Why this climate of denial?

T he Great Derangement is a landmark book on climate change — which is saying a lot for a subject that has generated a sea of technical literature and an ocean of verbiage. The ‘derangement’ pertains to the mismatch between the nature of the problem (a threat to the survival of life on the planet, unmatched in scale to any problem that humankind has ever faced) and the staggeringly indifferent response.

The book — a rigorous and yet elegant and poignant essay that moves easily from weather science to literary criticism, philosophy, economic history and political systems — basically probes this indifference in the world of literature and politics. These are two parallel but inter-connected strands.

The question is: Why does this derangement or blindness exist not just in the minds of policymakers but in almost all of us? Perhaps, few works have offered such a comprehensive, complex and yet succinct answer.

The climate crisis, as Ghosh points out, cannot simply be reduced to the excesses of ‘capitalism’— it is also about how the thought processes that underpin modern societies (Ghosh covers the interface between the philosophy of the Enlightenment and literature so well) have programmed our relationship with Nature. The work points to the need for a paradigm shift in the discourse.

The political dimension As for the political, Ghosh argues how the logic of empire “may actually have retarded the onset of the climate crisis”.

Ghosh disputes the stereotypical view that technology diffused from the West to the East and cites historians such as Sanjay Subrahmaniam to suggest that they developed ‘synchronously’.

As a result, coal based steamships were being avidly built by the Wadia family in Bombay, only to run into a British protectionist law that barred Indian ships from accessing British ports.

Since a vibrant coal-based industry would instead have ensured the use of Indian coal locally rather than its being exported, the British empire was focused on controlling coal in India and oil in Burma. This kept emissions in the colonies low.

The end of colonialism led to the freeing up of these resources and accelerated ‘development’ in the Asian colonies.

The climate justice argument of India and China today “about fairness in relation to per capita emissions is, in a sense, an argument about lost time.”

But the pursuit of distributive justice by the whole of Asia is obviously showing up in a spike in worldwide emissions, with recent years witnessing the most unprecedented floods, heat waves, glacier melts and hurricanes — ironically, with disproportionately tragic effects in densely populated Asia.

Asia, playing catch-up, does not want to cut back. Meanwhile, the West, realising the strong link between fossil fuel use and control over the world, is reluctant to commit to emission cuts so steep as to lead to the “global redistribution of power”. This is the political deadlock, the derangement.

Climate justice, unfortunately, goes against a simple truth: “that the patterns of life that modernity engenders can only be practised by a small minority of the world’s population.”

The inability to resolve this excruciating dilemma lies at the core of the derangement or ‘silences’ on the world political stage.

As Ghosh puts it: “In this role as horror-struck simpleton, Asia has also laid bare, through its own silence, the silences that are now ever more plainly evident at the heart of global systems of governance.”

Gandhian critique By probing Asia’s confusion, Ghosh is not being an apologist of the West or of empire. The book is nothing if not a penetrating, and somewhat Gandhian critique of the Western way of life and thought.

He etches out how the shift away from coal to oil — from a labour intensive, participatory way of producing energy to a remote controlled, machine-driven one — has disembowelled political and environmental dissent in Western democracies, since citizens only consume the energy, without having any levers on its production, as with coal.

However, it leaves one wondering whether a shift away from oil to renewables (apart from nuclear and hydro) can lead to a recapture of citizen’s political power as well.

As an interesting historical aside, Ghosh points out that Mahatma Gandhi’s advocacy of a low-resource-based model of development and living was resisted by those who felt that India should industrialise to be strong.

This conflict led, in his view, to Gandhi’s assassination by Hindu supremacists. However, ‘endless industrial growth’ is a goal shared by all political forces today.

Literary derangement The engagement with Gandhi ties up with the book’s literary and philosophical concerns. Gandhi’s environmentalism resonates with a pre-modern view of how Nature mediates human lives, investing it with mystery, beauty and danger.

With the Enlightenment came the idea of Man using science to control nature. God too assumed an anthropocentric persona. Today, the relentless hubris of technology seems absurd and terrifying. Ghosh points out how indigenous populations never lived near the sea, whether in Fukushima or in the Andamans. In both places, modern installations were ravaged by tsumanis.

Ghosh points out that mainstream literature of the 19th century right up to the present has been essentially based on the foibles of orderly, everyday, bourgeois life; descriptions of ‘individual moral adventure’ congealed in space and time, with no room for phenomena beyond the certitudes of science. The novel has yet to come to terms with the fact that in today’s world, wild and improbable events have become the new normal — quite like the tornado that hit Delhi in 1978, which Ghosh brings to life early on in the book.

This is the cultural derangement — of the arts being trapped in an Enlightenment framework, and neo-classical economics being taken up by the ideal of individual freedom. Ghosh observes that Gandhi’s acutely moral approach too does not challenge the prevailing ethic of individualism.

Ghosh, again adopting a Gandhian strain, does not lay store by non-religious responses as such, perhaps because they are too enmeshed in the Enlightenment philosophy. He relies on a certain grand religious narrative which transcends boundaries, like Pope Francis’ appeal to save the planet does.

If the waffle at the Paris Ministerial last December is any indication, corporate honchos and politicians cannot be trusted with the job. Ghosh’s angst-ridden refrain, of course, is that writers too have lost the plot.

Amitav Ghosh is an award-winning author and essayist whose books include, The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome,The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide and The Ibis Trilogy: Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire.

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