Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

The great British historian E. P. Thompson once remarked that “India is not an important country, but perhaps the most important country for the future of the world. Here is a country that merits no one’s condescension. All the convergent influences of the world run through this society: Hindu, Moslem, Christian, secular; Stalinist, liberal, Maoist, democratic socialist, Gandhian. There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East which is not active in some Indian mind.” Some may cavil at his assertion that India is (or ever was) the most important country for the future of the world. But I want rather to endorse Thompson’s other claim — namely, that there has been an astonishing diversity of intellectual opinion in India. This is a product of the country’s size, its cultural heterogeneity, and its daring (if admittedly imperfect) attempt to construct a democratic political system in a deeply hierarchical society. Indeed, among the countries of the so-called Global South, India is notable for the vigor, sophistication, and self-confidence of its intellectual traditions. In this respect it stands out even compared to its larger neighbor China, where the scholarly legacy of the past has been brutally crushed by a totalitarian state.  For too long a significant strand of the Indian intellectual tradition has been neglected: its rich speculations about the past, present, and possible future of human relations with the natural world. The burgeoning contemporary literature on the history of environmentalism is also guilty of this omission, owing to its narrow geographical focus. The challenge to American intellectual hegemony in this field first came from Europe, and what took place there was noticed in America. The traffic of ideas across the Atlantic was intense. Yet the conversation has been conducted as if environmental movements and environmental thinkers could not exist outside Europe and North America.  I hasten to add that this bias did not originate in any sort of colonialist condescension or feeling of racial superiority. Rather, it most likely had its roots in conventional social science wisdom, which stubbornly held that environmentalism was a “full stomach” phenomenon, possible only in societies where a certain level of material prosperity had been reached. By the canons of orthodox social science, countries such as India are not supposed to have an environmental consciousness. They are, as it were, too poor to be green. As the economist Lester Thurow notoriously remarked in 1980, “If you look at the countries that are interested in environmentalism, or at the individuals who support environmentalism within each country, one is struck by the extent to which environmentalism is an interest of the upper middle class. Poor countries and poor individuals simply aren’t interested.” This haughty dismissal of any possibility of poor countries being interested in the fate of the natural environment was, at least with regard to India, years out of date. In the spring of 1973, a popular peasant movement in the Himalaya, known as Chipko, threatened to hug the hill forests to stop them from being felled by commercial loggers. Many of the participants were unlettered, but its leaders, though themselves from peasant backgrounds, were informed and articulate about the wider issues. They wrote essays and tracts (usually in Hindi) tracing the direct link between industrial forestry, soil erosion, landslides, and floods. These showed that what at one level was an economic conflict — between the subsistence demands of peasants for fuel, fodder, and so on, and the commercial motivations of paper and plywood companies — had deeper ecological implications as well.  Still, the incomprehension persisted. Consider these remarks, from 1994, by Eric Hobsbawm: “It is no accident that the main support for ecological policies comes from the rich countries and from the comfortable rich and middle classes (except for businessmen, who hope to make money by polluting activity). The poor, multiplying and under–employed, wanted more ‘development’, not less.” Unlike Thurow, Hobsbawm was a historian — a great historian, and therefore more attentive to the messiness of social life, more interested in exploring hidden details than in postulating grand generalizations. And unlike Thurow, whose life was lived largely within the North American academy, Hobsbawm had a keen interest in Latin America, a