(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Roman Krznaric is an Australian philosopher and author. He has a PhD in political sociology and grew up in Hong Kong. He is someone who draws the long lines through history, and who finds many interesting parallels between then and now. It is often said that we must learn from the past to avoid making similar mistakes in the future.
This book takes the phrase that we must learn from history, very serious, and makes the expression far more than just a phrase. According to the author, with the help of the past we can "break the dependence on fossil fuels, promote tolerance", "remove our consumer goods", "tame social media", "secure water for all", "gain new faith in democracy", "handle it the genetic revolution', 'building a bridge across the inequality gap', 'getting control of the machines' and 'avoiding the collapse of civilization'.
Slavery and fossil dependence
What we need now is perhaps a well-thought-out book based on a rational optimism? This is just such a book. Yes, how can we break the dependence on fossil fuels? Perhaps surprisingly to some, Krznaric goes back to the days of slavery in Britain to learn how we can get rid of our dependence on fossil fuels. How on earth can we learn from slavery to avoid this problem?
Krznaric argues in the following way: Even though the two situations are completely different, there is still something about the way in which the authorities doubt their privileges, and how the authorities, through such an argument, avoid carrying out the necessary reforms, which coincide: This is precisely what we can , according to him, learn from history: We can learn to see through how the powerful and the privileged have always used certain types of argumentation to prevent changes from being implemented.
Krznaric draws lines from the so-called West India Interest, one of the most powerful political lobby groups in British history (often referred to simply as "The Interest") – to the ecological struggle of our own time. This group had only one goal: to prevent the abolition of slavery in the British colonies in the Caribbean.
700 slaves still worked on the plantations even many years after the abolition of slavery.
700 000 slave according to Krznaric, worked on the plantations there even many years after the abolition of slavery. One of the most used arguments against abolishing slavery was that "The world was not yet ready to give the black slave laborers freedom". Another widely used argument was of course the economic one, namely that the abolition of slavery would lead to "complete economic ruin" for the plantation owners and for thousands of people in Britain, who depended on the slave trade for a living. But that this would also hurt the consumer, who would have had to buy more expensive products elsewhere, from India and other countries, was of course also a widely used argument.
200 years later, the author sits in Edinburgh at a conference on climate change and listens to the then director of Shell, Ben Van Beurden, who presents exactly the same arguments against the reduction of fossil fuel consumption. "This must happen at a pace that is acceptable," was the refrain, of course, and the company was, according to its leader, "committed to continuing to produce fossil fuel as long as there was demand for it."
The author writes: "History speaks to us. Although the damage caused by fossil fuel production is fundamentally different from the unforgivable crime of enslaving people, it is striking how both cases illustrate the powerful position economic elites can have in the face of change.”
'Conviviality'
Other historical parallels the author draws are how we can increase tolerancen between peoples by studying how people came together in an Islamic kingdom in the Middle Ages, and comparing this to how Chinese immigrants were made scapegoats for the economic downturn in the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
In the Middle Ages, something very special happened in the Muslim kingdom Al Andalus, which was a stratified society where the Muslims ruled. Here, according to this author, tolerance flourished between Christians, Muslims and Jews. "What made this tolerance possible?" he asks and answers: "That everyone had their own language and freedom to practice religion." But above all, it was "the social contact forced forth by city life" that mattered. The point is that city life created personal relationships across religious communities, creating "networks of mutual economic dependence and mutual respect".
This is called conviviality, which is the idea of living together in harmony in multicultural societies. Opposite conviviality was, as mentioned, the way Chinese immigrants were made scapegoats during the economic downturn in the United States.
Furthermore, the author draws lines between the invention of the art of printing in the 1500th century, and how we can learn to tame the social media. The art of printing also led to politicization, persecution and violence. Without the art of printing, for example, the rebellion against the Catholic Church would not have grown as quickly as it actually did.
The book is rich and full of striking examples and is suitable for anyone who wants to believe that positive change is possible. This is a book that makes me as a reader think, and I wonder if I haven't been living in a kind of cognitive blindness before reading it.
