The Covid-19 pandemic shows how globalisation can trigger changes in the much longer-term history of the planet, a historian based in the US told a Calcutta audience at a virtual programme on Friday.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, professor of history at the University of Chicago, gave the Alexander Duff Memorial Lecture organised by Scottish Church College. The lecture was initiated in 2013 to commemorate “the association of the college with its founder”. The topic of this year’s lecture — The Planetary Age in Human History.

“My personal pleasure is actually enhanced by the fact that my father was a student of this college. He took his honours degree in physics sometime soon after the college changed its name from Scottish Churches College to Scottish Church College,” Chakrabarty said at the outset.

His lecture straddled between capitalism, globalisation and climate change, true to the speaker’s introduction by Supratim Das, the vice-principal of the college. “He has been driven by the question — what history is, what it was yesterday and what it may be tomorrow. We find an amazingly expansive range in his writings, from a genealogy of the discipline of history in late colonial India to the way of thinking about the dilemmas in which humans find themselves today in the wake of climate change, the pandemic and other related problems,” Das said of the speaker.

Some excerpts from Chakrabarty’s lecture and answers to questions that he took later.

All is not well

The current pandemic, the rise of authoritarian and xenophobic regimes and sentiments across the globe, discussions of renewable energy, fossil fuels, climate change, extreme weather events, global warming, loss of biodiversity, the Anthropocene and so on — all signal to us, however vaguely, that something is amiss with our planet and that this may have to do with human actions.

The Covid-19 pandemic is the most recent and tragic illustration of how the expanding and accelerating process of globalisation can trigger changes in the much longer-term history of the planet.

The current moment of the Covid-19 pandemic belongs not only to global history of capitalism and its destructive impact on human life, it also represents a moment in the history of biological life on this planet when humans are acting as the amplifiers of a virus whose host reservoir may have been some bats in China for millions of years.

Bats are an old species. They have been around for about 50 million years. Viruses for much, much, much longer. In the Darwinian history of life, all forms of life seek to increase their chances of survival. This new virus, the novel coronavirus, thanks to the demand for exotic meat in China, jumped species and has now found a wonderful agent in humans that allow it to spread worldwide.

Why?

Because humans, very social animals, now exist in very large numbers, in very big urban concentrations on a planet crowded with them and most of them are extremely mobile in pursuit of their livelihood opportunities.

Humans will win their battle against the virus, and as a human being I really hope we do, but the virus has already won the war. This pandemic is no doubt an episode in the Darwinian history of life and the changes it causes will be momentous both in our global history and in the planetary history of biological life.

Lockdown lessons

I think the lockdown strategy worked very well in slightly richer countries where you not only locked down people but you also gave them money to subsist on. Australia, for instance, introduced a wage contract, whereby they paid people almost 70 per cent of their wages for a whole year. A lockdown works well if the entire nation decides to undergo some privation, so that the national savings are spent more on the vulnerable people. But if you don’t give the poor any money and just simply lock them down, what will they eat and how will they eat?

It very much depends on what kind of social contract the nation represents. In my own sense, about India, unfortunately, is that it does not represent the kind of social contract that welfare states do.

Can change, not mend

Planetary processes — like the carbon cycle, the hydrological cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the way the ocean water circulates or the glaciers — have until now operated mostly independent of human activities. But they have been central to the flourishing of human and other forms of life.

The more we acknowledge our emerging planetary agency, the clearer it becomes that we now have to think about aspects of our planet that humans normally just take for granted as they go about the business of their everyday life.

Take the case of the atmosphere and the share of oxygen in it. The atmosphere is as fundamental to our existence as the simple act of breathing is. For the last 375 million years, since the evolution of large forests, the concentration of oxygen has been maintained by certain processes of the planet at a level that ensured that animals did not suffocate from the lack of oxygen and forests did not burn up from an over-abundance of it.

Dynamic and diverse processes maintain the atmosphere in its current equilibrium. Oxygen is a reactive gas. So, the air needs a constant supply of fresh oxygen. Some of this oxygen comes from tiny sea creatures called the plankton.

If human activities affecting the sea and raising the temperature completely destroyed the plankton — which might happen if the sea level temperature rose by six degrees Celsius, we would thereby destroy a major source of oxygen.

In short, humans have acquired the capacity to interfere with planetary processes but not necessarily, at least not yet, the capacity to fix them.