Writing Climate Change (16)
Getting Literary – Global Weirdness
This is part 16 of a series on writing Climate Change for fiction.
One of the many alternative names for climate change is Global Weirding. Climate change is making the weather get weird, which, weirdly isn’t all that weird really.
Weird weather turns out to be the least weird thing about climate change. The planet is behaving normally. We know where this is going.
The weirdness of climate change goes much deeper. And it’s less about the weather than it is about us.
Climate change - when we truly grapple with what this phenomena is - reveals a vast chasm between how most people typically think, and how the world actually is. To put it bluntly, climate change reveals our society to be fundamentally delusional. Then climate change shoots a bazooka through any notion that the human mind is even capable of grasping things as they truly are.
Therefore, one way to tell a climate story is embrace our collective delusion and get freak’n weird.
Weird Writing
The aim with weird writing is to unsettle the reader. To make them question reality. Too destabilize their perceptions.
For a society trapped in a delusion questioning reality might be a very good idea. We could really do with breaking some delusions about now, because those delusions are driving climate change and could get millions of people killed. We’ll get into the details soon, but first let’s consider the techniques of weird writing. It’ll be useful to keep these in mind.
Here is an incomplete list of how to literarily break people’s minds:
- Ambiguity: Something is happening, but what? Things cannot be fully defined, known, seen, or understood.
- Defamiliarisation: The ordinary is made strange. Jim reads an email. Photons stream from the screen into Jim’s eyeball. The eyeball blinks.
- Distanctiation: The artificiality of the text is revealed. We can’t identify with it, nor be passive, mere consumers. Because who wrote these words anyway? Some guy sitting on a red chair?
- Hybrids & Blurred Categories: Are zombies dead or alive? Is a biotech squid natural or man-made?
- Unsettling Juxtapositions: A man hums a tune while making a sandwich. His wife is bleeding on the floor. An octopus slithers out of the fridge.
- The Uncanny Valley: It’s just like the rael thing, almost.
- Messing with Time: Are we in the past, future, present? What’s happening? When’s happening?
- Messing with Memory: What really happened? Who am I?
- Illusion: Nothing is real, or is it?
- Surrealism, Dream Logic, and General Mind F***ery: Sure, let’s end the entire thing with a giant penguin. Why not?
- The Fantastic: The strange and wonderful. Supernatural creatures. Things that shouldn’t be, can’t be, and yet... there they are.
- Special Realms: Step through the portal, into the maze, into a world strange and new.
- Monsters: Evil, chasing us down, tormenting us, unstoppable. Run! How did this thing come to be?
- Linked Doubles: Two characters are near identical, an evil twin; or binary opposites, like Jekyll and Hyde. Yet linked. The same, but not.
- Shapeshifting and Transformation: Drink this potion, who knows what might happen?
- Master-Slave Relationships: Vampires and their familiars. Mad scientists and their assistants. Who truly controls who?
- Curses and Inherited Doom: Don’t open the tomb! Don’t touch the monkey’s paw! You’re not a Kennedy are you? Oh dear.
- Metaphors Made Real: Going to work is like becoming a separate person. Literally. They put a chip in your brain. You have no memory of work.
- Dormant Horrors & Atavistic Intrusions: For centuries evil slept, forgotten by the realms of men...
- Overwhelm: The scales break all normal limits. The emotions cannot be contained. Who can comprehend the horror?!
- Theatricality: Who said this is over the top? We haven’t even seen the top yet! Fire the glitter cannons!
- Existential Fears: Try not to think about death. Shut your eyes. It’s okay. It’s just like sleeping, with your eyes closed.
- Ruin, Decay, Failure, and Self-destruction: Nothing works. Everything dies. Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!
- Horror and the Macabre: The octopus slithers onto the woman’s face, and lays its eggs in her mouth.
- Mental and Physical Contamination: Do you think you can just self-isolate in your castle and have a masquerade ball? Think again. The disease is inside your head.
- Negative Emotions: Melancholy. Fear. Anxiety. Pessimism. Confusion. Dread. We’re not happy about this. We were trying to repress this... and yet here it comes bubbling to the surface.
- Shame and Secrets: I really wish didn’t have to talk about this, so I’m not telling.
- Isolation: We are all alone, and that’s both wonderful and terrifying.
- The (in)Sanity of Paranoia: what if they really are out to get you?
- The Oppressiveness of Good Intentions: Who is really good? At what cost does order come? Who is collateral damage in superhero’s victory?
- Moral Transgression: Serial killers, cannibals, perverts, oddballs, freaks. We are not bound by normal standards here.
- Impulsivity, Seduction & Burlesque: We’ve lost control and we’re loving it. Bring in the sexy vampires! Lets party!
- The Sublime: Moments of transcendence, the breakdown of distinctions into primal unity, reaching the limits of knowing. Stand upon the mountaintop and scream!
- Insanity: Maybe none of this stuff makes sense because you’re the one that’s gone mad.
Those are some ideas about how we might do weird. Now, what about those delusions? Let’s explore.
The Break Down of Rationality in Our Hypernormal Moment
The world is living through a particularly weird moment. Everything is okay. Nothing is okay. We’re faking it.
Adam Curtis, in his suitably unsettling 2016 documentary of the same name, calls this phenomena Hypernormalisation.
The opening narration says it all, so I’ll quote at length:
“We live in a strange time. Extraordinary events keep happening that undermine the stability of our world. Suicide bombs, waves of refugees, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, even Brexit. Yet those in control seem unable to deal with them, and no-one has any vision of a different or a better kind of future.
This film will tell the story of how we got to this strange place. It is about how, over the past 40 years, politicians, financiers and technological utopians, rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, retreated. Instead, they constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power. And as this fake world grew, all of us went along with it, because the simplicity was reassuring.
Even those who thought they were attacking the system - the radicals, the artists, the musicians, and our whole counterculture - actually became part of the trickery, because they, too, had retreated into the make-believe world, which is why their opposition has no effect and nothing ever changes.
But this retreat into a dream world allowed dark and destructive forces to fester and grow outside. Forces that are now returning to pierce the fragile surface of our carefully constructed fake world....”
“...The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. But everybody had to play along and pretend that it WAS real because no-one could imagine any alternative.
One Soviet writer called it "hypernormalisation". You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it. The fakeness was hypernormal.”
So yeah. We might call this a kind of delusion.
We all live in a dream-world. A collapsing dream-world, emerging into a waking nightmare, one aspect of which is climate change.
Curtis then references the Strugatsky brother’s novel Roadside Picnic as being the literary attempt to capture this feeling of hypernormalisation. Better still I would recommend The Doomed City. To me this seems the brother’s most clear attempt to write about a hypernormal society.
In The Doomed City the world is entirely fake. The sun switches on and off like a lamp. The geometry of reality makes no sense. Random occurrences happen without explanation. The Experiment is the Experiment. No one knows why. Everything is falling to pieces. Everything is fine.
Surrealism and weirdness are the brother’s guiding lights in a hypernormal world. For me at least the effect was compelling and resonant, despite being a story about Soviet Russia with all the differences of detail between then and now. I suspect the hypernormalisation is what hooked me.
After all, the Experiment is the Experiment.
The Hypernormal and Climate Change
Our delusional dream-world cannot handle climate change. The result is some fairly serious hypernormalisation.
Here’s just a few examples:
- We continue creating multi-lane highways, expanding oil exploration, and permitting coastal housing developments. Car dependence and fossil fuels needs to be phased out, and good luck getting insurance for those houses in 20yrs.
- A standard middle-class suburban life is seen as normal, desirable, and unproblematic. We seem to believe that the best society is one in which everyone is a middle-class soccer mom or suburban dad.
- Those of us who are middle-class soccer moms and suburban dads continue to drive to work along those multi-lane highways, earn our money from the status quo, invest that money into funds... which fund oil production... which makes jet fuel, so we can fly on holiday to tropical islands... before those islands vanish beneath the rising seas caused by...
- Politicians, technocrats, and business leaders are wisely leading our efforts against the grave and serious threat that is climate change. This is effort is best achieved by cost-effective incremental actions with minimal disruption to our normal, desirable, and unproblematic lives.
- Also… politicians, technocrats, and business leaders have committed themselves to climate targets which require the transformation of global society in about 10yrs ago.
- Some charismatic politicians recognize a contradiction exists here. Their election campaigns promise bold actions.
- These politicians then implement those bold actions via cost-effective incremental actions with minimal disruption to our unproblematic lives.
- Meanwhile... the moment the economic status quo is threatened, incremental politics is instantly discarded. Billions in wealth is funneled to the wealthy, leaving people are asking questions like: Is everything bullshit?
- But climate change is also serious threat to the status quo. Therefore we have solutions. These solutions are that everything continue as it is right now, but with electric cars. Please ignore all the grifts and scams around carbon offsets. Those are exceptions, not symptoms.
- However something is so visibly wrong that society is having a gigantic “The Emperor has no clothes” moment. Literally. The children are protesting. Children. Just dwell on that one.
- Common responses to climate protests include: look they ate a hamburger, it’s not right to delay traffic for innocent people, these people are so annoying, I think they should use different tactics because I don’t like that one.
- Meanwhile, if these protests fail then millions of people will die.
- None of us want millions of people to die. We agree on that part. But we do need to weigh those mega-deaths up against other matters too. Such as: property values... the inconvenience caused to motorists by bicycle lanes... and anything which might interfere with a normal and desirable and normal life.
- Meanwhile… economic crisis, the pandemic, and extreme weather is causing the dream-world to crumble.
- And yet... even as the dream-world crumbles we still don’t really believe it’s happening.
Everything is fine.
Why Does Weird Writing Work Here?
Because we are delusional.
Weirdness is an appropriate mode when a society’s fundamental assumptions are false, but that falseness is not being acknowledged. Trying to be logical with broken logic can only ever produce nonsense and madness, which must itself be accepted as normal because everything is fine.
The result is weirdness.
Weird fiction can highlight this insanity.
More importantly weirdness can skewer a very particular kind of broken logic – the fetishisation of logical systems themselves, the kind of thinking which gets us stuck here to begin with.
What I mean by this is a kind of almost theological thinking. It’s the world in which every question has an answer and those that don’t aren’t real questions. It’s the orderly rational world. Everything makes sense. We done the math. Therefore everything is fine.
It’s the kind of thinking which tends to support the power structure of society, to justify and maintain an orderly status quo.
These fetishized logical systems drive and support dysfunctional societies in their dysfunction. In the Soviet Union that system of beliefs was called Communism. Today we merely call it economics. We don’t need to give it a special label. It’s just economics. It’s just the way things are.
Which is the problem.
When I say the system has become fetishized, I mean that we’ve become incapable as a society of dealing with the gap between our beliefs about reality and reality itself. The system is reality. We can’t tell the difference between a finger pointing at the Moon, and the actual Moon.
For a long time (perhaps since the enlightenment or the industrial revolution, in either case at precisely the moment when weird fiction first started to become a thing in the form of Gothic) society has fetishized scientific rationality. Our society has ended up with riddled with physics-envy thinking. Nothing is true unless you’ve got a mathematical equation.
T = N - F
Truth is numbers minus feeling.
An over-application of scientific rationalism leads to pseudo-scientific garbage. We enter the gap between reality and actuality, which produces weirdness, which our fetishisation can’t handle leading to hypernormalisation.
This fetishized pseudo-science produces a kind of World-as-Engineering problem way of thinking, or as the Strugatsky’s put it in The Doomed City, the mindset of “P for Population” under Stalin. In this rationalized view the world can be:
- understood
- controlled
- and rationally designed
The world is a machine. Once the correct system based on the correct understanding is fully implemented then the machine will work. If we can use math to understand a chemical reaction, surely we can use math to understand and manage society too?
The Weird stabs a knife into this view.
Think back to that list of techniques. They are stabbing directly into this sense of know-ability and control. The breakdown of human designs. The ruined cathedrals, the immoral behaviors, the dirt and filth, the sheer bloody physicality of human flesh. In the weird we face a direct confrontation with the thing-in-itself: the sublime – beyond language or control.
Soviet Russia had a World-as-Engineering-Problem utopian system. It collapsed. At the time of writing, central banks are saying we need people to lose their incomes so that people don’t have to spend as much of their income on rising prices. That seems weird to me, but it makes sense within the logic of the system.
And now I wonder if any central bankers will ever get murdered by a half-naked man wearing shaman-horns. Maybe? That also makes sense, within the weird overflowing dysfunction of a hypernormal system.
Time will tell.
The True Deep Weirdness of Climate Change
Standard discussions about climate change are very much rooted in the World-as-Engineering-Problem logic: emissions trading schemes, electric vehicle uptake rates, environmental product declarations, integrated assessment models, net zero by 2050 – all these are engineer’s questions with a whiff of the hypernormal.
The weirdness there is simply that we’re delusional, as already discussed.
To find the true weirdness of climate change we need to step away from engineer’s questions, and ask some different questions.
For example let’s take that central bit of climate data, the Keeling Curve. It’s fairly simple. Carbon Dioxide is going up, therefore we have a problem. However, zoom in and you’ll notice a zigzag. This is seasonal variation.
That squiggle in the data is a hint of the true totality underlying the phenomena of climate change – on an annual basis the biggest most powerful climate actions are made not by people, but by trees.
Climate change is a supra-human event.
The totality of climate change involves trillions of lives, only a minority of which are human. We might be the driving force, but we’re not in control. Relevant choices are also being made by fish, microbes, and mushrooms. In this story beetles and jellyfish have interests of their own. These are the ignored and hidden creatures. Our B for Biosphere. They will also decide what happens to us.
Here is the real weirdness of climate change.
Truly grappling with climate change slams us directly into an encounter with the sublime. That unknowable uncontrollable beyond. The place where human thought breaks.
To take another example, consider the time scales involved (see Part 4).
We are making moral decisions which have ten-thousand year consequences. No decision making practice can deal with this. Cost-benefit analysis can barely deal with thirty years. Even “the seventh generation” cannot deal with time scales that exceed the existence of humanity. These time scales are mind breaking.
Again, consider the full chain of cause-and-effect that is climate change. That totality goes far beyond mere steam engines and hurricanes. We are talking about the entire Earth system. Everything you have ever known.
Everything.
The true totality that got us here involved a million billion trillion micro-decision made over four billion years. The evolution of photosynthesis, the first hominid’s use of fire, the psychological effects of the Cold War. The true causal consequences of climate change will be similarly vast, rippling out into all aspects of Earth-life for billions of years.
To go deeper still:
A certain fraction of all our bodies is now made from fossil fuels, and given geology and time a certain fraction of human bodies will one day be converted back into fossil fuels, which one day might be burnt again for energy by our descendants just as we today are burning our own ancestors.
Again:
We like to think that we are killing or saving Earth. We are responsible, therefore we are in control.
Yet it is Earth that created us. Our core desires are shared with all life itself, including the craving for cheap energy. Life is the use of energy. Climate change is a by-product of life itself.
The true reality of climate change is near incomprehensible.
And weird...
Consider for a moment this fun climate change fact: frying pans can alter the weather.
This is a well established truth. The science is clear. The weather is being altered by your grandmother’s frying pan, last used in 1952.
She cooked with gas, which emitted unseen vapours, which communed with sunlight, which vibrated water, which sixty years later slammed a hurricane into New York.
Frying pans can influence clouds, like magic and madness.
This vast unfathomable chaos is what we tidy up and label “Climate Change”. Then we give this concept to the economists, who do a cost-benefit analysis to decide the most efficient emission reduction plan for the next five years, while hoping they never get murdered by a half-naked man wearing shaman-horns.
That’s what the language and math simplifies away. That’s what the weirdness reminds us is lurking underneath.
Writing Meta-natural Realism
All the examples above immediately lend themselves to the supernatural, the divine, the monstrous, the absurd, and the insane. We slip into a superstitious paranoia about frying pans controlling clouds.
Straightforward realistic writing struggles to contain this level of reality. Indeed, trying to capture this level of reality “realistically” without making things go bonkers anyway is rather hard.
It was 1952. Pam put the gas on, set the frying pan down over the flame. The sky outside was cloudy, not her fault – yet. Pam cracked an egg in the pan, turned the heat up, then, one-hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand years later there was a storm off the coast of Chile. Three fishermen died because of Pam’s eggs – sunny side up.
Rather than write like this, meta-natural realism (or weird naturalism or whatever name you like) gives up on trying to express that which is beyond comprehension, and embraces whatever it takes to represent the sense of this reality (see Part 10). If it takes mutants, monsters, and spooks to do it, then so be it. Because which is more true to reality? To include ghosts, or to drift into the hypernormal and merely say: Pam fried an egg.
Confronting the Seductive Darkness
Climate change has two other aspects which benefit from a weird approach:
1) climate change is frightening and depressing
2) climate change is substantially the result of desire
Fear and despair are the emotional response to dangerous forces we cannot understand or control. Likewise, desire is that part of ourselves which we so often cannot understand or control. This is what weirdness deals with head on.
In the Apocalypse, climate change is a kind of sin which receives divine punishment. All sackcloth and ashes. In the dark weirdness, climate change is more like a sex scandal that gets us in serious deep trouble.
Climate change is a bad trip. A vampire drug. A seduction. The world got addicted to Faustian cocaine. Power unimaginable, for a price. Like having an army of slaves meeting your every need. But now we find the slaves were not working for us alone, and life is spiraling out of control - haunting us with the ghosts dead from an addiction we don’t want to break while we pretend that everything is fine.
Climate change is weird.
But the weirdness of a polar vortex snowstorm in summer is not just that this is unusual – we know damn well why it’s happening too – rather the weirdness comes from seeing the fingerprints of an invisible monster that haunts us. Our addiction. Ourselves. Humanity’s evil twin, our double embodied in the clouds. Giant and godlike. A monster we created and cannot control. A monster we might even be tempted to lust for, to worship. We might even want the monster to win.
The Limitations of Weirdness
We are delusional, and it’s one of the limits of being human. The weird seems an excellent mode for toying with this aspect of life.
However, the weird isn’t great for putting reality back together.
The weird is a strongly counter-active technique, pushing back against an artificial order that cannot admit to the monsters it breeds. Therefore, the danger is to go too far in the other direction. Reminders of limitation and darkness can slide into mere hopelessness, cynicism, fatalism, superstition, and confusion. Climate change action also does need real-world solutions, and real world motivation for action. The weird might not be a great place for that. And if people are already destabilized, does this really do anything other than destabilize them even more?
For now at least much of society is still lumbering along in hypernormal mode. Surely that’ll break eventually. Until then, puncturing that fake normality would seem fair game. Likewise, finding expression for the bizarreness of this all would seem more than worthy. At its best weirdness can break through to a deeper reality - felt rather than seen – give expression to feeling that we’re losing our minds, and lay the ground for a better world by breaking the broken logic.
That story of our crumbling delusions is one way of understanding the story of climate change.
Next time we’ll continue getting literary, looking at various modes of story-telling that might work for climate change.
Return to menu.
Physics-envy thinking. Faustian cocaine. So perfectly well said. Another great piece. Thanks!