The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
- Sep 29, 2022
- 3 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
★★★☆☆
I had never heard of Amitav Ghosh before adding The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable to my reading list. I have a couple of friends on Goodreads who have it on their respective lists, and I either learned about it from one of them, or Goodreads knows me well enough to know that this would fall squarely in my wheelhouse. In any event, this felt like the right book to follow Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Democracy of Species (excerpts from Braiding Sweetgrass, as it turned out), and, in many ways it was. Ghosh is apparently one of India’s great fiction writers, but here he has adapted a series of lectures presented at the University of Chicago in the fall of 2015.
Where The Great Derangement differs from other climate change books, to its great strength, is that its focus is not the narrow lane of climate science but rather the wider boulevards of literature, history, and politics. Broadly, Ghosh is interested in the ways in which human (in)action and thought(lessness) (my parentheticals) have contributed to our current predicament and why we seem incapable of mustering the will to alter our trajectory. Call it a crisis of creativity or, more accurately, an impasse of imagination. That is to say, perhaps uniquely to climate change, humans have not been able to challenge traditional ways of thinking, so we can’t arrive at different conclusions, and so nothing ever changes.
The history of how we got here, strongly correlated with empire and power, is different than many might imagine, while the current political stasis is both cart and horse: governments are incentivized to maintain the status quo, thereby neglecting to take the bold action necessary to effect substantive change; climate change deniers accuse environmental activists of hypocrisy for not living a third-world existence; and media and energy industries benefit from all this gridlock, actively working to perpetuate it. And because politics, like literature, has become increasingly personal, we are no longer bound together in ways that might create collective action.
The great derangement, then, is saying we want a different world while doing nothing to change the present one. Ghosh believes that literature, what is called serious literary fiction, is uniquely positioned to take up the torch and help us imagine other forms of human existence. But, heretofore at least, stories about climate change are seen as too far-fetched to be taken seriously, finding themselves banished to the lower rungs of sci-fi and cli-fi. It seems hard to imagine that in 2015 when these lectures were given, or in 2016 when The Great Derangement was published, let alone in 2022 when I’m reading this, that the arts can have the kind of impact Ghosh envisions: aside from interference and bamboozlement from the expected places, we simply seem too fractured, too isolated, and too self-absorbed to find common ground on anything of such grave importance. It’s a commendable call to arms, perhaps even a necessary one for Ghosh, but feels sadly lacking as the book’s hopeful conclusion. (It doesn’t help that too little has changed in the years since publication.) If literature—serious literary fiction—is going to lead the way in addressing the most urgent crisis of our time, it had better get cracking.
As a final word, because after all this I still haven’t addressed the three-star elephant in the room, I think the book would have benefitted from ordering its sections differently. It starts with “Stories” followed by “History” and “Politics.” As a series of lectures, this sequence may have worked. Here, however, it would have been better had Ghosh opened with “History” and concluded with “Stories.” This flow is obvious for two reasons. First, history is the backdrop to the entire narrative; it is only natural that it should be where the story begins. Second, if literature or, more specifically, writers are meant to help us confront climate change head-on, it is only appropriate that this summons should be the book’s rousing crescendo.
Comments