The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
by Amitav Ghosh
First reviewed December 2016
December of 2016. Bleak.
At first I thought my review of Evil Paradises was rendered laughably naive after England’s Brexit and America’s selection of Donald J. Trump as President-Elect violently and frighteningly repudiated internationalism. I doubt that conclusion, now, because what seems to have been repudiated was not internationalism—not intentionally, anyway—but neoliberal conservatism. The “drain the swamp” populism—embodied on the other end of the narrowly allowed American political spectrum by Bernie Sanders—was co-opted by the very class that should have been overthrown; the entrenched, wealthy, self-dealing elite. Hillary Clinton is the zenith of the neoliberal conservative dream—monied and extremely capable—but that the basis for the dream itself was insufficient and unwanted went ignored:
In the text of the Paris Agreement, there is not the slightest acknowledgement that something has gone wrong with our dominant paradigms; it contains no clause or article that could be interpreted as a critique of the practices that are known to have created the situation that the Agreement seeks to address. The current paradigm of perpetual growth is enshrined at the core of the text.
Perhaps recognition that the modern “Progress above all!” ethos is flawed is what led to the, “Let’s see what’s behind curtain number two!” destruction at the voting polls; it turns out it was only lies and a power grab that is dangerous to the millions of non-white non-males it will continue to disenfranchise.
This does not mean we should ignore the horrors of international cooperation-via-cooptation, the massive benefits of which accrue from exploitation abroad for the sake of innovation at home. Colonialism via capital-accumulation proxy may staunch during the resurgence of baronial dynasty at home, but likely it will only be further masked by our own suffering as wealth continues to congeal amongst the top stratum. In short, without any hands on the levers of government except the very wealthy, we’ll all get fucked:
...it is now perfectly clear that in the West political processes exert very limited influence over the domain of statecraft—so much so that it has even been suggested that “citizens no longer seriously expect...that politicians will really represent their interests and implement their demands.”
This altered political reality may in part be an effect of the dominance of petroleum in the world economy. As Timothy Mitchell has shown, the flow of oil is radically unlike the movement of coal. The nature of coal, as a material, is such that its transportation creates multiple choke points where organized labor can exert pressure on corporations and the state. This is not the case with oil, which flows through pipelines that can bypass concentrations of labor. This was exactly why British and American political elites began to encourage the use of oil over coal after the First World War.
These efforts succeeded perhaps beyond their own wildest dreams. As an instrument of disempowerment oil has been spectacularly effective in removing the levers of power from the reach of the populace. “No matter how many people take to the streets in massive marches,” writes Roy Scranton, “they cannot put their hands on the real flows of power because they do not help to produce it. They only consume.”
This isn’t meant to be another sophomoric polemic against the evils of greed; John Stuart Mill and the myth of enlightened self-interest is the simple ethos we’ve all been taught to justify the way we currently live. It is clearly false, but the nice kind of false that allows us to run our refrigerator twenty-four hours of a day without recognizing that if every single family on the entire planet—rather than just the four percent of the global population that is made up of Americans—did the same thing we’d all asphyxiate. It is the philosophical equivalent to the, “Your greatest weakness is also your secret strength” pap and pablum in which online personality quizzes reel in the confused. It lets us guiltlessly put ourselves first while pretended as if what we’re doing is for the greater good:
Here again the trajectory of the modern novel represents, I think, a special case of a broader cultural phenomenon. The essence of this phenomenon is again captured by the words that John Updike used to characterize the modern novel: “individual moral adventure.” I have already addressed one of the implications of this conception of the novel: the manner in which which it banishes the collective from the territory of the fictional imagination. I want to attend now to another aspect of it: the implications of the word moral.
The word moral derives from a Latin root signifying “custom” or “mores”; connotations of aristocratic usages may well, as Nietzsche famously argued, have been implicit in it. The word has had a long career in English: having once resided within the Church—especially the churches of Protestantism—it has now come to draw its force primarily from the domain of the political. But this is not a politics that is principally concerned with the ordering of public affairs. It is rather a politics that is also increasingly conceived of as an “individual moral adventure” in the sense of being an interior journey guided by the conscience. Just as novels have come to be seen as narratives of identity, so too has politics become, for many, a search for personal authenticity, a journey of self-discovery.
The world is being changed for the worse by humanity pretending our relationship to nature is mostly invisible, that we make the world around us by virtue of our minds and beliefs. That is wrong, simply wrong, and eventually, hopefully, we will learn to work with the world rather than upon it:
Through much of human history, people regarded the ocean with great wariness. Even when they made their living from the sea, through fishing or trade, they generally did not build large settlements on the water’s edge: the great old port cities of Europe, like London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Lisbon, and Hamburg, are all protected from the open ocean by bays, estuaries, or deltaic river systems...an element of that caution seems to have lingered even after the age of European global expansion began in the sixteenth century: it was not till the seventeenth century that colonial cities began to rise on seafronts around the world. Mumbai, Chennai, New York, and Charleston were all founded in this period. This would be followed by another, even more confident wave of city building in the nineteenth century, with the founding of Singapore and Hong Kong. These cities, all brought into being by processes of colonization, are now among those that are more directly threatened by climate change.
Written before 2016 slid from Year of Misery into End of Days territory, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable tears a gash in the self-preservation barriers we’ve collectively erected to blithely continue onward in the lifestyles to which we’ve grown accustomed. I cannot recommend it enough, and my placing of more words between you and this book is doing you a disservice.