Category: Justice
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Is There Hope?
This is the eleventh article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.
‘The Eye of the Storm’. Credit: OrganikArts In the face of climate change, people often ask me if I have any hope for the future. For it seems a bleak prospect to contemplate the fundamental unsustainability of industrial civilization, as I’ve done throughout this series. It is, after all, the only way most of us know how to live. But without a shared context for what futures we understand to be possible or desirable, I find hope a slippery topic. It matters very much what we hope for.
Many of us simply ‘hope’ our world will carry on as it has been, while governments and corporations control global warming with technical fixes. But this attachment to a desired outcome without evidence that it’s possible is blind faith, not hope. Indeed much of what gets called hope today actually includes beliefs held contrary to evidence. These are fantasies or delusions, wishful thinking or willful ignorance. All such false hopes are dangerous. They lull us into inaction. They guide us down wrong paths.
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The Overshoot Story
[This article first appeared in the Caravan magazine, June 1, 2023.]
India’s approach to global warming cannot mirror the West
THE GODAVARI RIVER wends its lazy way between the Papikondalu Hills of the Eastern Ghats in Andhra Pradesh. Bright jungle spills down the steep hillsides, reflected in the broad, slow bends of the magnificent river. On the December day I visited, a pall of pollution damped the view. The flanks of the hills were dotted with small villages, but nearly all of them were ghost towns—empty, voided spaces where not a child played, not a dog snoozed, not a cow grazed. These were the remains of a few of the over two hundred and fifty villages that will be flooded1 when the Polavaram dam is finished, not far downriver, creating a vast reservoir that will drown this spectacular landscape.India: A Forecast
A thread of 20 tweets, on what I see ahead in India. Click below to read the rest.India: A Forecast 🧵
India is on a sinister path, much darker than most worried citizens foresaw in 2014. Things have gone downhill rather fast. So what do I see as the near-term outlook (5–7 years) for India? I offer my provisional thoughts in this thread. Hope I’m wrong. (1/20)— Namit Arora (@NamitArora0) May 3, 2022
Namit Arora interviewed by Scroll
Scroll commissioned my friend and fellow writer, Abdullah Khan, to interview me over email. I enjoyed responding to his excellent questions. Read it here, or read it on Scroll.in where it was first published with the title below.
________________‘No one person gets to limit what it means to be Indian’: Namit Arora, author of ‘Indians’
To write his book, Arora travelled to the seats of the different civilisations of India
Category: Anthropology & Archaeology, Books & Authors, Culture, Economics, History, Justice, Politics, Religion, Science, TravelStories of Wealth and Distribution
[The thirteenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
In the world of Star Trek, no one ever goes hungry or lacks access to healthcare. No one wants for housing, education, social inclusion or any other basic need. In fact, no citizen of the United Federation of Planets is ever seen to pay for everyday goods or services, only for gambling or special entertainments. The Federation suffers no scarcity of any kind. All waste is presumably fed into the replicators and turned into fresh food or new clothes or whatever is needed. Yet despite ample social safety nets, there’s no end to internecine politicking, human foibles and failures, corruption and vanity, charisma and venality. The world of Star Trek appeals so widely, I think, because it presents us with something colorfully short of a utopia, a flawed human attempt toward a just, caring, and individually enabling social order. It imagines a society based on a shared set of human values—fairness, cooperation, political and economic egalitarianism—where basic human needs are equitably answered so that no one has to compete for basic subsistence and wellbeing. As the venerable Captain Picard has put it, “We’ve overcome hunger and greed, and we’re no longer interested in the accumulation of things.” Some Libertarian Trekkies have been scandalized to realize that Star Trek actually depicts a post-capitalist vision of society.But Star Trek’s world is premised upon the existence of a cheap, concentrated, and non-polluting source of effectively infinite energy. Obviously, no such energy source has ever been discovered (solar-paneled dreamscapes notwithstanding). And the replicator, which eliminates both material waste and scarcity, is a magical technology. The Star Trek vision is also a picture of human chauvinism and hubris, presuming H. Sapiens as the only relevant form of Earthly life. So it falls short of a vivid and plausible imagining of an ecologically sustainable, technologically advanced, and egalitarian human civilization.
Category: 3QD, Anthropology & Archaeology, Books & Authors, Economics, Environment, History, JusticeUpheaval and Migration
[The ninth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
—Change. Resilience. Where do we start? I’ve got no idea. What happens after this? Listen! The answer is here!—These words, splashed on posters, jumped out at me from images sent by a friend. The posters were part of an exhibition called We Need To Talk About Fire, hosted at an artists’ gallery along the Nowra River, about halfway between Sydney and Canberra. The Nowra River region had been hard-hit by the catastrophic Australian bushfires of 2019–20, following an unprecedented drought. Fire season in Australia is worsening as the planet warms, just as it is in the western United States, the Amazon, and Siberia. And the 2019–20 Australian season was particularly horrific, igniting a follow-on spate of depression and suicides in the area. What struck me about these posters was the raw simplicity of their messages, which ranged from forceful platitudes to agonized queries.
Views of Future Earth
[The eighth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
In the late fifteenth century, European seafarers began searching for what they called the “Northwest Passage,” a fabled route across the Arctic Ocean, which would allow them to sail northward from Europe directly into the Pacific in search of fortune. But the Arctic of their time, during the so-called Little Ice Age of the fourteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, was covered by thick, impenetrable sheets of ice and densely packed icebergs. Nor had they any reasonable expectation that the great mass of ice would soon melt away. That they imagined finding a reliably navigable route through a polar sea seems to me a case of wishful thinking, a folly upon which scores of lives and fortunes were staked and lost, as so many adventurers attempted crossings, only to flounder and often die upon the ice.But now that the Arctic sea ice is melting away, the Northwest Passage has become real in a way the adventurers of old could not have dreamed. Today, nations encircling the Arctic Ocean jockey for control of its waters and territorial rights to newly exposed northern continental shelves, which promise to be full of oil and gas. What had been a deadly fantasy is now a luxury cruise destination flaunting an experience of rare wonder, including opportunities to watch polar bears on the hunt. “A journey north of the Arctic Circle is incomplete without observing these powerful beasts in the wild,” entices the Silversea cruises website, with nary a note about the bears’ existence being threatened by the very disintegration of their icy habitat that makes this wondrous cruise possible. Meanwhile, in China, the emergent northern sea routes have been dubbed the Polar Silk Road, projecting a powerful symbol of their past wealth and influence onto an unprecedented reality.
INDIANS: A Book Trailer
My sales pitch for Indians, or as they euphemistically say in the industry, a ‘book trailer’. 🙂
A shorter book trailer with just music (and on-screen text) is here. To learn more about the book, click here.
Category: Anthropology & Archaeology, Art & Cinema, Biography, Books & Authors, Culture, Economics, Environment, History, Justice, Philosophy, Photography, Politics, Religion, Science, Travel, VideoTalk Less, Work More
On India’s troubled relationship with democratic values. (First published in The Baffler.)
Sometime after midnight on June 25, 1975, over six hundred political leaders, social activists, and trade unionists in India were rudely awakened by knocks on their doors. By dawn, they had been placed behind bars for inciting “internal disturbance.” In parallel, the government shut off electricity to newspaper offices, blocking their next day’s editions.“The President has proclaimed the Emergency,” Prime Minister Indira Gandhi announced in a surprise broadcast the next morning on All India Radio. “This is nothing to panic about.” The previous night, she had made a bleary-eyed President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed trigger the Emergency provision in Article 352 of India’s constitution, which allowed her to postpone elections and suspend most fundamental rights, including those to speech, assembly, association, and movement. With the stroke of a pen, Gandhi had effectively dismantled India’s democratic infrastructure, concentrating dictatorial power in herself. Total press censorship was imposed, and foreign journalists who did not toe the line were summarily expelled, including stringers with the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the Daily Telegraph. On June 28, someone snuck a clever obituary into the Bombay edition of The Times of India: “D’Ocracy—D.E.M., beloved husband of T. Ruth, loving father of L.I. Bertie, brother of Faith, Hope, and Justice, expired on 26th June.”
Lost and Found in Eden
[The fifth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
High in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta of northern Colombia, the Kogi people peaceably live and farm. Having isolated themselves in nearly inaccessible mountain hamlets for five hundred years, the Kogi retain the dubious distinction of being the only intact, pre-Columbian civilization in South America. As such, they are also rare representatives of a sustainable farming way of life that persists until the modern era. Yet, more than four decades ago, even they noticed that their highland climate was changing. The trees and grasses that grew around their mountain redoubt, the numbers and kinds of animals they saw, the sizes of lakes and glaciers, the flows of rivers—everything was changing. The Kogi, who refer to themselves as Elder Brother and understand themselves to be custodians of our planet, felt they must warn the world. So in the late 1980s, they sent an emissary to contact the documentary filmmaker, Alan Ereira of the BBC—one of the few people they’d previously met from the outside world. In the resulting film, From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brother’s Warning (1991), the Kogi Mamos (shamans) issue to us, their Younger Brother, a warning akin to that which the Union of Concerned Scientists would also later issue in their World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity (1997, with a second notice in 2017): that we must take heed of our damage to the planet; that if we don’t stop what we’re doing to it, we will destroy the world we know.The Kogi warning, however, is couched in the language and metaphor of their own knowledge system. They speak of The Great Mother, who taught them “right from wrong,” and whose teachings still guide their lives. “The Great Mother talked and talked. The Great Mother gave us what we needed to live, and her teaching has not been forgotten right up to this day,” they tell us. It’s Younger Brother who is causing problems. “They are taking out the Mother’s heart. They are digging up the ground and cutting out her liver and her guts. The Mother is being cut to pieces and stripped of everything,” the Mamos scold. “So from today, stop digging in the Earth and stealing the gold. If you go on, the world will end. You are bringing the world to an end.” You can hear in their tone that it doesn’t occur to them that Younger Brother might not listen.
Caste and the Delusion of “Merit” in Indian Higher Education
(This essay first appeared in The Caravan, Aug 2020, where it has received many comments. Its full text is also available on Magster.)
The great engineers of medieval India were mainly Shudras. Members of the lowest varna in the caste hierarchy, the Shudras produced a steady supply of architects, builders, stonemasons, bronze sculptors, goldsmiths and other professionals. Sometimes called the Vishwakarma community, these artisans and craftsmen worked in hereditary guilds. They studied structural design, mathematics, material science and the artistic conventions of the day. Commissioned by kings, merchants and Brahmins—who disdained all manual labour themselves—the Shudras, aided by the labour of those considered “untouchable” and outside the varna hierarchy, built all of India’s engineering marvels, including its grand temple towns, magnificent cities such as Vijayanagar and medieval fort-palaces.
The Threat of Covid-19 in India
How to assess the threat of Covid-19 in India? How much fear is justified and how much is overblown? How to think about future policies? Some thoughts below.About 27,000 people die every day in India, including all causes of death combined (0.73% of the population annually). These can be classified into three categories:
(1) About 25%, or 6,750 deaths, are from communicable (infectious) diseases like TB, HIV/AIDS, Malaria, Flu, Diarrhoeal and other respiratory or parasitic diseases.
Of Migrants, Muslims, and Other Non-People
(First published in The Baffler)
The Coronavirus entered India by plane, hidden in the lungs of upper-class travelers. It then jumped to their family members, colleagues, drivers, and maids. The first case of Covid-19 was reported on January 30, but it was only over a month later, in early March, that the government began screening passengers from all international flights. By then, there were twenty-eight known cases in five states; in some parts of the world, the virus was killing nearly as many people as all other causes of death combined.India is the world’s second most populous country. Yet it boasts one of the globe’s lowest levels of public expenditure on health care, just 1.3 percent of GDP, less than a fifth of what the European Union countries invest. Knowing this, the government recognized the virus as a grave, perhaps catastrophic, threat. Public health officials heroically pursued contact tracing. “Social distancing” and “self-isolation” rapidly entered the national lexicon. By March 23, with the number of confirmed cases nearing five hundred, the government had prudently shut down all domestic and international flights and hardened its borders.
A Collective Madness
What Modi’s victory says about today’s India. (An op-ed published in Himal Southasian, where it has received many comments.)
In Varanasi recently, I took an auto-rickshaw from Godowlia to Assi Ghat. Like everyone else in town, the driver and I began talking politics. The 2019 general election was a week away and Prime Minister Narendra Modi was seeking reelection from Varanasi. The driver was an ardent Modi fan and would hear no criticism of him. He even claimed that demonetisation had punished the corrupt rich. One topic led to another and soon he was loudly praising Nathuram Godse as a patriot — Gandhi deserved no less than a bullet for being a Muslim lover. “You don’t know these people,” he thundered. “Read our history! Only Muslims have killed their own fathers to become kings. Has any Hindu ever done so? Inki jaat hi aisi hai. You too should open your mobile and read on WhatsApp. Kamina Rahul is born of a Muslim and a Christian; Nehru’s grandfather, also Muslim, Mughal. Outsiders all. Modi will teach them!” Fortunately, my destination came before his passion for the topic could escalate further.I entered Assi Ghat with a numbing sadness. Was this really Kashi, among the oldest continuously inhabited cities of the world, known for its religious pluralism and massive density of gods, creeds and houses of worship, with its long history of largely peaceful coexistence? The Kashi of the Buddha, Adi Shankara, Kabir, Ravidas and Nanak? The Kashi of shehnai maestro Bismillah Khan, who lived in its tangled gullies and regularly played during the aarti in Balaji temple, or of Hindustani vocalist Girija Devi, whose family kept mannats on Muharram? What still remains of its famed Ganga-Jamuna tehzeeb? No, I consoled myself, my auto driver was not the norm in Varanasi, but he did herald certain fundamental changes now sweeping the country.
What Freedom Means
(This essay appeared in Outlook India on the occasion of India’s 72nd Independence Day. It’s now also on Medium.)
Freedom is the ability to pursue the life one values. This view of freedom is inclusive, open-ended, and flexible. It embraces our plural, evolving, and diverse conceptions of the good life. It also admits other long-standing ideas of freedom, such as not being held in servitude, possessing political self-rule, or enjoying the right to act, speak, and think as one desires.Some people naively equate freedom with an absence of social restraints. But should I be free to do whatever I want? Should I be free to pollute the river, not pay any taxes, or torture the cat? To play loud music on the metro, not rent my apartment to Dalits, or incite hate or violence against other groups? I hope not. My freedom requires limits, so that others may enjoy their freedom. Edmund Burke held that freedom must be limited in order to be possessed. A freer society is not necessarily one with fewer social restraints, but one with a wisely chosen set of restraints as well as provisions, such as public education, healthcare, and ample safety nets for all.
On the Ideology, Political Economy, and Prospects of Cryptocurrencies
(Cross-published on 3 Quarks Daily, Raiot, and Medium; a Spanish translation was published in the journal Nueva Sociedad)
The cryptocurrency movement may be a mainstream media story but confusion about it is widespread. It evokes deeply polarized opinion, what with daily stories of scams, speculative booms, crypto billionaires, and government bans amid tall claims about how cryptocurrencies (and blockchain) are about to transform life and society as we know it. The acolytes of this ‘movement’ imagine it as a totally disruptive force for economics, politics, governance, the Internet, and much more, even though there is little empirical evidence yet to ground that imagination.The cryptocurrency (aka crypto) movement is exciting—full of brainy people, venture capital, heady innovation, and high hopes. It behooves us to more clearly understand the animating ideology of the crypto movement. Should it ever succeed, where might it fit into our political economy and what might be its effects on society? And finally, just how likely is it to succeed?
The Lives of Farm Animals
Peaceable Kingdom, an extraordinary, revelatory, and very moving American film about a few farmers and their farm animals is now online. I saw it when it first came out in 2012 and distributed DVDs to friends. I saw it again last week and I still can’t recommend it enough (the title isn’t my favorite though!). Also consider watching this 24-min talk by its director James LaVeck who offers a wonderful reflection on Harriet Beecher Stowe and how her “famous antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, inspired the making of this documentary film” (78 min).
“A story of transformation and healing, this award-winning documentary explores a crisis of conscience experienced by several farmers questioning their inherited way of life. Growing more and more connected to individual animals under their care, they struggle to do what is right, despite overwhelming social and economic pressure to follow tradition. The film also explores the dramatic animal rescue work of a newly-trained humane police officer whose desire to help animals in need puts her in conflict with unjust laws she is expected to enforce. With heartfelt interviews and rare footage demonstrating the emotional lives and family bonds of farm animals, this groundbreaking documentary challenges stereotypes about life on the farm, offering a new vision for how we might relate to our fellow animals.”
There But For Fortune, Go You Or I
Dr. Mohan Rao, Professor, School of Social Sciences, JNU, takes on The Lottery of Birth for The Book Review. I’m drawing attention to this because it’s the first media review of TLOB. It is unfortunately behind a paywall but here is a PDF of the printed version. Excerpts below.
To understand what is structural violence and what causes it, is this remarkable book of essays … Namit Arora is an unlikely writer of a book such as this, and thus is all the more convincing … written with honesty, intelligence, sensitivity and with ease. Arora has read all the relevant literature in history, anthropology and political theory and writes for the general reader. What is significant above all, is his respect for data, skillfully analysed…How did caste originate in India? How did colonial anthropology and laws shape it, and indeed cast it in stone? Do the Vedic scriptures both create and nurture the system, despite its immorality? Yes, indeed, finds Arora, adding to the voices of those labelled anti-national today. But how reassuring it is to find an anti-national emerging not from JNU, but from the hallowed nationalist portals of IIT! … When voices are being silenced, when debate is being stifled, we need more argumentative Indians than we have. Namit Arora’s brilliant book has contributed to this, and we must thank him for that.
The Paradox of the Belief in a Just World
(An excerpt in The Wire from the introductory essay of my new book: The Lottery of Birth)
In this extract from The Lottery of Birth: On Inherited Social Inequalities, Namit Arora parses through the fiction that he is the sole author of his success and the wilful blindness among Indians about their inherited privileges.
A leading ideological fiction of our age is that worldly success comes to those who deserve it. Per this fiction, the smarter, more talented and disciplined men and women, with some unfortunate exceptions, come out ahead of the rest and morally deserve their material rewards in life. The flip side of this belief is of course that, with some unfortunate exceptions, those who find themselves at the bottom also morally deserve their lot for being – the conclusion is inescapable – neither smart nor talented nor disciplined enough.
The Lottery of Birth
Friends, I’m pleased to announce my first book, ‘The Lottery of Birth: On Inherited Social Inequalities’. This collection of fifteen essays has been in the works for over seven years, and includes extensively updated versions of many essays that first appeared in other online or print venues. Published by Three Essays Collective, the book is now available worldwide. I hope you will give it a look and spread the word. I can arrange a complimentary copy for anyone interested in reviewing the book on any forum. Simply send me a message with a mailing address.
A New Book on Inequalities in IndiaThe Lottery of Birth: On Inherited Social Inequalities by Namit Arora
Publisher: Three Essays Collective | April 2017 | Paperback, 300 pages | Kindle | Excerpt
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