## Metadata - Author: [[Amitav Ghosh]] - Full Title: The Great Derangement - Category: #books ## Highlights - Probability and the modern novel are in fact twins, born at about the same time, among the same people, under a shared star that destined them to work as vessels for the containment of the same kind of experience. Before the birth of the modern novel, wherever stories were told, fiction delighted in the unheard-of and the unlikely. Narratives like those of The Arabian Nights, The Journey to the West, and The Decameron proceed by leaping blithely from one exceptional event to another. This, after all, is how storytelling must necessarily proceed, inasmuch as it is a recounting of “what happened”—for such an inquiry can arise only in relation to something out of the ordinary, which is but another way of saying “exceptional” or “unlikely.” In essence, narrative proceeds by linking together moments and scenes that are in some way distinctive or different: these are, of course, nothing other than instances of exception. Novels too proceed in this fashion, but what is distinctive about the form is precisely the concealment of those exceptional moments that serve as the motor of narrative. This is achieved through the insertion of what Franco Moretti, the literary theorist, calls “fillers.” According to Moretti, “fillers function very much like the good manners so important in [Jane] Austen: they are both mechanisms designed to keep the ‘narrativity’ of life under control—to give a regularity, a ‘style’ to existence.” It is through this mechanism that worlds are conjured up, through everyday details, which function “as the opposite of narrative.” It is thus that the novel takes its modern form, through “the relocation of the unheard-of toward the background . . . while the everyday moves into the foreground.” ([Location 226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LF08CU8&location=226)) - There is an additional element of the uncanny in events triggered by climate change, one that did not figure in my experience of the Delhi tornado. This is that the freakish weather events of today, despite their radically nonhuman nature, are nonetheless animated by cumulative human actions. In that sense, the events set in motion by global warming have a more intimate connection with humans than did the climatic phenomena of the past—this is because we have all contributed in some measure, great or small, to their making. They are the mysterious work of our own hands returning to haunt us in unthinkable shapes and forms. All of this makes climate change events peculiarly resistant to the customary frames that literature has applied to “Nature”: they are too powerful, too grotesque, too dangerous, and too accusatory to be written about in a lyrical, or elegiac, or romantic vein. Indeed, in that these events are not entirely of Nature (whatever that might be), they confound the very idea of “Nature writing” or ecological writing: they are instances, rather, of the uncanny intimacy of our relationship with the nonhuman. ([Location 455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LF08CU8&location=455)) - How, then, did the provinces of the imaginative and the scientific come to be so sharply divided from each other? According to Latour the project of partitioning is supported always by a related enterprise: one that he describes as “purification,” the purpose of which is to ensure that Nature remains off-limits to Culture, the knowledge of which is consigned entirely to the sciences. This entails the marking off and suppression of hybrids—and that, of course, is exactly the story of the branding of science fiction, as a genre separate from the literary mainstream. The line that has been drawn between them exists only for the sake of neatness; because the zeitgeist of late modernity could not tolerate Nature-Culture hybrids. ([Location 1003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LF08CU8&location=1003)) - It is possible, of course, to construct many different genealogies for the deepening logocentricism of the last several centuries. But the one point where all those lines of descent converge is the invention of print technology, which moved the logocentricism of the Abrahamic religions in general, and the Protestant Reformation in particular, onto a new plane. So much so that Ernest Gellner was able to announce in 1964, “The humanist intellectual is, essentially, an expert on the written word.” ([Location 1182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LF08CU8&location=1182)) - But apart from its dual role as both protagonist and victim, Asia has played yet another critical part in the unfolding of the Great Derangement: it is that of the simpleton who, in his blundering progress across the stage, unwittingly stumbles upon the secret that is the key to the plot. This is because certain crucial aspects of modernity would not have become apparent if they had not been put to an empirical test, in the only continent where the magnitudes of population are such that they can literally move the planet. And as with any truly revelatory experiment, the results would not have been believed, by Asians or anyone else, if they had not turned out exactly as they have. For the results are counterintuitive and they contradict all the tenets on which our lives, thoughts, and actions have been based for almost a century. What we have learned from this experiment is that the patterns of life that modernity engenders can only be practiced by a small minority of the world’s population. Asia’s historical experience demonstrates that our planet will not allow these patterns of living to be adopted by every human being. Every family in the world cannot have two cars, a washing machine, and a refrigerator—not because of technical or economic limitations but because humanity would asphyxiate in the process. It is Asia, then, that has torn the mask from the phantom that lured it onto the stage of the Great Derangement, but only to recoil in horror at its own handiwork; its shock is such that it dare not even name what it has beheld—for having entered this stage, it is trapped, like everyone else. All it can say to the chorus that is waiting to receive it is “But you promised . . . and we believed you!” ([Location 1271](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LF08CU8&location=1271)) - It is now known that the Kerala School of Mathematics anticipated the work of “Gregory, Newton and Leibniz by at least 250 years”; ([Location 1310](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LF08CU8&location=1310)) - It will be evident from this that Indian entrepreneurs were quick to grasp the possibilities of British and American steam technology. There is no reason to suppose that they would not have been at least as good at imitating it as were their counterparts in, say, Germany or Russia, had the circumstances been different. 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. The appetites of the British economy needed to be fed by large quantities of raw materials, produced by solar-based methods of agriculture. Had a carbon economy developed synchronously in India and elsewhere, these materials would have been used locally instead of being exported. In other words, the emerging fossil-fuel economies of the West required that people elsewhere be prevented from developing coal-based energy systems of their own, by compulsion if necessary. As Timothy Mitchell observes, the coal economy thus essentially “depended on not being imitated.” Imperial rule assured that it was not. ([Location 1485](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LF08CU8&location=1485)) - Among Gandhi’s best-known pronouncements on industrial capitalism are these famous lines written in 1928: “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. If an entire nation of 300 millions [sic] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.” ([Location 1543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LF08CU8&location=1543)) - 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 think about the world only as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide. ([Location 1737](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LF08CU8&location=1737)) - 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. ([Location 1762](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LF08CU8&location=1762)) - “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.” ([Location 1767](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LF08CU8&location=1767)) - 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. ([Location 1834](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LF08CU8&location=1834)) - the Pentagon devotes more resources to the study of climate change than any other branch of the U.S. government. ([Location 1882](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LF08CU8&location=1882)) - 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.” ([Location 1889](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LF08CU8&location=1889)) - it is increasingly clear to me that the formal political structures of our time are incapable of confronting this crisis on their own. The reason for this is simple: the basic building block of these structures is the nation-state, inherent to the nature of which is the pursuit of the interests of a particular group of people. ([Location 2183](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01LF08CU8&location=2183))