Amitav Ghosh: In this time of monstrous anomalies, we must recognise that the Earth is judging us

It takes only a glance at a newspaper nowadays to see that much of what we once took for granted is either being cast aside or turned on its head. Indeed, with floods sweeping away entire cities, and the prospect of a nuclear war closer than it has ever been, I couldn’t bring myself to think about what I was going to say today until a couple of weeks ago; such are the uncertainties of our times that I wondered whether it would even be possible to hold this ceremony as scheduled.

On the day that I finally began to write these words, I happened to be at the far eastern end of Indonesia, in the Banda archipelago, which is the ancestral home of the tree that produces both nutmeg and mace. These spices were once immensely valuable, and they made those islands so rich and prosperous that they became a coveted prize for European colonialists and were ultimately conquered by the Dutch East India Company or VOC. In the year 1621, on the orders of the then governor general of the East Indies, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, almost the entire population of the islands was eliminated in the course of a few weeks, although a few hundred managed to escape to neighboring islands where they kept their culture and language alive till the present day. This was one of the foundational genocides of the early modern era, and it enabled the VOC to establish a monopoly on nutmeg and mace, which in turn, contributed greatly to the prosperity of the Netherlands in the period known as the Dutch Golden age.

This atrocity never features in the art and literature of that period, and it would probably have been largely erased from history had it not been for the work of an almost forgotten Dutchman who happened to be the head archivist of the colonial administration in Batavia, J.A. van der Chijs. In 1886 van der Chijs published a meticulously detailed account of the Banda genocide, titled The Establishment of Dutch Rule Over The Banda Islands: it was van der Chijs’s research that made it possible for me to write my own account of the Banda massacre in my book The Nutmeg’s Curse.

Van der Chijs should by rights be accorded a prominent place within the distinguished lineage of Dutch critics of empire that goes back to Eduard Douwes Dekker or Multatuli. This tradition that has been kept alive until the present day by scholars like Jan Breman, Dirk Kolff and Marjolein van Pagee. The fact that I am here today, to accept this great honor here in the Netherlands, is itself a testament to this tradition’s continuing relevance and vitality.

The legacies of writers like Multatuli and van der Chijs serve to remind us of the extreme violence through which Western hegemony over the entire planet was established several centuries ago. It is important to note that violence was not incidental to the geopolitical ascendancy of Western empires; it was central to it. As the American political theorist Samuel Huntington once noted: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

Paradoxically, it was in the aftermath of decolonization that Western geopolitical dominance reached its apogee, with the United States becoming the world’s sole hyperpower at the end of the Cold War. This rise to absolute dominance happened so suddenly, and in such a fashion, that American political elites came to be convinced that the US had achieved absolute and permanent geopolitical supremacy, and that its paramountcy would never again be challenged. This, combined with the booming successes of Silicon Valley, created a hubris that surpassed anything that had existed even in the glory days of European imperialism in the 19th century. Western politicians and pundits decided that they had a duty to impose their will wherever they wanted, for whatever reason. And what was the result? Sadly, it was a swath of destruction that stretched from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Palestine.

NATO’s bombing of Libya is a particularly egregious example of the short-sightedness of Western actions in this period. Libya was host to hundreds of thousands of Asian and African migrants: after the government collapsed, and the country descended into civil war, these workers had no recourse but to flee across the Mediterranean, as stateless migrants and refugees.

This resulted in a crisis that continues to roil politics in the West to the present day, with the issue of migration causing an upsurge in support for demagogues and right-wing movements. Driving the ascendancy of these neo-fascist movements is a myth of victimhood, in which affluent countries are seen as the aggrieved parties, resisting invasions by black and brown foreigners. Yet the fact is that the preconditions for these mass migrations were created by none other than the West itself, with the multiple invasions and regime change operations that it launched across the world while it was reveling in the delirium of the unipolar moment.

Did none of the West’s leaders, with all the collective wisdom of their armies of pundits and think tanks, see this coming? The triumphalism of their pronouncements at that time suggest that they truly believed that their actions would never have any consequences. But, as the recent US elections show, all of that is now unraveling because of a tremendous backlash from their own constituencies, which are no longer willing or able to pay the price of hegemony.

This is indeed one of the principal reasons for the extreme uncertainties of our era, because it has now become evident that the centuries-long period of Western dominance is lurching towards its end. Whatever might be our opinions on the rights and wrongs of the current conflicts in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and Ukraine, it is now self-evident that it is no longer possible for the West to dictate solutions through force of arms, as it once did: it has lost its erstwhile ‘superiority in applying organized violence.’ This loss has been accompanied also by an accelerating erosion of the West’s financial and industrial dominance: the fact that the recently founded BRICS grouping of nations now has a significantly larger share of global GDP than the G7 nations is a clear indication of this. Nor is it a coincidence that this relative military and financial decline has been accompanied by political crises of such gravity that the West’s structures of governance are now in danger of swerving disastrously off course.

We are, in other words, in a moment of multiple intersecting crises and transitions – of geopolitics, financial structures, and, perhaps most importantly, of environmental and ecological regimes that are slowly but surely pushing the planet towards catastrophe. No wonder then that one of the most often repeated quotations of our time is Antonio Gramsci’s famous aphorism: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

That is where we find ourselves today, living through a time of monstrous anomalies, when exterminatory violence, like that which depopulated the Banda Islands, can play out on live television; a time when it is possible to speak of the deaths of certain people, but not of others; a time when entire cities can be swept away by flash floods while the world carries on as usual; a time when environmental activists receive longer jail sentences than corporate criminals; when UN forums for climate change negotiations turn into markets for selling oil and gas.

Even Antonio Gramsci could not have imagined the full extent of the abnormality of our era, because he lived in a simpler time when the most dangerous monsters were purely political creatures, like fascists. What is distinctive about our time is that its monsters consist not only of political extremists of all kinds, but also of weather events that could not have been conceived of in Gramsci’s lifetime: supercharged storms, megadroughts, catastrophic rain-bombs and the like. Back then these monsters, had they appeared, would have been considered ‘natural’ phenomena or acts of God. But knowing what we now know about the role of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in intensifying climate disasters, it is no longer possible to cling to the fiction of a strict division between the natural and the political: it is clear now that wildfires, rain-bombs and the like are also deeply political creatures in that they are the by-products of historical processes that have hugely benefited a small minority of human beings at the expense of the great majority of the world’s population.

These inequalities are at the core of the monstrous dramas that are unfolding in front of us today: what we are witnessing is nothing other than an epochal struggle between those who are intent on preserving their historical advantages, and those who are not only determined to resist but now also have the means to do so. And since those historical advantages, as well as the means to resist, are greatly dependent on the use of fossil fuels, the result is a spiraling double helix that will continue to generate more and more monstrously anomalous events, through processes that are neither exclusively political nor environmental, but both at once.

And yet, the paradox of this interstitial era is that these anomalies are not all monstrous in nature: some of them could even be described as benedictions in that they have suddenly made it possible to contemplate, and even embrace, possibilities that were denied or rejected during the age of high modernity – for example the idea that plants might possess something akin to intelligence; that rocks might be sentient; that rivers might be regarded as persons; that certain topographical features might possess qualities and attributes that cannot be reduced to their geological composition.

Such vitalist conceptions have been widely prevalent in human cultures since the infancy of our species and they still continue to exist in many different forms across the world. It was only at the beginning of the early modern era, at about the time of the conquest of the Banda Islands, that a tiny group of elite European men, many of whom were deeply implicated in colonialism, invented a philosophy in which sentience, thought, reason, and historical agency were ascribed solely to human beings, with the result that vitalist beliefs of all kinds came to be contested, denied and violently suppressed. Over the following centuries, with the Western conquest of most of the world, this kind of human-centeredness became a core component of elite ideologies everywhere in the world, even in formerly colonized countries like India and Indonesia.

Today, as the planet hurtles towards environmental and societal breakdown, brought about by the interlinked vectors of global warming, biodiversity loss, species extinctions and the spread of new pathogens, it is becoming ever more evident that modernity was founded on a profoundly mistaken understanding of the world, and that the elevation of humans above all other species, and indeed the Earth itself, has had disastrous consequences for humanity as well as all other living Beings.

The discrediting of modernity’s anthropocentrism is itself a part of the ongoing collapse that we are now witnessing. Now, as it begins to dawn on us that there is much to be learnt from premodern ideas and understandings, the Earth suddenly seems to teem with sentience as we come to understand that we have always been surrounded by many kinds of Beings who also have spirits and souls and are richly alive. High modernity taught us that the Earth was inert and existed primarily to be exploited by human beings: in this time of monstrous anomalies, we are slowly beginning to understand that in order to ensure a future for humanity we must learn to recognize that we have never been alone on this planet, that the Earth itself is watching, and judging, us.

To come to this realization has taken me a very long time and I am fortunate in having had the support, on this journey, of my children Lila and Nayan, and above all, of Deborah, my partner of 35 years, who has at this point been by my side for the better part of my life. I have also been extraordinarily fortunate in having had the support of many friends and members of my family, some of whom have taken the trouble to travel long distances to be here today: I thank them all from the bottom of my heart, particularly my sister and my niece, and my in-laws from the Baker and Harper families. There are many others I would like to thank but I am afraid that I would run out of time because I have been informed, by none other than the director of the Erasmus Prize Foundation, that the number of family and friends attending this ceremony is more than she has ever seen in her ten years in that position. Well, that is what happens when you give a prize to someone from the world’s most populous country.

However, it would be remiss of me if I failed to thank Shanti Van Dam, the director, and Britt Kroon, the program administrator, of the Erasmus Prize Foundation who have spared no effort to make the arrangements for this ceremony. And finally, I would like to thank the members and jury of the foundation for bestowing an undreamt-of honor on me, and for making it possible for me to be here today, in the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, to receive the prize from his Majesty, King Willem-Alexander in the presence of the Royal Family of the Netherlands.

Amitav Ghosh was given the Erasmus Prize in Amsterdam on November 26. The Erasmus Prize is awarded annually to a person or institution that has made an exceptional contribution to the humanities, the social sciences or the arts.