Once in a while, even in works of popular history, an author will raise the prospect that what happened twelve thousand years ago, during the so-called Agricultural Revolution, wasn’t that humans domesticated plants but that plants domesticated humans. From a Richard Dawkins ‘selfish gene’ perspective, this makes a kind of sense. To ensure the survival of its DNA, a plant was shrewd to offer itself up as a staple to the human diet. Armies of human slaves were soon organized and trained to cultivate and protect generation after generation of its offspring.
Authors mean this as provocation, I suppose, something perhaps to get the mental juices flowing, because the idea is typically dropped just as soon as it’s floated. Of course it is. To explain the Agricultural Revolution as the botanical domestication of human beings would be to attribute historical agency to plants, and what is that if not blatant superstition?
Yet the granting of historical agency to non-human subjects and the exploration of what such a radical prospect would mean to our understanding of the past and the present has been the project of Amitav Ghosh, one of the most influential and compelling scholars writing in the humanities today. In his latest book of non-fiction, Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories (2023), Ghosh excavates the British empire’s nineteenth-century Asian opium monopoly: its cultivation and processing of the poppy nectar in South Asia, its importation and distribution into the ‘virgin soils’ of Southeast Asia and China, and—because, without this trade, the empire would not have been fiscally viable—the violence that it used to establish near total control of the many aspects of this enterprise, including two Opium Wars. Ghosh examines the trade’s literature and visual arts, its arguments of justification and dissent, and its legacies and parallels in the present day.
Among these legacies are those parts of India, relatively more stable and less blighted with poverty today, where particular peoples were able to skirt British dominance, to maintain degrees of autonomy, and to find their own ways of profiting from a highly lucrative market in a highly addictive drug. Among the parallels is the opioid crisis of recent decades in the United States. In this historical rhyme, the British role is played by Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family, the Chinese by the working class of deindustrialized America, and the precisely weighted packets of smoke-able Chana by machine-cut tablets of OxyContin and Vicodin.
All well and good. All quite thorough and impressive, actually. But here’s the difference. Ghosh believes that this history is best understood by perceiving the poppy plant not as inert matter, but as “an actor in its own right,” an “independent biological agent.” I see the reasoning for this approach. Ghosh is not alone in taking the position that the consequences of modernity, which we now must recognize as dire and catastrophic, were built on a fundamentally modern orientation that attributed intelligence solely to the human mind and dismissed the remaining non-human world of life as mindless, biological mechanics. This is the fundamental assumption that underwrote Western dominance and its justifications, of which the British opium trade is particularly representative. It is this orientation that continues to underwrite notions of human exceptionalism and suprem
acy. To truly confront these consequences, and to be responsible to them, we must replace this way of thinking with another way.
I have a lot of sympathy for the argument, but let’s face it—it’s asking a lot. So I find myself looking closely at Ghosh’s language. If the poppy has historical agency, how does Ghosh demonstrate that agency? What is its character? And where else to look for the answers to these questions, other than his words?
At times Ghosh’s claims are couched with some diffidence: the non-human intelligence he senses at work here is a “feeling” that is “hard to ignore.” It indicates “a certain kind of vitality that manifests in innumerable ways, seen and unseen.” At other times, Ghosh is more straightforward. The poppy plant has “extraordinary powers,” and the fact that today’s polycrisis has forced us to reckon with them is “entirely positive.” Likewise, when describing particular actions taken during the period in question, Ghosh lands at various points on a kind of agency scale. Sometimes the poppy was merely “instrumental”; other times, it “colluded” with humans; still other times, it acted outright: expanding its circulation, creating addiction, defeating military powers, molding history. Of course, when he attributes direct actions to the poppy, he doesn’t mean the actions of any particular plant, the way we might discuss the actions of an individual human being, but the poppy as some Platonic universal, the poppy oversoul, perhaps.
“It would appear, then,” Ghosh writes in a summary sentence late in the book, “that the poppy, having been a major force in the making of modernity, will also be instrumental in its unmaking, a role that it will share with fossil fuels.” Here, the several ways Ghosh expresses the poppy’s agency are not precisely in harmony with each other. For instance, consider his use of the word “force.” Whether this metaphor has its origins in the structural violence of political power or the ancient science of physics, it is wildly overused as a way to explain causality. We all rely on the term “force,” almost constantly, but it betrays a fundamentally materialist orientation, precisely the orientation that Ghosh and other ecologically-mindful critics are striving to disrupt. Likewise, when he then refers to the poppy as an instrument—a tool—he continues to reinforce the modern conceptual system that perceives all non-human life as an exploitable resource.[i]
In the next clause, however, the poppy plays “a role,” a metaphor from the theater, where purpose is effected via analog symbolics. Unlike “force,” the plays-a-role metaphor supports Ghosh’s claim that the poppy possesses vitality and truly acts. But then that notion is immediately undermined once again: the poppy’s role, Ghosh writes, is “shared” by fossil fuels. Surely he doesn’t t claim the same intelligence and vitality for fossil fuels that he does for the poppy, given that the poppy—however universally he intends us to understand that term—is alive; whereas fossil fuels are definitively not alive but are the remains of life.
It is useful to subject Ghosh’s language to this sort of linguistic analysis? Ghosh himself admits that our biggest obstacle to challenging a materialist orientation is “the fact that the necessary vocabulary does not exist for thinking about history in a way that allows for the agency of non-human entities.” The contribution of scholars such as Ghosh is to chip away at that obstacle.
One of the ways Ghosh does this is to differentiate between what we might call human time and poppy time. The poppy “creates patterns,” Ghosh writes. It creates its own “temporalities.” It comes into and then “recede[s] from view.” The poppy’s agency exists within it’s own temporal dimension and is felt by humans systemically, in structures of class, in inequities of wealth and freedom, in geographies, in geopolitics. Societies struggle to manage systemic pathologies, just as individuals struggle to manage the consequences of addiction, patterns likewise sunk deeply into their own body’s natural history. Most of time these struggles, whether collective or individual, are in vain. We are not in control, as the 12-step programs say—our fates are in the hands of a “Power greater than ourselves.”
Power is another of those overused and problematic mechanistic metaphors. If the poppy acts and wields power, maybe it isn’t that its power is ‘greater,’ as in possessing more ‘force’ than human power does, but that it operates at a broader timescale than that easily perceived by humans. We might think of greater as older, wiser, more deeply integrated, more complexly related. In Smoke and Ashes, Ghosh shouts out to Robin Wall Kimmerer a time or two. Kimmerer’s project of honoring our “elders” in the plant world overlaps with Ghosh’s on animist grounds.
The attention Ghosh gives to differences in dimension and timescale likewise overlaps with the insights of the systems view. When articulating his ideas about “mind and nature,” the systems theorist Gregory Bateson emphasized the importance of understanding that in complex ecological systems, some informational loops are vast. An answer to a message eventually comes back around the loop, changing form along the way, but that circuit may take many human lifetimes to complete.
In making these connections—between his particular mode of environmental humanities and recent scholarship in indigenous thought and spirituality, and in turn, to the science of complex systems—Ghosh advances a merger of disparate intellectual projects, like circles closing in on each other in a Venn diagram. It’s the opposite of siloing. The shared space, which grows larger the more the circles converge, is fertile ground for the ecological imagination.
It is ground, too, for the moral advocacy that the ecological imagination implies. “Only by recognizing the power and intelligence of the opium poppy can we make peace with it,” Ghosh writes. Recognizing the poppy’s power and intelligence, or, more broadly, the power and intelligence of non-human life, “would mean parting company with many ideas that have long been dominant, such as the notion that the earth is inert and humans are the only agents of history.” Those ideas and notions have been described by a host of thinkers as Cartesian, Baconian, as materialist-utilitarian, as modern. They “created a system in which indifference to human suffering was not just accepted by ruling elites but was justified and promoted by a plethora of false teleologies and deceptive theories.” That indifference is the same indifference that “makes it possible today for the wealthy and powerful to be suicidally indifferent to the prospect of a global catastrophe.”
What Ghosh and others advocate for, then, is a fundamental reimagining of perception. This advocacy is a moral one because it involves matters that cannot be solved technologically but that must be adjudicated with a moral conscience. Whether we are indifferent to or sensitive to the suffering of others, and whether we are indifferent to or sensitive to “the prospect of global catastrophe” may hinge on the same thing: whether we attribute intelligence and agency to life in the non-human world.
[i] In their 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson define ‘conceptual system’ as the system of concepts that “structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities.” Conceptual system is therefore essentially synonymous with many other terms such as ‘fundamental orientation,’ ‘mindset,’ ‘worldview,’ ‘mental maps,’ ‘frames of reference,’ etc.
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