The Great Derangement

1. The Literary Derangement: Fiction's Inability to Address Climate Change

It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel.

Literary blind spot. Despite the urgency of climate change, "serious fiction" largely ignores it, often relegating novels that address the subject to the genre of science fiction. This peculiar feedback loop is confounding, as it suggests a conception of seriousness blind to existential threats. The author questions why global warming casts such a small shadow in literary fiction compared to its prominence in public discourse.

Novel's historical roots. The modern novel, born in the same era as the concept of probability, developed by prioritizing the "everyday" and the "probable," banishing the "unheard-of" and "unlikely" events that characterized older narrative forms like epics and romances. This literary convention, which values realism and moderation, struggles to accommodate the "wild" and "improbable" weather events that are now becoming the norm in the Anthropocene. Writers like Flaubert and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee exemplify this shift towards depicting ordinary life, effectively concealing the exceptional moments that drive narrative.

Concealment of reality. The novel's "mimetic ambition" to conjure reality through everyday details ironically becomes a concealment of the real, especially when confronted with events of extreme improbability. Introducing phenomena like a character encountering a tornado at a precise, unprecedented moment risks banishment from "serious fiction" to genres like fantasy or science fiction. This resistance reveals a broader imaginative and cultural failure at the heart of the climate crisis, where established literary forms are unable to negotiate the torrents of a rapidly changing world.

2. The Uncanny Return of Non-Human Agency

For these changes are not merely strange in the sense of being unknown or alien; their uncanniness lies precisely in the fact that in these encounters we recognize something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and proximity of non-human interlocutors.

Awakening to presence. The author describes a "shock of recognition" when seemingly inanimate things reveal themselves to be vitally, even dangerously, alive, such as a drifting log turning out to be a crocodile or a harmless vine a snake. This mirrors his personal experience of a tornado in Delhi and encounters with Sundarbans tigers, where non-human presences assert their agency. These moments challenge the Cartesian dualism that denies intelligence and agency to non-human entities.

The uncanny in climate change. The word "uncanny" increasingly describes the freakish events of our era—unaccustomed rain, weird cyclones, oil slicks—because they evoke a recognition of something we had suppressed: the active presence of non-human forces. This renewed awareness suggests that humans were never alone, always surrounded by beings possessing will, thought, and consciousness, a concept long understood in many indigenous and non-Western cultures.

Intervention in human thought. The burgeoning interest in the non-human across humanities disciplines, coinciding with accelerating climate impacts, suggests that the earth itself may be intervening to revise human thought patterns. This implies that non-human forces can directly shape our discussions, making us uncannily aware that our conversations have always had other, unseen participants. Climate change events, animated by cumulative human actions, are "the mysterious work of our own hands returning to haunt us in unthinkable shapes and forms," confounding traditional "Nature writing."

3. Colonialism's Reckless Urban Planning and Climate Vulnerability

A colonial vision of the world, in which proximity to the water represents power and security, mastery and conquest, has now been incorporated into the very foundations of middle-class patterns of living across the globe.

Ignoring historical caution. Historically, humans regarded oceans with wariness, building major settlements away from the water's edge to account for unpredictable furies like tsunamis and storm surges. However, from the seventeenth century onwards, colonial cities like Mumbai, New York, and Hong Kong were founded directly on seafronts, driven by a vision of power, security, and conquest. This colonial logic, prioritizing strategic advantages and trade, disregarded generations of accumulated knowledge about environmental risks.

Modern complacency. The author illustrates this with the example of the Nicobar Islands, where a military base was designed with officers' housing closest to the sea, leading to disproportionate casualties during the 2004 tsunami. This "complacency that was itself a kind of madness" reflects a bourgeois belief in the "regularity of the world," carried to the point of derangement. Similarly, densely populated coastal areas like Far Rockaway in New York, built on former barrier islands, were swamped by Hurricane Sandy.

The price of "progress." This pattern of settlement, where proximity to water signifies affluence and status, has become globally dominant, making millions vulnerable. The story of Port Canning in Bengal, abandoned after a cyclone despite Henry Piddington's warnings, serves as an early example of how practical men, accustomed to bourgeois regularity, dismissed warnings of large-scale, improbable natural phenomena. This historical disregard for environmental realities, rooted in colonial hubris and a fragmented worldview, has created a "concentration of risk" in many of the world's most important cities.

4. Asia's Pivotal Role as Both Victim and Driver of Climate Change

Asia’s historical experience demonstrates that our planet will not allow these patterns of living to be adopted by every human being.

Numbers amplify impact. Asia is conceptually critical to every aspect of global warming due to its immense population. The vast majority of potential climate victims reside there, with regions like the Bengal Delta (over 250 million people) facing catastrophic inundation and displacement. Delta regions across Asia are subsiding faster than oceans are rising due to geological processes and human activities like dam building and groundwater extraction.

Dire consequences:

• Sea-level rise: Could displace 50 million in India and 75 million in Bangladesh, and over a tenth of Vietnam's population.
• Desertification: 24% of India's arable land is turning into desert; China faces $65 billion in annual losses.
• Water crisis: Himalayan glaciers, sustaining 47% of the world's population, are melting twice as fast as the global average, threatening catastrophic water shortages for half a billion people in South and Southeast Asia within decades.

The "simpleton" reveals the truth. Asia's rapid industrialization from the 1980s, driven by its populous nations, brought the climate crisis to a head, dramatically shortening the time available for adaptation. This "revelatory experiment" demonstrated that the carbon-intensive, consumerist lifestyles of modernity cannot be universally adopted without humanity asphyxiating. Asia, in its horror, has torn the mask from the phantom of infinite growth, exposing the unsustainability of the dominant global economic model.

5. Imperialism's Paradoxical Impact on the Carbon Economy

It was the very fact that India’s ruling power was also the global pioneer of the carbon economy that ensured that it could not take hold in India, at that point in time.

Delayed industrialization. The question of why populous Asian countries industrialized late in the 20th century is crucial. While Western narratives often attribute this to technological diffusion from Europe, the author argues that imperialism actively suppressed indigenous carbon economies. For example, India had the skills and entrepreneurial interest to adopt steam technology in the early 19th century, but British policies, like the 1815 Registry Act, crippled its advanced shipbuilding industry to protect English competitors.

The "carbon economy" as a tool of power. The emerging fossil-fuel economies of the West required that other regions be prevented from developing their own coal-based energy systems. Imperial rule ensured this, making the coal economy "depend on not being imitated." This military dominance, exemplified by steam-powered gunboats in the Opium Wars, continually reinforced Western power, suppressing alternative modernities.

Decolonization and acceleration. The "Great Acceleration" in carbon emissions coincided with the period of decolonization after World War II. The restoration of political sovereignty in Asia allowed its economies to industrialize rapidly, adopting the carbon-intensive model previously denied to them. This raises the paradoxical possibility that imperialism, by retarding Asian and African economies, may have inadvertently delayed the onset of the climate crisis, a "lost time" that forms the basis of arguments for climate justice and reparations today.

6. Modern Freedom's Blind Spot: Ignoring Non-Human Constraints

Only those peoples who had thrown off the shackles of their environment were thought to be endowed with historical agency; they alone were believed to merit the attention of historians—other peoples might have had a past but they were thought to lack history, which realizes itself through human agency.

Enlightenment's legacy. Since the Enlightenment, the concept of freedom has been central to Western thought, defined by humanity's escape from non-human constraints. This anthropocentric view relegated nature to a passive backdrop, denying agency to the non-human world. This perspective shaped not only history and philosophy but also the arts and literature, which increasingly centered on human consciousness and identity.

The "unliveable world." Twentieth-century art and literature, particularly in Asia, embraced modernity by reconfiguring traditions and jettisoning those that acknowledged non-human salience. Freedom became an exploration of the human mind and spirit, "transcending" material life. While this vision produced "radical and clear-sighted aesthetic achievements," it also depicted an increasingly "unliveable world," complicit in the "Great Derangement" by blinding artists to the ecological crisis.

A collusive avant-garde. The author provocatively suggests that the avant-garde, far from being "ahead," was a "laggard" in recognizing climate change. The intense political engagement of writers and artists during the period of accelerating carbon emissions paradoxically led them to focus on directions that blinded them to the archaic voice of the earth. This raises a damning indictment of a vision of art perpetually moving forward, driven by innovation and imagination, yet failing to perceive the most critical reality of its time.

7. The "Individual Moral Adventure" Limits Collective Action

This then is the paradox and the price of conceiving of fiction and politics in terms of individual moral adventures: it negates possibility itself.

The moral-political fusion. The contemporary understanding of "the moral" has become a hinge joining the political and literary imaginary, transforming politics into an "individual moral adventure" guided by conscience. This secularized Protestantism, emphasizing individual perfectibility and self-discovery, leads to a public sphere focused on personal authenticity and testimony rather than collective decision-making.

Fiction's lost potential. When literature is conceived as the expression of authentic individual experience, fiction is deemed "false." However, fiction's true potential lies in its subjunctive mode—imagining possibilities and envisioning the world as it might be. The climate crisis demands this imaginative leap, but the dominant literary trend, centered on individual psyche, has turned away from the collective and the non-human, negating the very possibility of imagining alternative futures.

Paralysis in the public sphere. This individualizing imaginary has created a deadlocked public sphere, where political performance (marches, online petitions) is increasingly divorced from actual governance. The "politics of sincerity," framing climate change as an individual moral issue, allows "deniers" to deflect responsibility by accusing activists of personal hypocrisy. This approach, rooted in neo-liberal premises, ignores that climate change's scale demands collective decisions, not individual sacrifices.

8. Cynical Geopolitics: The "Armed Lifeboat" and "Attrition" Strategies

In this world view, humanity has not only declared a war against itself, but is also locked into mortal combat with the earth.

The Anglosphere's dilemma. The Anglosphere, particularly the US, exhibits a tension between widespread climate denialism and vigorous environmental activism. While public discourse is polarized, military and intelligence establishments in these countries take climate change very seriously, viewing it as a "threat multiplier" that will deepen existing divisions and lead to conflicts. This suggests a tacit, covert adoption of a common approach by political elites and security structures.

"Politics of the armed lifeboat." Western security establishments are likely to adopt a "politics of the armed lifeboat," combining counter-insurgency, militarized borders, and aggressive anti-immigrant policing to keep climate refugees at bay and protect resources. This Darwinian approach, rooted in free-market ideology and a long pedigree in Anglosphere statecraft (e.g., colonial famine responses), prioritizes the preservation of the "body of the nation" in a literal, exclusionary sense.

"Politics of attrition." On the other side, elites in some developing countries may tacitly adopt a "politics of attrition," assuming their populations, accustomed to hardship, can absorb climate shocks better than rich nations. This cynical strategy leverages the resilience of the poor, reducing the incentive for compromise in climate negotiations. Both the "armed lifeboat" and "attrition" scenarios highlight how power differentials and self-interest, rather than collective survival, drive current geopolitical responses to climate change.

9. The Failure of Secular Politics and the Hope in Religious Movements

It is impossible to see any way out of this crisis without an acceptance of limits and limitations, and this in turn, is, I think, intimately related to the idea of the sacred, however one may wish to conceive of it.

Secular institutions' limitations. The author argues that formal political structures, built on the nation-state's pursuit of particular interests, are inherently incapable of confronting the climate crisis. Even transnational bodies like the UN struggle to overcome national self-interest. Climate change, in its very nature, presents an unresolvable problem for modern nations whose biopolitical mission focuses on territorialized human populations, ignoring intertwined non-human forces.

The time constraint. Popular protest movements, while vital, typically take years to build momentum, a luxury not afforded by the rapidly shrinking time horizon for effective climate action. Moreover, security establishments worldwide are already extensively prepared to deal with activism, further hindering rapid mobilization. A significant breakthrough requires existing mass organizations to lead the struggle.

Religious groups as a source of hope. Religious groups and leaders offer a promising path forward. They transcend nation-states, acknowledge intergenerational responsibilities, and are less constrained by economistic thinking, allowing them to imagine non-linear change and catastrophe. Their worldviews are intimately related to the idea of the sacred and the acceptance of limits, which is crucial for navigating this crisis. Their ability to mobilize vast numbers of people, combined with popular movements, could provide the necessary momentum for drastic emissions reductions while upholding equity.

10. The Great Derangement: A Crisis of Culture and Imagination

Quite possibly then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.

A collective delusion. The "Great Derangement" refers to humanity's collective failure to grasp and respond to the climate crisis, despite overwhelming scientific evidence. This derangement is rooted in a cultural and imaginative inability to perceive the true scale and nature of the problem, perpetuated by narratives of endless progress, human exceptionalism, and the suppression of non-human agency.

The price of modernity. The trajectory of modernity, marked by the "Great Acceleration" in carbon emissions, has led to the destruction of communities, increased individualization, and the illusion of human freedom from material circumstances. This has extinguished traditional knowledge, material skills, and community ties that could offer succor as climate impacts intensify. The very speed of the crisis, however, might paradoxically preserve some of these resources by forcing a rapid re-evaluation.

A call for transformation. The author concludes with a hope that the struggle against climate change will birth a generation with clearer eyes, capable of transcending humanity's isolation and rediscovering kinship with other beings. This vision, "at once new and ancient," must find expression in a transformed and renewed art and literature, moving beyond logocentricism and the confines of the individual human psyche to imagine possibilities for collective survival.