes. A funny thing happened to me on the way to the podcast.

Speaker1: [00:04:53] Exactly.

Speaker2: [00:04:55] So without further ado, maybe we should turn to Professor Chakrabarti.

Speaker1: [00:05:01] Go to Peche.

Speaker2: [00:05:11] Welcome press, Chakrabarti. We're so really happy to have you here kind of virtually in the studio by telephone speaking with us, it's so good to get a chance to talk to you again. So welcome to the Cultures of Energy podcast.

Speaker3: [00:05:26] Thank you. Thank you for having me here.

Speaker1: [00:05:28] We were just looking at our notes.

Speaker3: [00:05:29] It's been in this group.

Speaker1: [00:05:32] Yeah, we were just looking at our notes. It's been three and a half years since we had you here at rice. It's too long. You have to come back again.

Speaker3: [00:05:38] I had such a good time.

Speaker2: [00:05:39] Yeah, yeah. And so we are also remembering one of the kind of funny very Houston things that happened while you were here visiting and you may or may not remember. But we were laughing about it because you stayed at one of our more posh hotels here. It's called Hotel Zaza,

Speaker3: [00:05:55] And never I told you the story was outdoors. Yes? Tell us, Tell

Speaker2: [00:05:58] Us your story. Tell that story.

Speaker3: [00:05:59] That's a good place to start. I've dined out on that story so many times.

Speaker2: [00:06:03] That's great. That's great. So, so what happened? You had it. They offered you a table.

Speaker3: [00:06:09] I was, yeah, I was asking to the young lady at the dining hall reception for breakfast where I might sit in. And she said, Oh, you could sit indoors. I mean, or you could sit outdoors and in the room. It was hot. So I said, wouldn't outdoors be hot? And she just told me without batting an eyelid, she said it's only a condition

Speaker2: [00:06:36] All

Speaker3: [00:06:36] Of Houston outdoors, the air conditioning. Obviously, this outdoor is the outdoor adventures out,

Speaker1: [00:06:44] But somehow that captures both Houston and the Anthropocene in a nutshell, doesn't

Speaker3: [00:06:47] It? Yeah. And yeah, and also in some ways, it also it sort of shows them the inertia of a certain lifestyle.

Speaker2: [00:06:57] Right, right. Yeah. And the fact that she, as you said, didn't even bat an eyelash suggests that it's just so normative that there's no question about

Speaker3: [00:07:06] It, but of the normal, this was right. What was there to explain about it?

Speaker2: [00:07:10] Yeah, that's like these horrifying stories you hear of out in the suburbs of Houston, where during the winter, people want to have the experience of having a roaring fire. And so they have these fireplaces in their homes, but it never really gets cold enough to kind

Speaker3: [00:07:26] Of pull it down to a point where it should make sense. Exactly.

Speaker2: [00:07:29] They they crank up the air conditioning so that it's, you know, 50 degrees in the house. Yeah. And then start burning logs and

Speaker3: [00:07:39] It's very perverse, goes back to the 50s. And because, you know, I come from a Third-World background. So whenever I used to think about modernization, I used to think of William Rostow and poor countries like India and China trying to achieve the state of take off the take off stage in in roster's mapping of the journey, from development, from underdevelopment to development. But and now when I read American documents from the 1950s God they were, they believed in all this. They did, right? I mean, that was going to use the word that I shouldn't use. But they admit they believed in these fairy that they were selling to the Third World countries. Oh yeah, right? Profound faith in this modernization dreams that the Thames would indeed take care of electricity and whatever. I mean, whatever wind area was going around saying, you know, the prime minister Nehru, the first prime minister of India, used to have a map of a topographical map of India in his office and and he and he imagined in India where every river was dammed one day. Wow. But you know, this idea was coming from Tennessee Valley Authority, you know, but in the 50s, when you read American documents of the birth of histories about their vision for the US.

Speaker3: [00:08:54] I mean, it's a vision of limitless ness. You know, it's a vision of limitless plenitude. Right? And um, and it's amazing how much of that still works. You know, even the other day I got, I went to a business school for my master's degree India and my old business school friends who are now kind of either retired or approaching the age of retirement, whatever. You know, we have a listserv and they circulate different things in this morning. They circulated. I know where it came from, but an entirely technological utopian description of the future where everything, every every item was kind of plausible that we will have. All cars will be electrical by the time all cars will be self-driven. By such and such time, computers would be more intelligent than humans. So there'll be a lot, a lot of machine intelligence being used. Every little item was entirely plausible. But there was not a word about inequality, right? Yeah, right. But not a word about poverty. And there was no sense that that while technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the world, so have inequalities.

Speaker2: [00:10:02] Right. But but as you said, these true believers the faith in the market to constantly create growth and benefits and wealth.

Speaker3: [00:10:11] That that we can somehow get to a world that has no problems. Yeah. You know, and I find it's like it's almost an engineering engineer's utopia because, you know, once I was talking to an engineer friend about climate change and these two things and he said, Dipesh, you have to understand that engineers are trained to be optimistic. You know, we're trained to say Can-Do, right?

Speaker2: [00:10:34] Yeah, yeah. One wonders what it would be like if they were trained to be pessimistic. Would we be better off or

Speaker3: [00:10:40] Not better off? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker2: [00:10:42] Human beings are messy, though, for engineers, I think.

Speaker3: [00:10:45] You know, I love. So they think anyway. I'm just saying all this, you know, by way of really underlining the point that these Favreau's dreams or utopia kind of haven't died in people's everyday lives. No, no. They're in everyday discourse

Speaker1: [00:11:02] In a way they're clinging on to them ever more feverishly, I

Speaker3: [00:11:05] Think. Hang on to them. Absolutely. And when I was amazed by the absence of any discussion of poverty or inequality in this completely technological imagination of the world. Right, right. Yeah. Sorry. Oh no,

Speaker2: [00:11:19] No, no. That's that's that's a nice context. And so what we wanted to do, Dipesh, is to to mention this really seminal or angular, very, very important essay that you've written in two thousand nine, which really has set the stage in many ways for our discussions in the humanities and social sciences and beyond about the Anthropocene. And this is, of course, the your article on the four theses. Sure. And so I imagine that a lot of our listeners have read that article probably a several times and have marked up copies, you know, on their computer desktop. But but just for those who who haven't had a chance to read it yet, I wanted to just very quickly walk through the four theses and just repeat them for our readers. And then our first question to you is is whether you would add to these theses, whether you've found, you know, another thesis that you'd like to add or whether you would subtract or delete or modify. So that that's kind of the

Speaker3: [00:12:22] Question, but I think I broadly stand, I mean, I might modify, you know, each of those pieces in some minor respect, and we could talk about the minor revisions that I might make. I might want to make. We could talk about that later on. Okay? But overall, the only the only shift in my understanding, if I can call this shift of climate change from the 2009 essay has been this that when I was writing in 2009, I was very focused on climate change alone, very focused on the phenomenon of global warming and the phenomenon of the whole question of the greenhouse gases and the contribution to atmospheric warming. That's what I was focused on, and I was deriving all my UM propositions out of that concern. Increasingly, as I read into the literature and more widely, I have come to see climate change what we call climate change as belonging as something that belongs to a larger family of problems. Mm hmm. Right. Like know like water scarcity, food insecurity, plastics as a problem. So I kind of now think that there has been overall what you might call using, you know, William Hatton's 1982 term, an ecological overshoot on the part of humanity.

Speaker3: [00:13:41] In other words, I now think that like all other species, we created a niche humans and we became for all the problems internally among human beings, lack of inequality and injustice and all of those things. But for all those problems, we became so good at exploiting the niche for our own flourishing in the last 200 years. But I would say mainly in the period of the great acceleration, mainly in the post Second World War, right, we became so good at flourishing as a species, in spite of all the internal differentiations that that we kind of over consumed the base on which we rested. So we now have created a problem for ourselves by becoming a little too comfortable in that niche. So our flourishing itself is causing problems. And I now think of climate change as one of the major symptoms of it. But you could also think of the way human beings have terraform the seabed. Mm hmm. You know, and this shift in my position, I see it as actually reflecting the shift in the discussion of the Anthropocene as an idea because when it was first mooted by Gretchen and others, it referred to greenhouse gas emissions, right?

Speaker2: [00:14:59] Right. It was really about CO2, right?

Speaker3: [00:15:01] Yeah. But now they're increasingly realizing that CO2 is as a signature footprint of human presence on the planet is not as enduring. As the signals that will remain in the lithosphere,

Speaker1: [00:15:14] For example, plastics,

Speaker3: [00:15:16] Plastics or other techno fossils, what they call them, and but also they have also realized that human beings have completely because of deep sea fishing and all other kinds of technologies. We have apparently completely terraform the seabed. And as geological evidence, that's going to last much longer. Hmm. Hmm. And the CO2 in the atmosphere so, so in. So in the book that am right now, right to finish on planet, I don't believe in climate change. I would say my shift has been to, uh, from one from a position that was focused much more closely on the greenhouse gas emissions and atmospheric warming. I am still focused on that, but I'm now putting it in the larger context of a very of a process of human development where in which for a long time, for actually tens of thousands of decades. Humans, depending on this great boon of a big brain, have made technological and other kinds of advancements which have proceeded much faster than the pace of evolutionary change. So we have become so if you look at most animals that have historically been the top carnivores in the on the planet or have been historically at the top of the food chain in their own times, they are all those animals are also all individually majestic animals, you know, they can scare and other animals, humans are individually puny.

Speaker1: [00:16:44] That's true.

Speaker2: [00:16:46] Big brained, but puny.

Speaker3: [00:16:47] That's nice. Yeah, I mean, humans are individually. I mean, if you tell me a fox, a wild fox turned up would be scared. Mm hmm. A rabies, whatever, you know. I mean, the fox would be scared to, but we would be very scared. You know, when? When. Now in India, frequently cheetahs get into human areas and people run helter skelter in fear, as I would do if I were suddenly, you know, a cheetah that was more agile than, like, what's it running and things? So, you know, it's it's a it's a it's if you look at human, um, from the megafauna extinction, the human journey, we we were part of the evolutionary process. And then through evolution, we developed a big brain and and symbolic systems so that we could create larger affiliations. We are basically we hunted packs. Even if you think of deep sea fishing as hunting, we hunt impacts and we use the brain for doing all this. So in a way we overall have advanced in Homo sapiens in the last tens of thousands of decades at a pace that's faster than evolutionary pace. As a result of which, you know, the argument often goes in the literature that when when lions become very efficient, hunters, gazelles also learn to run faster. Mm hmm. Or the hippopotamus developed a bad temperament. You know, the rhinoceros where is we have evolved in a way so fast that the animals and the ecological systems around us haven't had time to readjust? True.

Speaker3: [00:18:17] So if we had, you know, this is a point that actually hunts Jonas makes very interestingly in the book On Responsibility The Imperative of Responsibility, which is basically which was you were selling technology, and he was making the point that technological advances much more fast paced than evolutionary advances. So in a way, the cost of an evolutionary mistake is not as high as the cost of a major technological mistake because it happens much faster. But you can actually extend that argument, something like that to human advancement as a whole. So, so the so in a way, what the canvas has become. I mean, I was speaking of human beings geological agency in that article, but the canvas has become wider. And the second, as part of this, the second understanding that is grown in me since the article is the deep question is about the deep connection between geology and biology. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Right. Whereas if you remember that article I was saying human beings have always been biological agents, but now they've become geological, right? And there's a limited sense in which what I say is right. Um, but in a larger sense, biology and geology on this planet because life exists are profoundly connected. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. So those would be the two shifts, but they're both in the direction of making the canvas even larger.

Speaker2: [00:19:36] Right, right, right. And seeing those interconnections because we can hardly write about the Anthropocene now by only focusing on the kind of geometric changes that human beings have created. We always, you know, bracketed also with, you know, the sort of biosphere the lithosphere, the Equus or the techno sphere. So it all comes into play here because it really does have instantaneous effects. Let me just walk through the thesis really quickly and just to remind people. So these thesis, number one, was anthropogenic explanations of climate change. The collapse of the age old humanist distinction between natural history and human history, thesis to the idea of the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch when humans exist as a geological force, severely qualifies humanist histories of modernity and globalization. And three, the geological hypothesis regarding the Anthropocene requires us to put global histories of capital in conversation with the species history of humans. And finally, the cross hatching of species history and the history of capital is a process of probing the limits of historical understanding.

Speaker3: [00:20:50] Great. Great. Great. Yeah. Okay, yeah. So now how would you like to discuss them?

Speaker2: [00:20:55] I think Dominic

Speaker1: [00:20:56] Is I was just going to jump. If you don't mind, just jump into the middle of one of them and ask. You know, this is, I think, really regards theses three. And I think one of the remarkable things about the essay is that you really anticipated what is now a very vibrant conversation between folks. And unfortunately, it's become a little polarised in ways that I'd be curious to.

Speaker3: [00:21:19] It is unfortunate.

Speaker1: [00:21:20] Yeah, the Anthropocene versus the capital of

Speaker3: [00:21:22] Seen, right? And I think the polarization is, in my judgment, a little silly, if I may say, Yeah,

Speaker1: [00:21:26] So I'd like I'd love to hear you talk about that. What are your thoughts about that discussion?

Speaker3: [00:21:31] My thought is that and I sometimes think of it as zooming in and zooming out. So basically, I begin to begin with. You have to remember that the evolution of capitalism, as well as the evolution of studies of capitalism, the history of environmentalism and as well as the history of the study of environmental problems. These are all ground up phenomenon because capitalism itself, you know, doesn't arrive fully formed overnight. And what Marx was studying is capitalism is by, you know, everybody acknowledges that the benefits very significant changes. But but the history of capitalism, if you think through somebody like Marx, I think through someone like Schmidt is a history of is a is a process of human beings arriving through internet, through interaction, through connections, through trade, through industry, eventually arriving at this realisation that what connects our lives together is a spherical object called the planet. Mm hmm. So if you read calculate the normal size of the Earth, you will find and he's not alone that he uses the word in translation. But I'm sure it's true in German, too. But he uses the word global and planetary to mean the same thing. Right? It both refers back to what we call the Earth. Mm hmm. If you look at the history of the science of climate change, then. So if globalization was a process which even intellectually sort of ground up building up to a climactic point climate change, the science basically comes post-Second World War out of a process of looking at this planet from the outside in as it were.

Speaker3: [00:23:19] So basically, it comes out of the post-Second World War interest in atmosphere and space. Why was there interest? One was, of course, both the US and eventually the USSR was interested in measuring the fallout of nuclear tests. Right. And the other one was the space competition. So even questions like Can you weaponize weather? Can you create floods and droughts in your enemy territory? These were strategic questions that was driving a lot of space research, and it was in that context that the whole question of search for extraterrestrial intelligence search quest to to make other planets, particularly Mars habitable for human beings came up. So Carl Sagan's unit was opened in narsa, and you will remember the James Lovelock. The Gaia man sure comes there in 1966 to precisely work on this on this issue of whether or not Mars had a history of life and whether or not that life could teach us how to make Mars habitable once more. Right. And this question out of that game was that, you know, why is our planet so right and so friendly to complex forms of life and has been so for a long period time, hundreds of millions of years, unlike Venus and Mars, one of which sort of had was very hot, too hot.

Speaker3: [00:24:44] The other one was too cold. And so Gaia theory comes out of this comparative studies. What makes the central question was what makes this planet so friendly to life? Hmm. So in a sense, this this, even in Lovelock time, raises the question of climate control because you know, one of the most interesting points in that whole area of thinking was that for this planet, we. Friendly to the forms of life that we know, most forms of life, which are oxygen dependent, oxygen has to be maintained at a certain level in the atmosphere, right? And it's been maintained for hundreds of millions of years long before human beings arrived at around 21 percent of the atmosphere. Now, because oxygen is a highly reactive gas, I mean, oxygen quickly sort of hooks up with other kind of gases or minerals to keep oxygen. At this level, you have to you have to go on supplying oxygen to the atmosphere and the planet does it, which which is lifeforms and other forces on the planet, the phytoplankton. All these things, they do it, they supply the doses. So in a way, they were looking at this planet within a comparative framework where they were also looking at Venus and Mars.

Speaker3: [00:25:59] And as I always say, look, it's not an accident that Lovelock was working on Mars. And Jim Hansen, the godfather of the American climate change thing science was working on Venus. Hmm. Yeah. I often say that climate change comes out of interplanetary studies of interplanetary studies. And one of my colleagues in the geophysics department, Peer Humbert, has a textbook called Planetary Science, which is taught to undergraduates. And if you go to that book, you'll find a chapter called Planetary Warming. Another of warming and cooling a processes that take place on planets. Mm-hmm. So global warming, what we call global warming is only one kind of planetary warming. So it's it's an element within a larger set called planetary warming. And that's why. So if you look at it, so these people were looking at this planet by zooming, by zooming out from from the planet as it were. It was this. So that's why the whole the cultural significance of that famous photograph called Earthrise. Remember? Yeah, 1958 taken from around the moon or the blue marble of 1972. Right, right. Their cultural significance precisely was that they they kind of give us this look at this planet from the outside in as it were right?

Speaker2: [00:27:16] And they and they kind of offered the possibility, you know, in the halcyon days of the early 70s of creating a sense that one planet meant one, you know, kind of collective and combined sense of humanity.

Speaker3: [00:27:32] That's right. And that's why the climate science, because it inherits that heritage. If you look at the language of IPCC, they're always posing a problem to humanity as a whole. Right. You know that humanity as a whole doesn't exist for social scientists.

Speaker1: [00:27:46] Right. So do you do you think there is a place for this, this concept of capital is seen? Or do you think it's?

Speaker3: [00:27:52] No, I think there is. What I'm saying is that of what I often say is that that today you need to zoom out right and zoom in. If you unless you zoom in into human history into more details into the final resolution of the story. You don't see what human beings are doing to one another, right? You don't see the injustice between humans. But if you don't zoom out, you don't see the human story as a whole in the context of other species, in the context of history of life. So you don't see that, you know, seven or whatever, you know, a million years ago, sort of, you know, there's a branching off and then you don't see maybe 200000 years ago this thing called Homo sapiens. You don't see that there are several five or six or seven different genus of homos going around. Some survive, some don't. You don't see that story, and you don't then see the story of the coming of the weak brain that you don't see that a particular species is developing cultural and technological institution at a pace that is much faster than the pace of evolutionary change. And it it kind of it goes to step jump. So it kind of a different point. It ratchets up its capacity to influence the planet. So one is the ratcheting up is European colonization of the world's land, in other instances, industrialization and other instances after the war. You know what they call great acceleration, the whole human quest for development. And through all this, you can also see that we are a species where individual members have the capacity to learn from one another.

Speaker3: [00:29:20] You can write the entire history of European colonization, and then the third will drive towards modernization as a history of learning. In other words, some of these Homo sapiens, thanks to all kinds of, you know, fortunate incidents, learn the art of living well and flourishing well. So these are Europeans who take when they learn that by taking other people's lands, they can reduce population pressure by exploiting the planet, they can get cool, whatever. And do you think other human beings are going to sit idle so the Japanese, without ever being colonized, decide to modernize themselves? Right? And the Japanese victory over Russia in 1985 is a huge fillip to Asian nationalism because Japanese are seen as an Asian power that has defeated Russia, which was seen as a European power now. So our desire to modernize in India and China is a way at one level, a very rational desire to. To attain the same level of flourishing following the Western examples, except that what we never imagined is that the model that worked for a fraction of humanity may go bust right when we try to generalize it for seven billion human beings or 12 billion human beings. And mind you, remembering that those numbers are made possible precisely by things like fertilizers, things like irrigation technology, things like the use of fossil fuel in these things. So as I was saying that, you know, today's dilemma is that it is precisely our flourishing. It is precisely the fact that even the poor who don't have good lives but have longer lives.

Speaker3: [00:30:50] You know, you have to remember that the average lifespan in the Roman Empire was 20. Right. So we have we have flourished in the last 200 years and wonderfully in the last 50 years. The Indian population has grown four times in my own lifetime. Wow. And and we have created human values where we actually have come to value every human life. We created this value when we were about maybe, you know, one third of the population size that we are today. But because of the value, we are committed to preserving every human life. But every human like life puts precious, our consumption puts precious. So what I see now is that our flourishing in the end has produced a profound disturbance in the distribution of natural life on the planet. Natural reproductive biological life on the planet. Mm hmm. And and that's why somebody just talked about the possibility of another great extinction. Um, but at the same time, you know, there are the predicament that I see, and this is why I think the capital is in Anthropocene. Polarization is silly. The predicament I see is this it's precisely institutions that have allowed us to flourish. There have also led us to this problem. And the irony of the historical situation is that we have to use the same institutions to cope with these problems, which is why certain kinds of dreams linger, that you might just green capitalism but keep up the levels of profits and consumption. Right? Right. I mean, that's a very widely shared dream.

Speaker1: [00:32:15] Oh, yeah, absolutely. Sustainable growth, whatever that means, it's paradoxical,

Speaker3: [00:32:21] But it means that we don't want to give up on our flourishing. Right? But we want to reduce our impact. And honestly, there's a profound contradiction.

Speaker2: [00:32:28] No, that's right. And it's almost it even goes beyond flourishing in some sense because I I think that we could flourish. Yeah, without without growth and acceleration, but we almost have collectively refused to quit accelerating. You know, our our use of planetary resources and our own human population growth and our own consumption. And I think, you know, that's where the that's where the really tricky pieces

Speaker3: [00:32:56] That you can see that that if they were if they were something like a global humanity that could make wise decisions collectively, right? It would be one thing. So yes, I mean, there are rational solutions to this problem.

Speaker2: [00:33:10] Great. And this is, you know, this is I mean, you're a historian by training. And so I think you can affirm that there's never been such a constellation of human agreement on the planet, right? We've never had an entire planetary population. Right. But you know who are in agreement. But I wanted to get back to something that I think is very important in the work that you've been doing, and that brings together this question of the human species and flourishing and that is this question of species thinking. So this is something that you describe in the in the essay and the mandate that you draw out is in species thinking. What we're doing is we're connecting human history to the history of life on the planet as a way to kind of think with other species and also with humanity writ large.

Speaker3: [00:33:58] And because in other words, in other words, our thinking again, if you go back and read those American documents of the 50s, our thinking is very broadly anthropocentric in the sense that most of the time we are focused on the question of justice between humans and the question of human welfare. Right. And now we are getting more aware, of course, you know. So animal rights people from the 70s have brought in the question of extending our moral sphere to to include some animals. So they had a restriction which which is often described as a sentient threshold. So animal rights people were saying, yes, we can extend human notions of morality and moral injustice to those animals that are that have a certain degree of sentience. For instance, animals that can anticipate cruelty feel fear. Mm hmm. Right. Not all animals can do that. Not all creatures can do that and there. But those arguments were not made in the context of climate change. They were not made in the context of species religion argument. They're actually very clear. Peter Singer is very clear that that animal rights argument. No bearing on the question of species, it's very individual, animal focused. So and it's very intentions for us. He actually said that if a tree does not feel its felling, then I have nothing to say about it. Hmm.

Speaker2: [00:35:25] Mm hmm. So then it becomes very anthropocentric again, because that's where

Speaker3: [00:35:30] Value in the animal rights philosophy really don't go there. It doesn't go there. But so but on the other, increasingly, we're becoming aware from all the literature that that lives are connected. So, you know, there's a very interesting and relationships change. So for instance, there's a bacteria in our guts called H. Pylori bacteria. Have you heard about it?

Speaker2: [00:35:56] I think we we've been there's a lot of gut bacteria out on

Speaker3: [00:35:59] The wavelengths this one is connected to to the ulcers, OK? And so at the moment, it is thought of as an ant friendly, as a non friendly or unfriendly or or a hostile bacteria. But it's lived in our guts for a very long time, and some people actually argue that it may have begun its life as a friendly bacteria. Hmm. It's because of human interventions, particularly with antibiotics and things. Its role may have changed. Oh yeah. You know so. So you begin to realize that we what this animal called the web of life after Darwin? I mean, he picks up it from somebody else for Darwin also used it that we are in the way of life. And and that's why I think we need to see ourselves as part of the history of life, this interconnectedness of life. And while as humans, it's very hard for us to know what a cow thinks or a horse thinks, but we can see ourselves in a larger perspective perspective we so we have. So I also I always say that look wild. If you read economics, most of it, most of economics is focused on human welfare. Oh yes. I mean, I haven't even come across a Right-Wing economist who says, I really want the world to remain completely divided between rich and poor. They always say, I want the world where both the rich and poor benefit and are better off compared to where they're now. Mm hmm. Um, sociology, anthropology, what we do have on the whole, anthropology is less guilty of this Typekit history, with most mainly been focused on on humans, right? And which? But but now the situation requires us to at least read at a certain level biology and geology.

Speaker3: [00:37:40] And I often tell people that because these are sciences where you can't tell the story and these are also storytelling sciences, and you can't tell their stories by always imagining humans to be at the center of things. The Hey, the story begins long before humans arrive. Be, you know that the story doesn't end with humans, so we are not a climactic point. And I think these bring us what for my purpose, I call some non anthropocentric perspectives to bear on our anthropocentric concerns about human welfare and justice and all of those things. So that's why I think we need to do these things together. And for me, it's a question of zooming in and out. It's a question of sustaining statements that are valid at different levels of abstraction, at different levels of resolution of the picture. So I don't see any innate contradiction between wanting to see human beings in the context of the issue of life and the story of capitalism. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And now it's becoming clear. So even in this sense, Moore's book on capitalism, he writes as a Marxist, but it's very clear that we now have come to the realization that the price of petroleum includes the cost of extraction of the fuel. But the fuel comes free. I mean, you know that which is the all that we should all or, you know, the the basic fossilized material that comes free, even though it took the planet hundreds of millions of years to produce it

Speaker2: [00:39:05] Right, it comes free only if we, if we humans, believe we have that

Speaker3: [00:39:09] Dominion that is thinking through thinking through capitalism and the market mechanism. So you kind of say so we should, we should. Maybe we should pay the planet some price. Right? And I find that a little weird because because using what the planet has produced is not peculiar to human beings, all animals do that. Sure. And and everything that the presently existing animals use or eat or consume or whatever, everything is taken a very long time for the planet, you know, to be there to to have been fashioned by the planet. So in a way, you're realizing that you can also think of this as a story, as a as something that tells you about the limits of thinking through just capitalism. It's the market mechanism. You have to think geology. Mm hmm.

Speaker2: [00:39:53] Right. And I think that's that's where species thinking is so provocative and interesting and gives us so many inroads because, you know, as we were saying before, we don't have a history where we've thought together as a species, at least collectively and in agreement. And yet it also, you know, you're bringing. Marxian readings as well, and I think that's another interesting juxtaposition, is Marx's version of species being right, which you're sort of playing with here.

Speaker3: [00:40:19] The difference is that, you know, as I understand it, sort of the Marxist version of species being assumes that the species has a particular kind of being

Speaker2: [00:40:28] And an exceptional one at that with, you know, exceptional

Speaker3: [00:40:31] Discoveries at the end of the story of at the end of the history that is the history of alienation from its own species.

Speaker2: [00:40:38] Right, right. From those creative potential through, you know what Marx

Speaker3: [00:40:43] Is the recovery of your species. Right, right, right, right. Whereas when you read Darwin's species has no such beings, any species is internally diverse. So this animal, for instance, in an article, he says he's critical of the species thinking point. And he says, and it is species. What do you mean by species? And then he says, I sarcastically says, Guess what? Of course, it is a homogeneous, unified species. Now you just have to read two pages of Darwin to know that species, by definition, cannot be homogenous. Right, exactly. Species are homogeneous. Natural selection wouldn't work.

Speaker2: [00:41:17] That's right. Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:41:19] Some species have to be diverse for natural selection to work.

Speaker1: [00:41:22] And I would actually argue that even for Marx, given his, you know, resolutely Hegelian dialectical mode of thinking that even the concept of species being he was working towards was as something that could evolve to that. The post-communist species being might not be the same as the pre capitalist one.

Speaker2: [00:41:40] But could it expand? But could it expand to other species that he was? He was saying that he would not allow.

Speaker1: [00:41:47] I agree he was. He was. He was sensitive to certain issues like metabolism. I think scholars have shown that, but that doesn't mean that he was egocentric now. I think he was very anthropocentric.

Speaker3: [00:41:58] That's that's quite sort of thing. I mean, you have to realize that, you know, um, even though, you know, he dedicated, he wanted to really get the first volume of capital to Darwin. There's no reason to assume that Marx's grasp of Darwin was very strong. Hmm. I mean, Darwin was being debated in his own lifetime. Mm hmm. And Darwin's thinking was very revolutionary. You know it just as Marxist thinking this evolution in a different sense. Anyway, so I actually find this polarization coming out of an anxiety on the part of many thinkers. You know, the debt that somehow to talk about life to the species will take the focus away from immediate struggle against capitalism, right? And one question to me, one question that I have for them and also is that so is the response to climate change a struggle against capitalism? You know. Well, for

Speaker1: [00:42:44] Somebody like Naomi Klein, it is, you

Speaker3: [00:42:46] Know? Yeah. So what what what's the program with the struggle? So what should we do? And I mean, it started against capitalism might take 100 years. Who knows? I personally think capitalism might get into bigger and more complicated problems because of the ecological devastation that's happening. Yeah. So it might actually come undone because of its own contradictions.

Speaker2: [00:43:11] I mean, I think one of the points that you made when you were here at Rice during your lecture is very interesting to having to do this question of of capitalism, you know, versus species or Anthropocene. And that is is that you said that climate change is a deeply political and moral problem that we got that. Yeah. But it cannot be reduced to capitalism alone because for these two points, those who oppose capitalism are going to say that climate change shows the faults of the capitalist order. But those who are in favor of capitalism, those you know, the one percenters, let's call them, will use climate change as evidence of how the market and technology can pull us out of these dire consequences. So, you know, it's sort of a catch twenty two in a way.

Speaker3: [00:44:02] Exactly. If you argue for capitalism, then people on the other side can also say that capitalism has the wherewithal. Yes, the point is to actually tackle this problem.

Speaker2: [00:44:09] Just give us more freedom in the market and will, well,

Speaker3: [00:44:12] We'll

Speaker2: [00:44:13] Claw our way out of this right?

Speaker3: [00:44:15] Right. It can do capitalism. I mean, Trump. There's a report in today's times saying that Trump has Trump and said that if you if you go on to president, he'll cancel the Paris Agreement. But but you see, the problem is that people who are looking at the planet from outside in like the IPCC and who are addressing as if they're talking to the planet of the whole humanity as a whole, you know, kind of this whole holistic forms of address. I think the two degree you can read the number two degree Celsius, which is an average figure as part of this form of address where I'm addressing the whole planet. So they're addressing the whole planet. As you know, the fifth report of the IPCC gave us what they call a carbon budget. You know about this, right? Yes. So these are yeah. So I don't want to explain it now. The carbon budget basically gives you an overall probabilistic, so it gives you a certain number of years in which you have to. Banned all the carbon you were allowed to spend if you wanted to, let's say, have 50 or 60 percent chance of remaining under this average figure of two degrees rise in the temperature. Now that's why it's funny because the IPCC statements addressed to humanity as a whole are always producing timetables. Mm hmm. But the anti-capitalist argument that we can we have a struggle against capitalism, there's no timetable. So are we going to struggle against capitalism in an open ended way? And without all these timetables, right?

Speaker2: [00:45:42] It's like something more programmatic needs to be in place. It's actually going

Speaker3: [00:45:46] To help the programmatic thing. And you said, this is how we're going to change capitalism. It's simply saying capitalism is bad and you know, it's causing problems. Yeah, I mean, we all agree on that.

Speaker1: [00:45:56] Can I can I take the conversation a slightly different direction? This is following up on what you had mentioned a bit ago about Trump. How not to how. Not to mention that, but one of the most provocative parts of of the essay, I thought was where you said that actually in the Anthropocene, we need enlightenment. That is reason more than ever, and that certainly doesn't seem to have been, you know, the trend since the recognition of the Anthropocene. On the one hand, you have you have a political culture that seems rife with all sorts of phobias and ethno phobias in Europe and here, you know, polarization around inequality to some extent. But it seems that in fact, you know, reason has. I mean, I'll be blunt, you know, sort of make an oversimplified claim that reason, at least political reason seems to have suffered in the era of the recognition of the Anthropocene. And I'm curious what you watch, what you think about that, especially when also we have, you know, the Enlightenment is a very convenient whipping post in a lot of the post humanist debates, too. And that's one of the reasons I thought your piece was so powerful. It was actually saying, no, actually, that's not the way we can go. We can't sacrifice.

Speaker3: [00:47:03] And first of all, yeah, please. First of all, you see, I mean, I I it's climate change and staying with climate change. Climate change is a problem that is defined by scientists. Humans don't define the problem per say of what planetary climate change is because it requires planetary observations. It requires other sorts of observations. That's why I start with the competitive interplanetary studies. So in that sense, you can't even define the problem without giving due recognition to time. Right? Right. So there is now what should that due recognition? Do you know, in a world where we know that what we call human politics includes fights over interests? Perceived interests includes psychology, includes non rational factors, including imagination, all kinds of things. So, so in a way, I fall back on what Karl Jaspers wrote in the, you know, facing the prospect of a nuclear winter. So he created this category that he called epochal consciousness, whereby he was saying that could we try to find a way of grounding our conflict and therefore our divergent politics in a literally pre political perspective on the world where this place for reason? In other words, he was saying reason does not have to dictate what politics we pursue. So let the field of politics entail everything it does. But is it possible for us to create at least a reasonable understanding on which to situate ourselves and then fight for our interest? So for instance, even if we agreed that the question of the human species and its flourishing is involved in this crisis, if that understanding does not have to stop us from pursuing what India and China may see as justice right in a climate constrained world. But on the other hand, that understanding may be what fills out the content of a word. There is otherwise rhetorically empty in the real formulation of our having common but differentiated responsibility because everybody knows what differences mean. Right? The word common was a lazy word put in there to placate the Americans. That's my understanding of it. Yeah. You know, and therefore, um, this kind of an understanding may actually give some context to the word common.

Speaker2: [00:49:28] Right? Yeah. So Dipesh, I want to float an idea by you. This is something I've been sort of noodling around with an idea I've been thinking about, and I'd love to hear your your feedback, your thoughts on it. So, you know, we've been talking about how there's been this proliferation of scenes. Sydney is right. The Tulu, Thulasi and the capitalist scene, the Anthropocene.

Speaker3: [00:49:50] The time has come up with something.

Speaker2: [00:49:52] Yeah, right. And then, you know, on this saying recently, the plantation of ST.

Speaker3: [00:49:56] So I'm seeing it everything.

Speaker2: [00:49:58] Yeah. So in the mad dash to come up with yet another scene? Yeah. Here's one. The beta scene? Let me explain. So beta, of course, is the second. Letter in the Greek alphabet, so it's a way of sort of displacing Alpha or that primary position, but Bita is also the mode that they use in Silicon Valley and all of these app tests, where if you have a new technology, not just not even necessarily digital, although usually digital, you have a new technology. And when you put it into the beta mode, you put it out there for your users to experiment with, to see what works and really importantly, to see what goes wrong. And so the beta mode is all about finding out what fails and what can be done better and experimental. And it's an experimental, improvisational and and importantly, it's it's massively distributed, right? It's something that happens among users. And so I was just thinking about this, as you know, kind of thinking about the troubles with anthropologists and centering it on the human. What if we kind of put it into this more experimental mode of trying out, recognizing that things have gone wrong, that things have been screwed up in several different dimensions? And so is there a way that we can think of this time as a and exciting, creative experimental time? And maybe that's a little too utopian like your engineers, but no.

Speaker3: [00:51:23] But I mean, I think the idea of it appeals to me. You know, it's hard to tell how far it will go, right? You know, but but the idea of it makes eminent sense to me because see, um, the what I'm the way I understand the problem today is that that there's a kind of mismatch between the process that led up to the COP21 meeting in Paris last December and what the climate scientists have been saying. So the climate scientists looking from outside in have been speaking as though they were addressing humanity as a whole, right the planet as a whole. We don't have any governmental system that runs the planet as a whole. Our governing institutions are all distributed between nation states across nation states, international UN type things right. So in a way. And that's what capitalism or globalization has didn't allow us to develop. And we're using those instruments to kind of stand in the place of that planet as a whole or the humanity as a whole. And that, as COP21 shows, we quite we can't quite do that. There's always something missing. So the amount of money that was actually put aside by the rich nations to pay the poor nations is paltry right. The argument has no legal, legally binding aspect to it. It's still a progress because it opens every country up to sort of peer group pressure and review.

Speaker3: [00:52:47] I think that's a good thing. But at the same time, there's no guarantee that we will necessarily match the calendars of action that will produce the same kind of synchronization that the IPCC is requiring of human action. Right. And I think that is a very interesting phenomenon. So cognitively, we have the capacity to address the planet of the WHO will see it as a whole. And that's what that's where the place of reasoning is. Mm hmm. And that's what I was talking about the epochal consciousness. Yeah, but it's very hard to translate it back into a program of action what takes its place at precisely the governing institutions? If you think through the ideas of French philosophers like you know, from, let's say, raunchier to, I guess, Alan Pardew people, but they would never see these government institutions as again taking the place of the political right. They would see this institution as deeming what might be the creative potential of the political right. So what I'm saying is that if you think politically, you didn't see that we are actually working our way through these mismatches of a certain reasonable view of the world, but we take the planet as a whole and speaks to the planet as a whole and then our governmental institutions, which often displace the field of the political or sort of squashed or substituted itself for the political wrangling through those governing institutions to come to a kind of consensus which has had lots of holes in it.

Speaker3: [00:54:15] And I think in some ways, the idea of the better scene or a better process precisely is very good because it it it actually illuminates the necessary the necessarily experimental status of politics. Yeah. Or governance, you know, I mean, Gandhi called it autobiography My um, my experiments with truth. Mm hmm. And I think it was a very powerful word to experiment, and I think it kind of. So in that sense, it sort of brings us back to a field of investigation that cannot afford to be doctrinaire if it's going to be experimental, right? That cannot afford to be completely deterministic. That has a huge room for uncertainty and errors. Mm hmm. Which is part of the human existential reality as I see it. I mean, that's what I call a deep predicament that cognitively we're able to produce a picture of a planet of the planet as a whole, which. Is convincing to scientists and convincing to us, but that doesn't mean that actually we can respond to that picture in quite the same way.

Speaker1: [00:55:19] Right, right. Dipesh, I know we're coming up on the end of the conversation. I wanted to ask one more question if that's possible. And that is, you know, with with India, much in the news recently because of the heat waves, the record setting heat waves there. And I'm recalling a conversation with a friend, Akhil Gupta, who who said that, you know, the politics of energy transition in India are very difficult because of the sort of growth imperative and the development imperative. And and, you know, people generally look to India and China as the places where, you know, global warming will be won or lost depending on decisions that are made there about the strategy of modernization. I was just curious if you wanted to reflect it all about. Yeah, about where India's going.

Speaker3: [00:56:05] Here's the um, the critical difference, which is that India may have missed out on an opportunity to launch Chinese kind of industrialization because the Chinese took advantage of cheap but will fit and healthy workers to create to construct EPCs and basically became the industrial hub for the world. So China became the world's manufacturing, supplying all of us. That history has also meant that China is a leading manufacturer of solar panels. Yes. And, you know, green technologies and things. So China has an investment in the market that is evolving because of this climate change phenomenon. India's effort is much more inward, inwardly directed and um, because India has an industrialised as well as China. I mean, there's a huge and because the population is younger than China's. There's a political imperative of creating jobs because otherwise you will have billions and billions of young people unemployed and obviously prey to all kinds of unwelcome forces. So, so, so the two models are somewhat different. China is actually producing solar panels and things in the pollution in Chinese cities. These things are driving China even towards more technological reform, as I can see it, in terms of energy transition, even internally. Yeah, India's invested investing quite big time in in solar. Ok. But there are two problems. One is that coal produced electricity is still very cheap. Yes. And and there's a lot of coal. So they've actually just, uh, building more coal fired power stations, and they've actually contracted with Bangladesh to build a huge amount of his number of coal fired power stations. So Indian production of coal is going to continue apace. But I guess invest in solar. Sorry.

Speaker1: [00:57:58] My my question, I guess, is also, you know, whether you think I mean, actually the air quality in Delhi is worse than in Beijing. And whether you think that especially for the Indian middle classes, there's going to be a feedback loop where the climatological effects are going to begin to feed into, you know, new demands for India's, you know, leadership and energy

Speaker3: [00:58:19] Transition in Delhi. When the last first time they introduced this odd even formula for cars, it looked like that might happen. But there's been um, it hasn't quite worked out that way yet. Okay. So basically, the middle class is still kind of trading off their health problems for the convenience of transporting private cars and things. Right? So there's an awareness, the higher awareness of Delhi's pollution. No question. Awareness has gone up. Um, but basically they would. They would rather that, um, just take steps that the government actually invested in public transport more, you know, kind of more buses or trains. So that's going to be time consuming. Right? So it's a slower process, what I was saying,

Speaker1: [00:59:03] And it also speaks to

Speaker3: [00:59:04] The use of coal and uh, while India is ramping up on solar. So overall, in terms of emissions, uh, I don't think the emissions will go down anytime soon.

Speaker1: [00:59:15] Well, I mean, it's disappointing, but of course, it makes sense and it goes back to the issue. You pointed out in the COP21 agreements that there simply wasn't enough aid that was being given from the global north to help, you know, accelerate those energy transitions.

Speaker3: [00:59:28] Elsewhere in the global north is also after a market you see they don't want to subsidize. Right? This market that is evolving through climate change, so they don't want to miss out on the profits, right?

Speaker1: [00:59:39] They don't want to miss out on that.

Speaker3: [00:59:40] And the other problem in India, of course, is the old fossil fuel guys who are in charge of the transition to solar.

Speaker2: [00:59:49] Never, never. A good sign

Speaker3: [00:59:50] Of industrialists who are put on the committee. India is set up to oversee the transition to solar. All represent oil and gas and coal.

Speaker1: [01:00:00] Yeah, right. Well, that explains a lot.

Speaker2: [01:00:02] The definition of irony?

Speaker3: [01:00:04] Yeah, those are the guys who backed the government. I mean, Modi came into power. A huge amount of money, somebody in an Indian newspaper, somebody said 14 billion dollars in this campaign money. Well, no. And the guys who backed Modi, basically the coal and oil and gas guys.

Speaker1: [01:00:23] Wow, OK. Dipesh, we're going to we're going to leave it there. I know you got to move on to your meeting, but thank you so much. It was a fascinating conversation.

Speaker2: [01:00:30] Really wonderful. Thank you for taking the time.

Speaker1: [01:00:32] And when will your book come out? Do we have a publication date yet?

Speaker3: [01:00:35] Not yet. I'm trying to, you know, I've done my thinking and I know what I want to say. I mean, some of it's what I already said to you. Right now, it's a matter of massaging many things I have written into a coherent book.

Speaker1: [01:00:48] Yeah, it's going to be great, though you can tell it's going to be a it's going to be just as important as the articles. Well, we'll let you get back to that then.

Speaker3: [01:00:57] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Take care.