“A landmark report from the United Nations’ [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, its Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 oC, dated October 8, 2018,] paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought,” Coral Davenport writes, in the December 7, 2018 edition of The New York Times, according to which “avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has ‘no documented historic precedent’.” Unless we change in altogether unprecedented ways, in other words, we will, in only a few decades, pass a climate-crisis tipping point on the other side of which humanity becomes at best dystopian, at worst extinct. “But while [the report’s authors] conclude that it is technically possible to achieve the rapid changes required,” Davenport continues, “they concede that it may be politically unlikely.”
Lest we think we can’t add still to the absurdity of the concession, we recall Bill McKibben’s call to arms, The End of Nature, which appeared on October 8, 1989, less than a year after the IPCC breathes its first, on December 6, 1988. With it arises an ever growing, increasingly clear-eyed academic and popular political climate-crisis movement, its most notable recent contribution Greta Thunberg’s “Skolstrejk för klimatet” (“School strike for the climate”), which sparked the worldwide Fridays for Future movement.
Amitav Ghosh memorably projects the absurdity into our future, in his Berlin Family Lectures on “Fiction, History, and Politics in the Age of Global Warming,” delivered September 29 and 30 and October 6 and 7, 2015, imagining provocatively what future generations may come eventually to think of us. “In [their] substantially altered world,” our era, suffering “modes of concealment that preven[t us] from recognizing the realities of [our] plight,” may well “come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.” Hence the title of the lectures, and of the book reflecting them, which appeared on July 12, 2016: The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.
The seminar will be devoted to exploring a range of such “modes of concealment,” each of them psychologically explanatory, none of them morally exculpatory. We will begin by addressing a variety of more or less established one, including, in the order they’ve been relayed to us, Melvin Lerner’s “just world hypothesis,” John Darley and Bibb Latané’s “bystander effect,” Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons,” Peter Singer’s challenge regarding relative affluence and its moral obligation toward relative need, Derek Parfit’s “nonidentity problem,” and Elaine Scarry’s revelations regarding the post-nuclear age weakening of our grasp of the very nature of emergency. Having laid out the above background, the remaining half to two-thirds of the semester will be taken up with exploring the most recently observed mode of concealment, which is the artistic one that Ghosh focuses on in particular. “[W]hen readers and museumgoers,” that is, he conjectured, audiences of artistic endeavors generally, “turn to the art and literature of our time [and] look, first and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance,” but “fail to find them, what should they—what can they—do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented [us] from recognizing the realities of [our] plight.” Our task in this respect will be to “turn to the art and literature [at the] time [of and since Ghosh’s conjecture] for traces and portents of the altered world” we risk bequeathing to future generations, to see if perhaps, hopefully, we are addressing the Great Derangement at least a bit more effectively since The Great Derangement.