(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
In recent years, we have seen an obvious deterioration in the conditions for rational debate. And unless we restore this important capability as soon as possible, we have no hope of closing the gap between our technological capacity for self-destruction and our moral capacity to stop ourselves in time.
It is about the worrying state of the planet climateclimate change that seems to be running amok, and the wars and conflicts that increasingly set the global agenda, and the ominous assessment comes from none other than Noam Chomsky. In the book Unknown territory Anders Dunker has the conversation with him.
The famous linguist, who for decades has expressed himself in many political contexts in dozens of books and countless articles, has a distinctive view of humanity's destructive power. From the systematic extermination of the large mammals by the Stone Age man to the atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, our planet has paid a terrible price for our devastation. With global warming, which is now giving itself very concrete expression in the form of increasingly violent weather phenomena, it really looks deeply worrying. And when you look at Russia's brutal war against Ukraine, the Middle East's increasingly chaotic development and rapidly changing power constellations around the world, Chomsky's concern for nuclear warperhaps not a figment of the imagination. He believes that higher intelligence “has proven to be fatal. It discovered the means of self-annihilation, but it did not develop the moral capacity to prevent it from destroying itself. Perhaps it is even an inherent feature of what we call higher intelligence.”
Populations are exterminated
The distance between our enormous insight and what we actually do has been a central question in moral philosophy since antiquity, and in the current environmental crisis it has taken on a decisive importance.
Anders Dunker has chosen to address this in the aforementioned book, which must be essential reading for anyone who deals with and is interested in the death route that the globe is on. Dunker, who has philosophy, comparative religion and literature in his baggage, is Norwegian but permanently resident in Los Angeles, and he has had a number of deep conversations with some of the greatest thinkers of the time. It has become the book's 16 chapters, all of which revolve around this gloomy but absolutely crucial subject, which is already making its mark on human existence. And not least, it will require some decisions up through the 21st century that will be decisive for the continued survival of humanity and the entire planet.
Dunker has made a great effort to choose the slightly odd and thought-provoking angles. He goes far beyond the usual and predictable themes of the debate, and this is probably part of what is also in the book's title, 'Unknown territory'. Yes, the title also has a deeper meaning, which the book also explains, but by, for example, taking the conversation with the clever Indian author Amitav Ghosh, Dunker probably ventures into terrain that one would not immediately expect to find in a book of this type. That is one of its great strengths.
In order to gain control of this lucrative nutmeg market, the Governor General decided to exterminate the local population.
In addition to the novels, Ghosh has written a few masterful pieces of non-fiction, where he thinks about, among other things, how to convey climate change in a meaningful way in fiction and fashion in general. And in particular he has in his latest book, The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021), committed a critical analysis of colonialism and how this painful legacy affects Southeast Asia in the age of environmental disasters.
The conversation between Ghosh and Dunker is, among other things, about a very concrete and very telling case. The Indian author has dealt extensively with the Banda Islands, which are today part of Indonesia. In colonial times, they went by the name Krydderiøerne. It was a prosperous place with an enterprising nutmeg growing population, and in order to gain control of this lucrative market, the Governor General of the Dutch East Indies, Jan Pieterzoon Coen, decided to exterminate the local population.
“Not even the Vikings would think of going to Burgundy because they like wine, then kill the entire population and run off with the grapes! The Vikings would understand that there is a connection between the people who live in this place, their expertise and the wine they produce," says Amitav Ghosh in the book.
He refers to Columbus the 'discovery' of the Americas had similarly disastrous consequences for the indigenous populations. In several places on the American continents, 95 per cent of the populations exterminated, completely as happened in the Banda Islands. These were people who had lived in peace and tolerability for centuries, he says. Yes, they had been at war with each other and there were disputes, but this was nothing against the ruthless brutality that accompanied the European conquests. His point in this context is that it did not stop here. The Europeans found the forests and swamps repulsive, so they transformed it, and to this day there is still extensive redevelopment of the Amazon.
In this way, nature and the environment get roughly the same role as the indigenous people. It is being transformed to serve the interests of colonialism. Along the way, the livelihoods of the original populations are reduced or destroyed – whereby we have an indirect warfare that goes by the name of biopolitics.
Planetary Coexistence
The mentioned historical horror story is only one of many aspects that are presented to the reader in a thought-provoking way. We come a long way.
In his conversation with Come on Hui, who is professor of philosophy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Dunker talks about planetary coexistence. It is a topic that is of great importance to Yuk Hui, who mainly deals with the philosophy of technology, and the strength of this conversation is that – like several of the other conversations in the book – it not only diagnoses a life-threatening problem, but also provides a number of advice on how we can get closer to a solution.
The professor takes his point of departure from the philosopher Immanuel Lace, which i.a. transferred the work of nature to politics – because in politics there is also a moral goal. And it is a teleology which, in Kant's formulation, became the idea of universal happiness.
Yuk Hui uses Kant's visualization of this by thinking of a tree. It is a kind of society, consisting of different parts, branches, twigs, leaves, etc., and all these parts constitute a community. For this community to function, reciprocity and interaction are required, and this is really a perfect picture of human society.
"Today, the ecological crisis is a common theme for everyone living on earth, as a common task," says Yuk Hui. "It is not the case that this applies to the Chinese but not to the Americans, because it is precisely a general task."
Acute relevance
These are wise and deep conversations. Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, who is a professor at Norway's University of Environmental and Life Sciences in Ås, starts from our own blindness towards nature, and the American economist Jeremy Rifkin argues persuasively that the age of progress is on its deathbed. Yuk Hui moves effortlessly from Kant to Hegel and Spinoza, but it's all done in a way that everyone can join in. As interlocutors, Anders Dunker has chosen a number of the very large capacities in their respective fields, but the individual conversation never becomes so learned that it gets lost in scientific theoretical considerations. It is all concrete, and it is so blessedly well written that the heavy subjects capture the reader immediately.
An exemplary book on a subject of acute relevance.
