This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on October 19, 2020 - October 25, 2020
Why is there so much denial of climate change and even wearing of masks during the pandemic? As the coronavirus death toll reaches a million, and more than 200,000 Americans have died, how can politicians be so cruel as to deny medical science, and morality, to seek power?
In this age of misinformation and data overload, we get different answers from psychoanalysts to philosophers. The best I have read so far is provided by Indian author Amitav Ghosh, in his 2016 book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.
Most climate change reports are so full of technical jargon that we simply ignore their important messages. Free market economists think of climate change as a market failure, which carbon taxes will solve. Politicians are unwilling to push through additional taxes to deal with climate change, which is a “wicked problem” with no simple answers. So we are trapped in denial and inaction, even as we watch California burn, Arctic ice caps melt and islands and coasts slowly sink as sea levels rise.
Ghosh has a fabulous command of language that can convey ideas and emotions beyond the technical. Born into a family of climate refugees in what is today’s Bangladesh, he weaves the threats of climate warming into life and puts it into perspective. Agreeing with Canadian iconoclast Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate) that climate change is caused by capitalism, Ghosh is able to paint a broader and deeper canvas of how capitalism, colonisation, power and poverty are entangled with the destruction of nature.
He calls this the Age of Derangement, because science and technology, which pushes information and self-awareness to the individual, denies the impending climate catastrophes.
Ghosh cleverly uses Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si (Care Of Our Common Home), to show how the pope’s use of language can electrify emotions and yet, point out the obvious.
As someone who grew up in the shade of the virgin tropical forests of Borneo, climate change was the least of my priorities for much of my life, until I realised in 2009 that this was the defining issue of our generation. But as a finance specialist and lifelong technocrat, I could not connect how climate, human inequality, politics, money and morality are one integrative issue. Indeed, I had not expected that a man of religion would be able to articulate a complex subject like climate change.
The reason why science and economics cannot get the message on climate warming is because “objective” science (and economics) took humanity out of their analysis and in doing so, abstracted or assumed away morality and ethics. By positing Mother Nature as a physical thing and humans as “rational robots”, both man and nature could be exploited and manipulated without consequences or limits.
The specialisation of disciplines created blind spots because no single expert could have an integrative and integral picture of what was happening to man and nature as One. This was the heart of the “divide and rule” power play in capitalist colonisation, in which a minority ruled the majority through domination of the mind. The heart must be taken out of the mind to rule “objectively”.
Ghosh notes that climate change cannot be divorced from Asia and colonial history. With 55% of the world’s population and already accounting for one-third of world GDP, “Asia’s centrality to global warming rests, in the first instance, upon numbers”.
Ghosh quoted Mahatma Gandhi, who presciently said 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.” Today, 300 million middle-class people in China, India and Southeast Asia are beginning to consume like the average American and European. The Global Footprint Network suggested that it would take four Earths to sustain a population of seven billion at American levels of consumption.
Western ideas of capitalism, democracy and freedom are founded on the freedom of individuals to choose. “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,” Ghosh writes. This explains “why the rates of climate change denial tend to be unusually high throughout the Anglosphere (Anglo-Saxon countries)”.
He further identifies climate denial coming from corporations and the Deep State (military-industrial complex) which realise that dealing with climate change will mean heavy costs and losses for them. The oil-producing companies have most to lose from decarbonisation, having invested heavily in oil and gas exploration. They were the largest supporters of climate denial.
The military were the first to appreciate how climate change would affect their capabilities, resources and financing. Through their focus on the balance of global power, they were the first to realise that climate crises would reorder the global distribution of power, as well as wealth. If the rich were to pay for the restoration of climate balance, the poor would be the first to benefit at their expense.
French philosopher Bruno Latour, in his latest book Down to Earth, was able to knit together and show that the rise of globalisation and free markets, growing social inequalities, and denial of climate change was one and the same political issue. The ruling class, collectively called the elites, had “concluded that the earth no longer had room enough for them and for everyone else”. They deny climate disaster because they could either live in gated communities or escape to outer space, as billionaires Elon Musk and Richard Branson are working on.
In short, climate change is due to excessive human consumption, financed by excessive debt, but its impact is uneven owing to growing inequalities and injustice. Pope Francis’ Laudato Si reasserts the religious view that all human activities are moral questions, not the technocratic paradigm of “infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology”.
This then is the great derangement, that the dominant world view of a minority, the rich elite, promises that everyone can enjoy what they can enjoy, without facing up to the fact that this is physically and morally impossible. The derangement denies the stark realities that we are destroying the global commons, our natural and human environment, and that the majority are living in desperation and fearful for their health, livelihood, food and human security.
We have therefore come full circle. An extreme individualist would deny that he or she lives in a common collective. A technocrat believes in limitless growth. Morality has no role in laissez faire freedom where each person can be as greedy as he wants. But that denies the reality that we have a common home and share a common fate. We live and die with man and nature, not independent of each other. Man, nature and morality are one, unified by diversity. To survive, we must truly get out of our great derangement.
Tan Sri Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective
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