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The Great Derangement

The Great Derangement
The Great Derangement

Amitav Ghosh

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Synopsis


Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability-at the level of literature, history, and politics-to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.

The extreme nature of today's climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements.

Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence-a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer's summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.
 

Summary



Chapter 1: Introduction – Climate Change and Uncivilization

In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh introduces an examination of how and why climate change has been “deranged,” or made unrecognizable by culture and society. Ghosh claims that as a species we have become disconnected from the idea of climate change, which affects our ability to process, come to terms with, and act against it. This disconnect of humanity from climate change, creating a “great derangement,” is due to the ever-deeper immersion in neoliberal economics, popular culture, and nation-states, which are themselves under the deranging influence of post-colonialism. As Ghosh states, “we have of late, come to inhabit a civilization so paradoxically structured that it appears to be entirely lacking in the capacity to imagine its owb future.” Using examples like the controversy surrounding the Montreal Protocol, the “us-versus-the-environment” mentality, and the way that the language we use shapes our understanding of climate change, Ghosh paints a picture of “uncivilization”. This “uncivilization” can be seen in the way that we engage with and overlook atrocities occurring in our own backyard due to issues related to humans and natural forces that largely go disregarded due to our focus on individual economic gain which blind us to the catastrophes that we in fact contribute to and are a part of.

Chapter 2: Reducing the Future to Climate – The Politics of Business as Usual

In Chapter 2 of The Great Derangement, Ghosh argues that the way we have come to understand and discuss climate change continues to be based on the assumption that the future is predetermined and could have been otherwise. By continuing to reduce the conversation to the language of politics and business-as-usual, the future is made appear to be certain and thus impossible to change. This mentality, Ghosh argues, rests upon a “fatalistic” conception of the future, which has lead to the notion that climate change is a phenomenon that can only be either avoided or accepted. This is especially true when it comes to policy, where lawmakers reduce the conversation to numbers and revenue in discussions (i.e. level of emissions and design of carbon-trading systems) and fail to take into account the “cultural” sources of climate change. An example of this form of futurism is the way that the U.S. Department of Energy approaches energy efficiency standards that must be met by 2022. They ignore the amount of innovation and effort that will be necessary, even considering human nature’s flawed inertia, and inadequately model growth to account for this. Ghosh notes that this form of futurism is damaging, because it fails to properly account for change, and ultimately prevents us from taking effective action on climate change.