You've mentioned optimism there and hope, and there is very much a feeling of
that towards the end of the book. If you remove borders as this book does
with the doors, there is something slightly absurd about trying to pretend
that there are these things of nation-states and as you say the sort of
nativism that strikes up in people. But are you hopeful that if, maybe not with
magic doors, but through the progress of time and through borders and barriers
being removed, that people will be able to live more cohesively together or
are people always going to revert back to sort of the things that make them
feel safe, the things that they recognise?
Well I think human history is the
unsteady, uncertain, yet nonetheless quite noticeable progression towards greater equality.
So you know the notion that men and women are equal, that people of different
races are equal, that religious and non-religious people, gay and straight
people are equal. These expansions of equality tend to occur over time.
And I think the notion that somebody born in Mogadishu and somebody born in
Manchester are equal will also eventually be acknowledged and they have
equal right to live in a safe and prosperous place and really equal right
to live anywhere on this planet. It might be some centuries in the future that we
get there, but I think that this is not actually a kind of disaster where we
have to you know because we like equality we sort of have to allow this
to occur but it's really gonna be terrible for us. I think as we begin to
expand our belief in that equality, in human equality, lots of new things come
into focus. So we will have to think as humanity to tackle climate change.
We're gonna have to think as humanity to mitigate the consequence
of migration. But also we have to think as humanity to regulate technology
because a nation-state based approach to regulating technology always results in
a kind of maximalist idea of what technology should
do because the nation that decides to go slow on technology will become militarily
you know vulnerable and obsolete very quickly. So if we are a bunch of
competing nation-states threatened by each other we will tend to allow
technology to unfold in a completely almost completely unregulated fashion.
Which is what we're seeing. And that's causing enormous anxiety and
particularly in the coming decades as we give birth to machines that can learn
and in many senses will be more capable than us at many tasks we used to perform,
simultaneously we're going to generate enormous surpluses from these machines
and we're going to have the obliteration of many forms of livelihood that we
previously knew. Now if we are thinking of ourselves as equal and governing
ourselves more as human beings we could take some of that surplus and make life
much better for those who are losing their jobs and actually enter into a
kind of almost heaven-like future where people do not want for food and shelter
and basic needs and are able to pursue things that they find to be valuable to
themselves. Alternatively we can stay you know in a world that doesn't accept the
equality of people based on where they are from and the benefits of this
technology can accrue to a handful of trillionaires in California and the rest of us
will be unemployed. A kind of dystopian hell. So you know I think each time you
expand what equality can do or is permitted, all the other equalities
benefit. You know men and women, different races, gay and straight. Each
equality expansion helps. So I think that a world which is more equal than this
world will also be a world where we are much better able to solve the problems
that we face. And I think that as a result of that what is paradoxically
likely to happen is far fewer people will move. Because most people actually
want to stay with their loved ones they don't want to go somewhere else. But our
world is engineered in such a way that we are you know
producing carbon dioxide emissions from wealthy countries, those are obliterating
the agricultural regions and coastlines of poorer countries.
But what if we weren't doing things quite this way? What if we were investing in
places because we thought of people as equal. I think that would be a world
where there would also be, even though the right to migrate would be enormously
expanded, it might be a world where the actual pace of migration was much lower.
And so I think you know if you if you start to imagine along these lines
what I'm saying may or may not come to pass and it's not necessarily the only way
we could go forward that's positive, but but I think starting to articulate
positive visions of the future is essential because at the moment what we're
being drowned in is pessimistic visions and those read almost invariably to
reactionary politics of tribes that sort of wanna kill each other. So, yes
the novel does hint at an optimistic future and I believe that optimistic
future actually is more likely than not to occur simply because the history of
humanity is not the history of genocides, it is mostly of genocides that
did not occur. So we are struck by the Holocaust and we are struck by you know
what happened to Native American people in North America for example
when European descent people arrived but those things are of the exception most
of the time what happens is what happened in Pakistan which is for
thousands of years lighter skinned people came into an area that was
inhabited by darker skinned people, and the result was brown skinned people like me.
They mixed over thousands of years and I think that's likely to happen in the future as well.
Pakistan of course has a history of division, it exists as a
country itself because of being divided, the division of religious groups,
and then divided again with Bangladesh. I wondered whether that history
of division is part of what feeds into a book that wants to find the hope in a
unification again of people coming together to work together.
Yeah, very much. For me I once asked my grandfather you know what was the biggest event of your
life. My grandfather you know died a little over a decade ago and he was born
in the early 20th century and he had grown up in a family in rural Punjab and
had sold off his family land and gone off to the UK to study engineering and
then came back (this was all when the British Empire still ruled India) then came back and
built canals. And in 1947 India and Pakistan was partitioned at that point
he was a married man with a couple of kids and so he was alive during the
Second World War and he was alive during the various India/Pakistan Wars and
nuclear weapons tests and man landing on the moon, Humanity landing on
the moon. And he said to me that the single event of his life that had been
most consequential was partition, the partition of India and Pakistan. Because
he said two-thirds of my neighbors and friends left. And I think that
somebody who spent a lot of time in Pakistan as I have, the echoes of
partition continue. But I think you know like many other major world events the
implications of these echoes is not simply for people who live in Pakistan
or India. We can learn as humanity from these things.
And what I have learnt is that even if undertaken with the best motives
that we should divide and fall and you know form more cohesive simple entities...
I mean sometimes there's reasons to do this,
you stop bloodshed by doing it, but you must be very careful with that
impulse because much more often than not you wind up triggering a whole series of
further fissionings and a search for purity which in the end
shatters societies. And so when I observe a partition impulse in Britain that we
see today I think history is useful. And already in Britain the tendency towards
purity you know the way that people who are anti-Brexit are spoken of as
traitors, the kind of language that we're using, the rise in hate speech and
racist violence; these are things we've seen in other places like Pakistan.
And so for me Pakistan has lessons you know for the rest of the world and
this novel is about some of those lessons.