The Great Derangement

by Amitav Ghosh

But the trajectory of the arts had been determined long before the Cold War: through the twentieth century they followed a course that led them to become increasingly self-reflexive. “Twentieth-century art,” wrote Roger Shattuck in 1968, “has tended to search itself rather than exterior reality for beauty of meaning or truth, a condition that entails a new relationship between the work of art, the world, the spectator, and the artist.” It was thus that human consciousness, agency, and identity came to be placed at the center of every kind of aesthetic enterprise.

  In this realm, too, Asia has played a special role: the questions that animated, obsessed, and haunted the thinkers and writers of twentieth-century Asia were precisely those that related to the “modern.” Jawaharlal Nehru’s passion for dams and factories and Mao Zedong’s “War on Nature” had their counterparts also in literature and the arts.

  In their embrace of modernity, Asian writers and artists created ruptures that radically reconfigured the region’s literature, art, architecture, and so on. In Asia as elsewhere, this meant that the abstract and the formal gained ascendancy over the figurative and the iconographic; it meant also that many traditions, including those that accorded the nonhuman a special salience, were jettisoned. Here, as elsewhere, freedom came to be seen as a way of “transcending” the constraints of material life—of exploring new regions of the human mind, spirit, emotion, consciousness, interiority: freedom became a quantity that resided entirely in the minds, bodies, and desires of human beings. There is, of course, as Moretti notes, a sort of “ascetic heroism” in such a vision, but it is also clear now that the more “radical and clear-sighted the aesthetic achievements of that time, the more unliveable the world [they] depict.”

  And now, when we look back upon that time, with our gaze reversed, having woken against our will to the knowledge that we have always been watched and judged by other eyes, what stands out? Is it possible that the arts and literature of this time will one day be remembered not for their daring, nor for their championing of freedom, but rather because of their complicity in the Great Derangement? Could it be said that the “stance of unyielding rage against the official order” that the artists and writers of this period adopted was actually, from the perspective of the Anthropocene, a form of collusion? Recent years have certainly demonstrated the truth of an observation that Guy Debord made long ago: that spectacular forms of rebelliousness are not, by any means, incompatible with a “smug acceptance of what exists . . . for the simple reason that dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity.”

  If such a judgement—or even the possibility of it—seems shocking, it is because we have come to accept that the front ranks of the arts are in some way in advance of mainstream culture; that artists and writers are able to look ahead, not just in aesthetic matters, but also in regard to public affairs. Writers and artists have themselves embraced this role with increasing fervor through the twentieth century, and never more so than in the period in which carbon emissions were accelerating.

  As proof of this, let us imagine for a moment, just as a thought experiment, that a graph could be drawn of the political engagements of writers and artists through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. It is quite likely, I suspect, that such a graph would closely resemble a chart of greenhouse gas emissions over the same period: that is to say, the line would indicate a steep and steady rise over the decades, with a few sudden and dramatic upsurges. The First World War would represent one such escalation, the rise in industrial and military activity being mirrored by an enormous outpouring of literature, much of it explicitly political.

  During the interwar years, too, the graphs would remain on roughly parallel tracks, a rise in worldwide industrial activity being matched by the increasingly visible involvement of writers with political movements, such as socialism, communism, antifascism, nationalism, and anti-imperialism: Lorca, Brecht, Orwell, Lu Xun, and Tagore being cases in point.

  Only in the early post–Second World War decades would there be a marked divergence in the two graphs, with the political engagements of writers outpacing the rise in the rate of emissions. The large-scale industrialization of Asia had yet to begin, after all, while writers around the world were broadening their political engagements on every front. We need think only of the Progressive Writers Movement in India and Pakistan; of decolonization and Sartre; James Baldwin and the civil rights movement; the Beats and the student uprisings of the 1960s; the persecution of Pramoedya Ananta Toer in Indonesia and of Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union. This was a time when writers were in the forefront of every political movement around the world.

  Not till the 1980s would the graphs again converge, and then, too, not because of any diminution in the political energies of writers and artists but only because the rate of emissions from Asia had begun its steady upward climb. But in this period too, writers were in the vanguard of many movements, feminism and gay rights being but two of them. This was also a time in which the paradoxical coupling of the processes of decolonization, on the one hand, and the increasing hegemony of the English language, on the other, made it possible for writers like myself to enter the global literary mainstream in a way that had not been possible in the preceding two centuries. At the same time, changes in technologies of communication, and a rapid growth in networks of translation, served to internationalize both politics and literature to a point where it could be said that Goethe’s vision of a “world literature” (Weltliteratur) had come close to being realized.

  I can attest from my own experience that this period—when an exploding rate of carbon emissions was rewriting the planet’s destiny—was a breathtakingly exciting time in which to launch upon a career as a writer. As I’ve noted before, not the least aspect of this was the promise of “being ahead” (en avant, of being a part, in effect, of an avant-garde), and this conception has been one of the animating forces of the literary and artistic imagination since the start of the twentieth century. “Modernism wrote into its scripture a major text,” goes Roger Shattuck’s wry observation, “the avant-garde we have with us always.”

  To want to be ahead, and to celebrate and mythify this endeavor, is indeed one of the most powerful impulses of modernity itself. If Bruno Latour is right, then to be modern is to envision time as irreversible, to think of it as a progression that is forever propelled forward by revolutionary ruptures: these in turn are conceived of on the analogy of scientific innovations, each of which is thought to render its predecessor obsolete.

  And obsolescence is indeed modernity’s equivalent of perdition and hellfire. That is why this era’s most potent words of damnation, passed down in an unbroken relay from Hegel and Marx to President Obama, is the malediction of being “on the wrong side of history.”

  That the world’s most powerful leader should hurl these words at his enemies, in much the same way that curses and imprecations were once used by kings, priests, and shamans, is of course a disavowal of the very irreversibility of time that the mantra invokes: for is it not also an acknowledgment of the power that words have possessed through the ages, of striking fear into the hearts of foes, of conjuring up visions of terror with curses and maledictions? And for modern man, terror is exactly what is evoked by the fear of being left behind, of being “backward.”

  There is perhaps no better means of tracking the diffusion of modernity across the globe than by charting the widening grip of this fear, which was nowhere more powerfully felt than in the places that were most visibly marked by the stigmata of “backwardness.” It was what drove artists and writers in Asia, Africa, and the Arab world to go to extraordinary lengths to “keep up” with each iteration of modernity in the arts: surrealism, existentialism, and so on. And far from diminishing over time, the impulse gathered strength through the twentieth century, so that writers of my generation were, if anything, even less resistant to its power than were our predecessors: we could not but be aware of the many “isms”—structuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism—that flashed p
ast our eyes with ever-increasing speed.

  This is why it comes as a surprise—a shock, really—to look back upon that period of surging carbon emissions and recognize that very few (and I do not exempt myself from this) of the literary minds of that intensely engagé period were alive to the archaic voice whose rumblings, once familiar, had now become inaudible to humanity: that of the earth and its atmosphere.

  I do not mean to imply that there were no manifestations of a general sense of anxiety and foreboding in the literature of that time; nor do I mean to suggest that mankind had ceased to be haunted by intuitions of apocalypse. These were certainly no less abundant in the last few decades than they have been since stories were first told. It is when I try to think of writers whose imaginative work communicated a more specific sense of the accelerating changes in our environment that I find myself at a loss; of literary novelists writing in English only a handful of names come to mind: J. G. Ballard, Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Barbara Kingsolver, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan, and T. Coraghessan Boyle. No doubt many other names could be added to this list, but even if it were to be expanded a hundredfold or more, it would remain true, I think, that the literary mainstream, even as it was becoming more engagé on many fronts, remained just as unaware of the crisis on our doorstep as the population at large.

  In this regard, the avant-garde, far from being “ahead,” was clearly a laggard. Could it be, then, that the same process that inaugurated the rising death spiral of carbon emissions also ensured, in an uncannily clever gesture of self-protection, that the artists, writers, and poets of that era would go racing off in directions that actually blinded them to exactly what they thought they were seeing: that is to say, what lay en avant, what was to come? And if this were so, would it not be a damning indictment of a vision in which the arts are seen to be moving forever forward, in a dimension of irreversible time, by means of innovation and the free pursuit of imagination?

  2.

  Writers are not alone, of course, in having broadened and intensified their political and social engagements over the last couple of decades: this has happened to the entirety of what used to be called “the intelligentsia.” In no small part has this been brought about by changes in the technology of communication: the Internet and the digital media have made the sphere of the political broader and more intrusive than ever before. Today everybody with a computer and a web connection is an activist. Yet what I said earlier about literary circles is true also of the intelligentsia, and indeed of circles far beyond: generally speaking, politicization has not translated into a wider engagement with the crisis of climate change.

  The lack of a transitive connection between political mobilization, on the one hand, and global warming, on the other, is nowhere more evident than in the countries of South Asia, all of which are extraordinarily vulnerable to climate change. In the last few decades, India has become very highly politicized; great numbers take to the streets to express indignation and outrage over a wide range of issues; on television channels and social media, people speak their minds ever more stridently. Yet climate change has not resulted in an outpouring of passion in the country. This despite the fact that India has innumerable environmental organizations and grassroots movements. The voices of the country’s many eminent climate scientists, environmental activists, and reporters do not appear to have made much of a mark either.

  What is true of India is true also of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal: climate change has not been a significant political issue in any of those countries, even though the impacts are already being felt across the Indian subcontinent, not only in an increasing number of large-scale disasters but also in the form of a slow calamity that is quietly but inexorably destroying livelihoods and stoking social and political conflicts. Instead, political energy has increasingly come to be focused on issues that relate, in one way or another, to questions of identity: religion, caste, ethnicity, language, gender rights, and so on.

  The divergence between the common interest and the preoccupations of the public sphere points to a change in the nature of politics itself. The political is no longer about the commonweal or the “body politic” and the making of collective decisions. It is about something else.

  What, then, is that “something”?

  A similar question could be posed in relation to the literary imaginary: Why is it increasingly open to certain conceptions of the political while remaining closed to an issue that concerns our collective survival?

  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 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.

  We encounter this word very frequently today in relation to fiction as well as politics. In my view, the notion of “the moral” is the hinge that has made possible the joining of the political and the literary imaginary.

  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.

  Although the evolution of the term moral has brought it squarely into the secular domain, the term continues to be powerfully marked by its origins, which clearly lie within Christianity and particularly Protestantism. The moral-political, as thus conceived, is essentially Protestantism without a God: it commits its votaries to believing in perfectibility, individual redemption, and a never-ending journey to a shining city on a hill—constructed, in this instance, not by a deity, but by democracy. This is a vision of the world as a secular church, where all the congregants offer testimony about their journeys of self-discovery.

  This imagining of the world has profound consequences for fiction as well as the body politic. Fiction, for one, comes to be reimagined in such a way that it becomes a form of bearing witness, of testifying, and of charting the career of the conscience. Thus do sincerity and authenticity become, in politics as in literature, the greatest of virtues. No wonder, then, that one of the literary icons of our age, the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, has publicly admitted to “being sick of fiction.” As opposed to the “falsity” of fiction, Knausgaard has “set out to write exclusively from his own life.” This is not, however, a new project: it belongs squarely within the tradition of “diary keeping and spiritual soul-searching [that] . . . was a central aspect of Puritan religiosity.” This secular baring-of-the-soul is exactly what is demanded by the world-as-church.

  If literature is conceived of as the expression of authentic experience, then fiction will inevitably come to be seen as “false.” But to reproduce the world as it exists need not be the project of fiction; what fiction—and by this I mean not only the novel but also epic and myth—makes possible is to approach the world in a subjunctive mode, to conceive of it as if it were other than it is: in short, the great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities. And to imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis: for if there is any one thing that global warming has made perfectly clear it is that to thi
nk about the world only as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide. We need, rather, to envision what it might be. But as with much else that is uncanny about the Anthropocene, this challenge has appeared before us at the very moment when the form of imagining that is best suited to answering it—fiction—has turned in a radically different direction.

  This then is the paradox and the price of conceiving of fiction and politics in terms of individual moral adventures: it negates possibility itself. As for the nonhuman, it is almost by definition excluded from a politics that sanctifies subjectivity and in which political claims are made in the first person. Consider, for example, the stories that congeal around questions like, “Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell?” or “Where were you on 9/11?” Will it ever be possible to ask, in the same vein, “Where were you at 400 ppm [parts per million]?” or “Where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke up?”

  For the body politic, this vision of politics as moral journey has also had the consequence of creating an ever-growing divergence between a public sphere of political performance and the realm of actual governance: the latter is now controlled by largely invisible establishments that are guided by imperatives of their own. And as the public sphere grows ever more performative, at every level from presidential campaigns to online petitions, its ability to influence the actual exercise of power becomes increasingly attenuated.

  This was starkly evident in the buildup to the Iraq War in 2003: I was in New York on February 15 that year, and I joined the massive antiwar demonstration that wound through the avenues of mid-Manhattan. Similar demonstrations were staged in six hundred other cities, in sixty countries around the world; tens of millions of people took part in them, making them possibly the largest single manifestation of public dissent in history. Yet even at that time there was a feeling of hopelessness; relatively few, I suspect, believed that the marches would effect a change in policy—and indeed they did not. Then, as never before, it became clear that the public sphere’s ability to influence the security and policy establishment had eroded drastically.