The following excerpt from the book The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021) by the English-language Bengali author Amitav Ghosh offers a witty critique of “official modernity” with its tendency to deprive everything non-human of voice and intentionality, of historicity. According to Ghosh, today we face a great task, which is to restore a voice to the non-human in the sphere of human imagination, as well as to recognize (rediscover) that not only humans tell and pass on stories. Translated by Luděk Čertík, based on the British paperback edition (John Murray, 2021, pp. 197-204).
I think there is no longer any dispute that Western scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals who believed that non-white peoples were inherently rude, insensitive, and essentially mute were deeply and fundamentally wrong. But what if they were also wrong about the inertness and brute objectivity of what they called “Nature”? What if the very people whom the Western elite considered brutes and savages were right all along—people who could see signs of vitality, life, and meaning in beings of countless different species? What if the idea that the Earth is teeming with other beings who act, communicate, tell stories, and weave meanings begins to be taken seriously?
And why should it be unlikely? Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose He had long since demonstrated that plants could feel pain and fear, and even respond audibly to certain stimuli. His work was praised for a time, but then the representatives of official modernity struck back and silenced him as a "charlatan."
Now, however, the practices of official modernity themselves have revealed communication skills in many kinds of nonhuman creatures, from marine mammals and elephants to trees and forests. Perhaps the most famous of these scientists is the famous primatologist Jane Goodall, who described instances of understanding with a male chimpanzee she nicknamed David Graybeard: “His large and shining eyes, set so wide apart… as if they somehow expressed his entire personality. David taught me that as long as I looked into his eyes without condescension, without any demand, he didn't mind… His eyes seemed like windows through which, if I had only a little bit of skill, I could peer into his mind."
Banu Subramaniam, a scientist studying the sedges, can now ask herself questions that would have been considered indecent a few years ago: "Who were the actors in my experiments with the sedges? And what about the plant itself? What about its actions? Its own history?""
Scientists now admit that trees in a forest are capable of communicating with each other under certain circumstances—they can send carbon aid to sick members of their community and they can warn each other of pests and diseases. It is now believed that some plants can even make sounds that are inaudible to the human ear but audible to certain other living creatures. Trees are therefore mute only to the extent that they lack the human attribute of speech. But could it not be said that the fact that humans lack the ability to communicate with trees makes humans mute from the tree’s perspective?
It may seem obvious to humans that the ability to destroy trees and forests gives them, and no one else, the ability to act. But intentional action can also occur on completely different time scales. Trees have inhabited the Earth much longer than humans, and their individual lifespans are in many cases orders of magnitude longer than humans: some live for thousands of years. If trees had intelligence, their thoughts would be geared to a completely different time frame, perhaps one in which they would assume that most humans would perish in a planetary catastrophe. The world after such an event would be one in which trees would thrive as never before, on soil enriched by billions of decomposing human bodies. Humans may take it for granted that they are the gardeners who decide what happens to the trees. On a different time scale, however, it might seem equally obvious that trees garden on humans. They may be the Earth equivalent of the oceanic superorganism from Solaris.
But maybe it's not all that different? Trees and humans are not adversaries competing for space. They are also connected by countless forms of cooperation. Perhaps the very idea of an isolated species is at fault here. It is now known that the human body contains a vast variety of microorganisms; biologists estimate that 90 percent of the human body is made up of bacteria rather than human cells, and one microbiologist has suggested that under a microscope the human body looks like a coral reef, "a cluster of living forms bivouacing together."". Microorganisms are also known to influence moods, emotions, and human reasoning abilities. So if it is true that the human ability to speak and think can only be realized in the presence of other animal species, can it really be said that these abilities belong exclusively to humans?
Recent biological research has shown that many species do not evolve in isolation: bacteria are essential for the survival of all kinds of animals, including humans. According to a team of biologists, "it is becoming increasingly clear that symbiosis is the 'rule', not the exception… Nature may favor 'relationships' over individual genomes." Many organisms are born without the bacteria they need to reach adulthood; they must encounter these bacteria in the world—and without these encounters, they are unable to reach their full potential.
It could not be said of humans that it was the presence of certain non-human creatures in specific moments of mutual encounter that made it possible Homo sapiens overcome your limitations? Take, for example, that pivotal moment in the history of consciousness when the Buddha attained enlightenment: this event, as is well known, occurred while he was meditating under the Bodhi tree. For more than two thousand years, in the Buddhist tradition, the presence of this tree has been inextricably linked to the moment of awakening. This does not mean that the tree transmits awakening, or even that it is an active participant in the process. And it is not true that everyone who meditates under the Bodhi tree will attain enlightenment.
However, millions of people have long recognized that an interspecies encounter at a specific historical moment was instrumental in the awakening of one particular man, Prince Siddhartha Gautama. The Buddha himself believed that the tree played a key role in his path to enlightenment, and millions of Buddhists still hold the Bodhi tree sacred. In the words of the Dalai Lama:
After the tree, the great sage Buddha was born. Under the tree, he overcame passion and attained enlightenment. After two trees, he entered nirvana.
What does this tell us? First of all, it suggests that certain kinds of interspecies connections cannot be understood using scientific methods. They are encounters or events that take place at specific points in time and cannot be repeated. Such encounters can only be approached historically, taking into account the circumstances under which they occur.
Second, it tells us that awareness of the possibility of such interspecies encounters has always existed among humans. One need only recall St. Francis of Assisi and the story of how he subdued a man-eating wolf in Gubbio, Italy. “Brother wolf," he said. "All the people curse you, the dogs chase you, and all the inhabitants of this city are your enemies, but I will make peace between them and you, brother wolf."… and neither people nor dogs will pursue you anymore." And so it happened. The encounter was witnessed by many eyewitnesses, and according to tradition, the people of Gubbio eventually buried the deceased wolf in the church named after Saint Francis. Five and a half centuries later, in 1872, during renovations, the wolf's remains were found buried under the church.
It does not take much thought to realize that countless men and women have spoken of communicating with nonhuman beings—animals, volcanoes, trees, gods, demons, angels, and even God. Although many of them were impostors and charlatans, some—like Saint Francis—were among the most respected figures of their time: human society and human history would be meaningless without these figures. But their claims cannot be understood or grasped by the forms of reasoning that prevail today, simply because they cannot be repeated or empirically verified. Contemporary reason requires anyone who claims to communicate with nonhuman beings to provide evidence of these interactions. This condition necessarily excludes anyone who says: “In an altered state of consciousness, a nonhuman being spoke to me, to me alone, and once, and what this being told me was neither useful nor verifiable: it was just a story.”"
Yet most similar claims are expressed in precisely these words: The traces they leave behind do not have observable effects in the real world, they are rather stories that subsequently take on a fixed form in texts, icons, and rituals..
The real question, then, is not whether nonhuman beings can communicate and weave meaning; rather, we must ask: When and how did a small group of people come to believe that other beings, including most of their own species, are incapable of expression and action? How did they manage to establish as the prevailing view the idea that nonhuman beings are mute and lacking in reason?
A fundamental step in silencing nonhuman voices was the idea that only humans are capable of telling stories. Again, this is not an idea that humans have always held; many people, perhaps most people in the world, still do not accept it. It is essentially another elitist idea that has gained ground with the advancing march of mechanistic metaphysics. Yet the idea that humans are the only storytellers seems self-evident to those who subscribe to it today.
Consider, for example, the following passage from one of the finest depictions of landscape in contemporary literature, Graham Swift's excellent novel Land of Waters (Waterland) from 1983. "Only animals," says one of Swift's characters, "they live exclusively in the Here and Now. Only nature knows no memory or history. But man—let me offer you a definition—is a story-telling animal. Wherever he wanders, he desires to leave behind him not chaotic confusion and empty space, but the comforting beacons and signposts of stories."
This passage served as an introduction to an excellent article by environmental historian William Cronon. The article discusses the nature of narrative, and Cronon argues that the fundamental difference between a mere sequence of events (a "chronology")") and story is that a story ties events together in such a way as to imbue them with meaning. He assumes that this is a characteristically human ability, and therefore: “Narrative is a specifically human way of organizing reality."
So again, it is not so much about storytelling itself as it is about who can be the creator of meanings. Again, the assumption is that non-human beings cannot weave or discern meanings.
As with many other attempts to define human exceptionalism, this idea is only tenable if meaning-making and storytelling are defined circularly, as bound to human forms of language. But is it really the case that experiences can have no meaning if language is absent? Clearly, this is not the case for prelinguistic humans: it is well known that even infants understand and weave a whole range of meanings. So why shouldn't it be possible to connect experiences into meaningful patterns in other ways, such as through memory, vision, or smell? Every pet owner knows that a dog understands the meaningful relationship between home, the park, and a particular time of day. It is a "chronology" for a dog" or "narration""? Either way, it is clear that the dog does not live "exclusively in the Here and Now""; his experiences are sequential and he understands them as unfolding in time and space.
The importance of sequence is obvious to anyone who has ever tried to write a story: a narrative is nothing more than the organization of a sequence of events. That is why the sentences that connect one paragraph to another have such an irreplaceable meaning: they create successive links between events and places that create a meaningful narrative. This kind of narrative sequence is analogous to movement in time and space: that is precisely what “unfolding” means." story. This may explain why so many of the world's oldest and most powerful narratives are stories that unfold through movement: for example, Ramayana, Odyssey, Norse sagas, Journey to the West (Monkey King) etc.
It is now well known that many animals have long memories and are able to communicate in complex ways. Some of these animals, such as elephants, whales and migratory birds, also travel vast distances and seem to feel a sense of place. These movements cannot be described as purely mechanical, instinctive or simply meaningful connections. Humpback whales, for example, express the passage of time by changing their songs from year to year. This would hardly be possible if they lived “exclusively in the Here and Now”.
As early as the 1930s, biologist Jakob von Uexküll demonstrated that many animals actively interpret their surroundings and create their own experiential worlds. This idea has long been uncomfortable for those who believed that it was a cardinal error to attribute human qualities to animals. However, as Eileen Crist convincingly shows in her book Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind, to consistently avoid anthropomorphism is only to risk falling into the related fallacy of mechanomorphism – the assumption that animals are mechanical creatures that cannot, in principle, be endowed with minds or interpretive powers.
In short, there are many good reasons to conclude, as Donna Haraway does, that “storytelling can no longer be pigeonholed into a human exceptionalism.”"Anthropologist Thom van Dooren goes even further. In his fascinating study of a flock of penguins that persistently return to a Sydney suburb beach year after year, he concluded that the birds' attachment to the place stems from "storytelling."" (storying). He writes: “Experiencers like penguins also ‘imagine’ the world: they do not simply receive sensory data as unfiltered and meaningless phenomena, but weave meanings out of experiences, so that, like humans, they ‘inhabit a story-world without borders’."
It seems, then, that the idea that humans are the only animals that tell stories is by no means an unproblematic reflection of reality. It is something that some people like to believe, just as many once believed that most humans are brutes and therefore incapable of weaving meaning. In other words, it is a construct that is closely linked to structures of power and the violent suppression of awareness of non-human forms of action and expression. Unsurprisingly, in this respect too, the hand of power often falls hardest on indigenous populations.
When we think of the suppression of stories today, dissident literature and authoritarian regimes immediately come to mind. But there were other kinds of stories that were also suppressed or oppressed, for very different reasons and for much longer periods of time – for example, storytelling. humm-hah the Laguna Pueblo (Kawaika) tribe. According to Leslie Marmon Silko These stories deal with conversations that "coyotes, crows, and buzzards once had with people". In his memoirs The Turquoise Ledge Silko recalls how she was not allowed to tell stories during her childhood hummah-hah to speak in some public places because they revealed “the Lagoon’s spiritual view of animals, plants, and spiritual beings.” These stories existed in the shadows, as secret rumors.
It is therefore quite possible that the ability to tell stories is far from being an exclusively human trait, but that it is the most animal of human abilities, a product of one of the traits that humans undoubtedly share with animals and many other beings – an attachment to place. Perhaps, then, storytelling, without distinguishing humans from animals, is in fact the most important vestige of our once wild selves. This would explain why stories are the quintessential domain of the human imagination in which nonhuman creatures have a voice and where nonhuman historicity has been fully recognized, even celebrated. Making such a leap may be difficult in other, more prosaic domains of thought, but in the world of storytelling, where anything is possible, it was not difficult.
The impoverishment of possibilities in this area and the subsequent erasure of non-human voices from the “serious" literature has contributed in no small measure to the blindness to other beings that is such a prominent feature of official modernity. It follows that if these nonhuman voices are to be brought back, it must be done primarily through stories.
This is the great burden that now rests on the shoulders of writers, artists, filmmakers, and all others involved in storytelling: we have the task of imaginatively restoring historicity and voice to nonhuman beings. As with the most important artistic works in human history, it is a task that is both aesthetic and political—and, given the scale of the crisis plaguing the planet, now has the utmost moral urgency.
