The Great Derangement

by Amitav Ghosh

  Since then the process has only accelerated: in many other matters, like austerity, surveillance, drone warfare, and so on, it is now perfectly clear that in the West political processes exert very limited influence over the domain of statecraft—so much so that it has even been suggested that “citizens no longer seriously expect . . . that politicians will really represent their interests and implement their demands.”

  This altered political reality may in part be an effect of the dominance of petroleum in the world economy. As Timothy Mitchell has shown, the flow of oil is radically unlike the movement of coal. The nature of coal, as a material, is such that its transportation creates multiple choke points where organized labor can exert pressure on corporations and the state. This is not case with oil, which flows through pipelines that can bypass concentrations of labor. This was exactly why British and American political elites began to encourage the use of oil over coal after the First World War.

  These efforts succeeded perhaps beyond their own wildest dreams. As an instrument of disempowerment oil has been spectacularly effective in removing the levers of power from the reach of the populace. “No matter how many people take to the streets in massive marches,” writes Roy Scranton, “they cannot put their hands on the real flows of power because they do not help to produce it. They only consume.”

  Under these circumstances, a march or a demonstration of popular feeling amounts to “little more than an orgy of democratic emotion, an activist-themed street fair, a real-world analogue to Twitter hashtag campaigns: something that gives you a nice feeling, says you belong in a certain group, and is completely divorced from actual legislation and governance.”

  In other words, the public sphere, where politics is performed, has been largely emptied of content in terms of the exercise of power: as with fiction, it has become a forum for secular testimony, a baring-of-the-soul in the world-as-church. Politics as thus practiced is primarily an exercise in personal expressiveness. Contemporary culture in all its aspects (including religious fundamentalisms of almost every variety) is pervaded by this expressivism, which is itself “to a significant degree a result of the strong role of Protestant Christianity in the making of the modern world.” There could be no better vehicle for this expressivism than the Internet, which makes various means of self-expression instantly available through social media. And as tweets and posts and clips circle the globe, they generate their mirror images of counterexpression in a dynamic that quickly becomes a double helix of negation.

  As far back as the 1960s Guy Debord argued in his seminal book The Society of the Spectacle: “The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.” The ways in which political engagements unfold over social media confirm this thesis, propounded long before the Internet became so large a part of our lives: “The spectacle is by definition immune from human activity, inaccessible to any projected review or correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever representation takes on an independent existence, the spectacle reestablishes its rule.”

  The net result is a deadlocked public sphere, with the actual exercise of power being relegated to the interlocking complex of corporations and institutions of governance that has come to be known as the “deep state.” From the point of view of corporations and other establishment entities, a deadlocked public is, of course, the best possible outcome, which, no doubt, is why they frequently strive to produce it: the funding of climate change “denial” in the United States and elsewhere, by corporations like Exxon—which have long known about the consequences of carbon emissions—is a perfect example of this.

  In effect, the countries of the West are now in many senses “post-political spaces” that are managed by apparatuses of various kinds. For many, this creates a haunting sense of loss that manifests itself in an ever-more-desperate yearning to recoup a genuinely participatory politics. This is in no small part the driving force behind such disparate figures as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, on the one hand, and Donald Trump, on the other. But the collapse of political alternatives, the accompanying disempowerment, and the ever-growing intrusion of the market have also produced responses of another kind—nihilistic forms of extremism that employ methods of spectacular violence. This too has taken on a life of its own.

  3.

  The public politics of climate change is itself an illustration of the ways in which the moral-political can produce paralysis.

  Of late, many activists and concerned people have begun to frame climate change as a “moral issue.” This has become almost a plea of last resort, appeals of many other kinds having failed to produce concerted action on climate change. So, in an ironic twist, the individual conscience is now increasingly seen as the battleground of choice for a conflict that is self-evidently a problem of the global commons, requiring collective action: it is as if every other resource of democratic governance had been exhausted leaving only this residue—the moral.

  This framing of the issue certainly has one great virtue, in that it breaks decisively with the economistic, cost-benefit language that the international climate change bureaucracy has imposed on it. But at the same time, this approach also invokes a “politics of sincerity” that may ultimately work to the advantage of those on the opposite side. For if the crisis of climate change is to be principally seen in terms of the questions it poses to the individual conscience, then sincerity and consistency will inevitably become the touchstones by which political positions will be judged. This in turn will enable “deniers” to accuse activists of personal hypocrisy by pointing to their individual lifestyle choices. When framed in this way, authenticity and sacrifice become central to the issue, which then comes to rest on matters like the number of lightbulbs in Al Gore’s home and the forms of transport that demonstrators use to get to a march.

  I saw a particularly telling example of this in a TV interview with a prominent activist after the New York climate change march of September 2014. The interviewer’s posture was like that of a priest interrogating a wayward parishioner; her questions were along the lines of “What have you given up for climate change? What are your sacrifices?”

  The activist in question was quickly reduced to indignant incoherence. So paralyzing is the effect of the fusion of the political and the moral that he could not bring himself to state the obvious: that the scale of climate change is such that individual choices will make little difference unless certain collective decisions are taken and acted upon. Sincerity has nothing to do with rationing water during a drought, as in today’s California: this is not a measure that can be left to the individual conscience. To think in those terms is to accept neo-liberal premises.

  Second, yardsticks of morality are not the same everywhere. In many parts of the world, and especially in English-speaking countries, canons of judgment on many issues still rest on that distinctive fusion of economic, religious, and philosophical conceptions that was brought about by the Scottish Enlightenment. The central tenet of this set of ideas, as John Maynard Keynes once put it, is that “by the working of natural laws individuals pursuing their own interests with enlightenment, in condition of freedom, always tend to promote the general interest at the same time!”

  The “everyday political philosophy of the nineteenth century” (as Keynes described it) remains an immensely powerful force in the United States and elsewhere: for those on the right of the political spectrum, this set of ideas retains something of its millenarian character with individualism, free trade, and God constituting parts of a whole. But by no means is it only the religiously minded whose ideas are shaped by this philosophy: it is worth noting that the dominant secular paradigms of ethics in the United States—for example, as in John Rawls’s theory of justice—are also founded upon assumptions about individual rationality that are borrowed from neoclassical economics.

  It is instructive in this
regard to look at an area of the humanities that has been unusually quick to respond to climate change: the subdiscipline of philosophy represented by climate ethicists. The dominant approach in this discipline is again posited on rational actors, freely pursuing their own interests. A philosopher of this tradition, in responding to the argument that the moral imperative of climate change comes from the need to save the millions of lives in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, might well quote David Hume: “’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” Climate activists’ appeals to morality will not necessarily find much support here.

  Last, we already know, from the example of Mahatma Gandhi, that the industrial, carbon-intensive economy cannot be fought by a politics of sincerity. Gandhi invested himself, body and soul, in the effort to prevent India from adopting the Western, industrial model of economy. Drawing on many different traditions, he articulated and embodied a powerful vision of renunciatory politics; no reporter would have had the gall to ask him what he had sacrificed; his entire political career was based upon the idea of sacrifice. Gandhi was the very exemplar of a politics of moral sincerity.

  Yet, while Gandhi may have succeeded in dislodging the British from India, he failed in this other endeavor, that of steering India along a different economic path. He was able, at best, to slightly delay a headlong rush toward an all-devouring, carbon-intensive economy. There is little reason to believe that a politics of this kind will succeed in relation to global warming today.

  Climate change is often described as a “wicked problem.” One of its wickedest aspects is that it may require us to abandon some of our most treasured ideas about political virtue: for example, “be the change you want to see.” What we need instead is to find a way out of the individualizing imaginary in which we are trapped.

  When future generations look back upon the Great Derangement they will certainly blame the leaders and politicians of this time for their failure to address the climate crisis. But they may well hold artists and writers to be equally culpable—for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats.

  4.

  One of the most important factors in the global politics of climate change is the role the Anglosphere plays in today’s world. This is true for many reasons, not the least of which is that the Anglosphere is no longer a notional entity: it has been given formal expression in the Five Eyes alliance that now binds the intelligence and surveillance structures of the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The UKUSA Security Agreement that formalized the arrangement implicitly acknowledges that this alliance undergirds the world’s current security architecture.

  The fact that laissez-faire ideas are still dominant within the Anglosphere is therefore itself central to the climate crisis. In that global warming poses a powerful challenge to the idea that the free pursuit of individual interests always leads to the general good, it also challenges a set of beliefs that underlies a deeply rooted cultural identity, one that has enjoyed unparalleled success over the last two centuries. Much of the resistance to climate science comes exactly from this, which is probably why the rates of climate change denial tend to be unusually high throughout the Anglosphere.

  Yet it is also true that the Anglosphere, the United States in particular, has produced the overwhelming bulk of climate science, as well as some of the earliest warnings of global warming. Moreover, many, if not most, of those who have taken the lead on the issue politically, whether it be as thinkers, theorists, or activists, are from these five countries, which together possess some of the most vigorous environmental movements in the world. Bill McKibben’s 350.org is but one example of a group that has spearheaded a global movement.

  The tension between these two polarities—widespread denialism, on the one hand, and vigorous activist movements, on the other—now defines the public politics of climate change throughout the Anglosphere, but particularly in the United States. And since identity and performativity are now central to public discourse, climate change too has become enmeshed with the politics of self-definition. When American and Australian politicians speak of climate change negotiations as posing a threat to “our way of life,” they are following the same script that led Ronald Reagan to speak of the reduction of the use of oil as an assault on what it means to be American.

  The enmeshment of global warming with issues of an entirely different order has given a distinctive turn to the politics of climate change in the Anglosphere. Instead of being seen as a phenomenon that requires a practical response, as it largely is in Holland and Denmark, or as an existential danger, as it is in the Maldives and Bangladesh, it has become one of many issues that are clustered along a fault line of extreme political polarization. Those on the rightward side of this line view climate science through a conspiratorial lens, linking it with socialism, communism, and so on. (As Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have noted, some of the most influential scientific denialists may have been motivated by the ideology of the Cold War.) These associations have, in turn, generated an extraordinary degree of rancor toward some climate scientists, some of whom, like Michael E. Mann, have had to face all manner of threats, harassment, and intimidation. It is a tribute to their courage that they have persevered with their work despite these attacks.

  The opposition to climate science is not, however, a self-subsisting phenomenon. As Oreskes, Conway, and others have shown, it is enabled, encouraged, and funded by certain corporations and energy billionaires. These vested interests have supported organizations that systematically spread misinformation and create confusion within the electorate. The situation is further compounded by the mass media, which have generally underplayed climate change and have sometimes even distorted the findings of climate scientists. This bias owes much, no doubt, to the fact that large sections of the media are now controlled by climate skeptics like Rupert Murdoch, and by corporations that have vested interests in the carbon economy. The net result, in any case, is that the denial and disputing of scientific findings has become a major factor in the climate politics of the Anglosphere.

  Yet I think it would be a mistake to assume that denialism within the Anglosphere is only a function of money and manipulation. There is an excess to denialist attitudes that suggests that the climate crisis threatens to unravel something deeper, without which large numbers of people would be at a loss to find meaning in their history and indeed their existence in the world.

  In other words, the climate crisis has given the lie to Max Weber’s contention that modernity brings about the disenchantment of the world. Bruno Latour has long argued that this disenchantment never happened and this is now plain for all to see. The “everyday political philosophy of the nineteenth century” is, as Keynes understood very well, an enchantment just as powerful as any dithyrambic mythology. And it is perhaps even harder to disavow because it comes disguised as a truthful description of the world; as fact, not fantasy. This perhaps is why, despite every effort to disseminate accurate information about climate science, the public domain of the Anglosphere remains deeply divided on the issue of climate change.

  But strangely, the picture takes on a completely different appearance when we look to other domains of the American body politic, for example, the security establishment. There is no sign there of either denial or confusion: to the contrary, the Pentagon devotes more resources to the study of climate change than any other branch of the U.S. government. The writer and climate activist George Marshall notes, “the most rational and considered response to the uncertainties of climate change can be found among military strategists. . . . As General Chuck Wald, former deputy commander of U.S. European Command puts it: ‘There’s a problem there and the military is going to be a part of the solution.’” Other top-ranking officers have been equally blunt. In 2013, when Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III (then head of the U.S. Pacific Command) was asked about the “biggest long-term security threat to th
e United States in the Pacific Region,” he pointed immediately to climate change, identifying it as the factor that was most likely to “cripple the security environment.”

  Indeed, the U.S. military establishment’s focus on global warming is such that Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, once summed it up with these words: “The only department in . . . Washington that is clearly and completely seized with the idea that climate change is real is the Dept. of Defense.”

  The seriousness of this commitment is evident in the fact that the U.S. military—which is also the single largest user of fossil fuels in the country—has launched several hundred renewable energy initiatives and is investing heavily in biofuels, microgrids, electric vehicles, and so on. Between 2006 and 2009, its investments in this sector rose by 200 percent, to over a billion dollars, and is expected to go up to $10 billion by 2030. All of this has been done in such a way as to bypass the contentious debates of the public sphere.

  Indeed, it would seem that the American military has in some instances appropriated the language and even the tactics of climate change activism. “Not only has the grand narrative of climate change been co-opted, warped and re-routed by the proponents of green security,” write Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle, “the very forms of new social movement resistance have been copied and reworked to suit these most recent geopolitical moments. In these multi-layered, multi-directional spaces, neo-liberal economics and neo-securities are one.”

  Similarly, U.S. intelligence agencies, and personnel associated with them, have produced some of the earliest and most detailed studies of the security implications of climate change. In 2013, James Clapper, the highest-ranking intelligence official in the United States, testified to the Senate that “extreme weather events (floods, droughts, heat waves) will increasingly disrupt food and energy markets, exacerbating state weakness, forcing human migrations, and triggering riots, civil disobedience, and vandalism.”