Summary
1. Climate change poses a challenge to the idea of freedom, a core part of our conception of modern politics. Part and parcel of that freedom is being free from Nature and the nonhuman, which makes it hard for politics to want to enmesh itself with those things.
Furthermore, not just politics but the arts of the late 20th century and early 21st century were concerned with the individual, with the self-reflexive. Art joined literature in transcending material life, in focusing on the abstract, and, as Ghosh posits, contributing to the Great Derangement. This is even more startling when we remember that we’ve always deemed the arts to be progressive, to be able to look ahead in aesthetic and political matters. However, as the “literary mainstream…was becoming more engage on many fronts, [it] remained just as unaware of the crisis on our doorstep as the population at large” (125).
2. The political sphere has widened extensively since the advent of the internet and digital media, but this politicization has not translated into more action to combat climate change. Most political energy these days seems to relate to questions of identity, such as religion, caste, ethnicity, language, etc. Ghosh wonders about this “divergence between the common interest and the preoccupations of the public sphere” (126), and suggests there has been a change in the nature of politics itself.
To delve into this, he returns to the modern novel and Updike’s quote about the “individual moral adventure.” “Moral” is now a secular term but one rooted in Protestantism. In relation to literature, it suggests a journey of perfection, of bearing witness and testifying, of upholding sincerity and authenticity. This is what direction literature turned to, and it is not equipped to deal with something like climate change.
Politics, like literature, excludes the nonhuman and sees everything as subjective. The public sphere is performative, while actual governance is done behind the scenes. Ghosh uses the example of massive protests against the Iraq War that did absolutely nothing to affect policy. Political processes have little influence over statecraft, and citizens say they do not seriously expect politicians to “really represent their interests and implement their demands” (130).
Ultimately, the countries of the West are now post-political spaces “that are managed by apparatuses of various kinds” (132), which leads to a sense of loss and a desire to find a truly participatory politics.
3. Ghosh has noticed that recently activists and other concerned people have begun referring to climate change as a “moral issue.” This may be true, but there are other facets to consider with this language. Individual choices make very little impact and major collective action is needed; yardsticks of morality are not the same everywhere; and moral sincerity is simply not powerful enough of an exemplar to inspire change. We are trapped in the “individualizing imaginary” (135) and need to find a way out. Ghosh says that it is fair to blame policymakers, but we should also blame the artists and writers whose actual job it is to imagine.
4. Ghosh looks at the state of affairs in the Anglosphere—the U.S., Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada—and identifies two poles of widespread denialism and vigorous activism. This is particularly conspicuous in the U.S., which is burdened by intense political polarization.
Opposition to climate science is “enabled, encouraged, and funded by certain corporations and energy billionaires” and “further compounded by the mass media” (137). Interestingly, though, other aspects of the U.S. body politic don’t have such issues with climate science. The security establishment is seriously committed to studying climate change, and has in many cases even “appropriated the language and even the tactics of climate change activism” (139). Intelligence agencies are also producing detailed studies of the effects on climate change.
5. It does not seem improbable that the security establishment in the Anglosphere today might adopt a different approach from the domestic political sphere: global warming is both domestic and global. It would also be counterintuitive for a nation state to ignore such a massive crisis. But this does not translate into any larger, more conspicuous changes. The nature of the carbon economy is that power, not just wealth, is largely dependent on the consumption of fossil fuels, so climate change has the possibility of disrupting and ordering the distribution of power in the world. For powerful nations, it is the status quo that is to be maintained.
Climate change is a “threat multiplier” that would deepen divisions and intensity conflicts. There are a few responses such powerful nations usually adopt: the first is the “armed lifeboat” posture, which would keep climate refugees at bay and protect one’s own resources. The Syrian refugee crisis is an example of how this is already playing out in the U.S., Britain, and Australia. However, the “contagion has already occurred, everywhere” (144), and ongoing changes will not be held back by man-made borders and boundaries.
6. The Darwinian approach of the armed lifeboat is not in conflict with free market ideology, which tends to prevail over the preservation of life. Climate change may even allow for an alibi for more intrusion into geographic and military spaces around the world. Ghosh avers that the distribution of power “lies at the core of the climate crisis” (146).
7. Besides the armed lifeboat, there is also the strategy that elites in some large developing countries have: the politics of attrition. It suggests that the populations of poor nations are more accustomed to hardship and have a greater ability to absorb the shocks and stresses of climate change that would cripple the middle class and, especially, the rich. Indeed, in the West “wealth and habits based upon inefficient infrastructures…may have narrowed the threshold of bearable pain to a point where climatic impacts could quickly lead to systemic stress” (147). The cruelty and cynicism of such an approach are obvious, of course, and there is no incentive to compromise.
8. The year 2015 was a startlingly extreme one for weather events and disruptions. It also produced two remarkable texts: the Paris agreement on climate change and Pope Francis’s encyclical letter LaudatoSi’. Both unequivocally accept the research of climate science, but there the similarities end.
The encyclical is lucid and simple, the Agreement stylized and complex. The Agreement has thirty-one declarations consisting of only two actual sentences and a myriad of commas and colons and semicolons. LaudatoSi’ is solemn and clear, with little of the exuberance of the Agreement. The Agreement also has the assumption that technological advances will sweep in and help, whereas LaudatoSi’ does not suggest that there will be any miraculous intervention. Other differences include that the LaudatoSi’ mentions poverty and justice while the Agreement does not acknowledge that there is anything wrong with our current paradigms; and in the Agreement’s ending “very syntax is an expression of faith in the sovereignty of Man and in his ability to shape the future” (158) while the LaudatoSi’ ends with “an appeal for help and guidance…[and] acknowledgements of how profoundly humanity has lost its way and of the limits that circumscribe human agency” (158).
9. In the final section Ghosh looks for hope and finds it mostly in the increasing involvement of religious groups and leaders in the politics of climate change. He writes that formal political structures are incapable and unwilling to confront this crisis on their own. Grassroots movements take years if not decades to build. Religiously-affiliated organizations transcend nation-states, acknowledge intergenerational and long-term responsibilities, do not have an “economistic” way of thinking, can imagine nonlinear change, and, in their embrace of the sacred, accept limits and limitations.
Analysis
In the final section, Ghosh looks at politics within the nation-state and on a global level, ultimately finding much of it wanting in terms of enacting real change to forestall climate catastrophe. There are many reasons for this: 1) there is a perceived, and often real, conflict with “freedom,” that exceedingly important modern political conception and 2) there is a “lack of transitive connection between political mobilization…and global warming” (126); even though people in India, for example, are very vocal about modern issues, climate change does not appear to be one of them, and the “voices of the country’s many eminent climate scientists, environmentalists, and reporters do not appear to have made much a mark” (126). Additionally, political energy is directed more toward issues that relate to identity, and the public sphere does not seem to have the ability to affect policy anymore, which Ghosh illustrates by talking about the millions of people who protested the Iraq War but wrought no discernible changes. Finally, “the countries in the West are now in many senses ‘post-political spaces’ that are managed by apparatuses of various kinds” (132).
All of these issues leave us with the disconcerting reality that there are no resources of democratic governance to seriously address climate change. Even though the intelligence and security apparatuses of the government are engaged with these questions, they are doing so in a largely private and invisible way. People are told that their individual moral approach to climate change is what matters most, but “the scale of climate change is such that individual choices will make little difference unless certain collective decisions are taken and acted upon” (133).
In contemplating potential futures, Ghosh has two rather disturbing possibilities: the armed lifeboat and the politics of attrition. With the former, he envisions powerful developed nation-states keeping the “‘blood-dimmed tides’ of climate refugees at bay and protecting their own resources” (143). Using the language the pathogen, of the infection, of needing to protect the sanctity of the body politic, the nation-state will try to reinforce boundaries and borders more than ever. The latter idea is that “the populations of poor nations, because they are accustomed to hardship, possess the capacity to absorb, even if at great cost, certain shocks and stresses that might cripple the rich” (147). Ghosh acknowledges the truth of this situation, but also its cynicism, cruelty, and preclusion of compromise.
Ghosh ends his work on a somewhat hopeful note, but ultimately remains concerned and skeptical. His hope derives from the potentiality of religious groups spearheading the resistance to and combatting of climate change, pointing to the Pope’s Encyclical from 2015 as evidence. In LaudatoSi’, the Pope eschews the complex jargon of documents like the Paris Climate Agreement from the same year, refuses to stake his hope in a miracle of technology that will save us all, unites poverty and justice, holds the Church accountable for some of the ways it has exacerbated the crisis, and appeals for help and guidance. It is a remarkable document, Ghosh claims, and is a template for the ways in which religious groups and leaders might lead the way. Those groups and leaders are not beholden to a particular nation-state, can mobilize people effectively, and “are not subject to the limitations that have made climate change such a challenge for our existing institutions of governance” (160).
In terms of the critical response to this last section, it is decidedly mixed. Astha Ummat lauds his conclusion, writing “Ghosh strikingly ties his thoughts together by quoting two pieces of texts on climate change in the current times—Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’s encyclical letter and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Both these texts are vastly different in their audience and conclusions. However, both lead to a ‘vindication of climate change’—to serve as encouragement to literary aspirants that climate change is not “uncanny,” but is a proven phenomenon, which will alter our future paths.”
In her review of the text, Ericka Hoagland finds the argument marred by the style of the discourse: “Clearly Ghosh intended this reading [of the Agreement and the Encyclical] to link back to his larger statements about the status quo (something the encyclical is clearly contesting), power distribution, and political inertia with respect to climate change, but like much of The Great Derangement, the sharpness of Ghosh’s arguments is dulled by the text’s tendency to jump around or go back to points which it appears he cannot quite resolve.” Ursula Heise is also unconvinced: “This is an odd turn of argument not only because quite a few major religions rely on the centrality of individual conversion as the key to changing the world – the individual perspective Ghosh had earlier rejected. Many institutionalized religions have also historically distinguished themselves by their expertise in pitting populations against each other at least as much as by the ability to ‘join hands with popular movements’ and with each other that Ghosh stakes his hope on (161).”
Finally, Rob Linthone succinctly states, “Ghosh offers no proposals and mostly sounds pessimistic. When he tries to be hopeful, it seems a little forced.” But Ghosh himself replied to that statement, offering an account of how “a change of direction is nowhere a discernible property,” so “In light of these realities, it is undeniable that the last section of The Great Derangement is ‘forced.’ The only excuse I can offer is that I felt it necessary to look, as does nearly everyone who writes about climate change, for some rays of hope. Very few of us can claim to possess the clarity of vision that allowed Martin Heidegger to say, as he did half a century ago: ‘Only a god can save us.’”
