{"id":3380,"date":"2019-11-11T12:21:29","date_gmt":"2019-11-11T01:21:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/irisherself.com\/blog\/?p=3380"},"modified":"2019-11-11T15:19:15","modified_gmt":"2019-11-11T04:19:15","slug":"the-time-of-the-great-derangement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irisherself.com\/blog\/the-time-of-the-great-derangement\/","title":{"rendered":"The time of the Great Derangement"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p> A sobering yet splendid write up of the current state of affairs<br><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/eq0Nm7SFEC?amp=1\" target=\"_blank\">Meanjin.com.au\/essays\/unearthed <\/a>by <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/cityoftongues\">@cityoftongues<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>&#8220;<\/em><em>We buy cheap clothes without letting ourselves think too  much about the manner of their production, eat meat without thinking too  much about where it comes from, catch planes without thinking too hard  about the impact of them, or of the materials that went into building  the plane, or the road, or of making the power that runs the lights. For  those of us in the first world, any reckoning with these questions is  likely to be particularly painful, demanding we learn to see the  invisible legacies and ongoing trauma of colonialism and exploitation,  dispossession and destruction that surround and enmesh us. Seen like  this our resistance looks less like moral cupidity or wickedness than  self-preservation. As T.S.&nbsp;Eliot recognised almost a century ago, there  is only so much reality most of us can bear. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>As a result we inhabit a weird duality, a world in which  we know but do not know, and where these mechanisms of evasion and  denial allow us to avoid staring into the eye of what is coming.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Five million Syrian refugees deranged Europe, a fraction of that has dramatically affected the dynamic of Australian society. What happens when tens of millions head north and south from Indonesia and equatorial or sub-Saharan Africa? When Central America or parts of India become uninhabitable? When Bangladesh and Myanmar flood? What happens when that occurs at the same time food grows scarce, water resources dry up and economic activity contracts to less than nothing as global commerce collapses?\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>When sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities such as  Kolkata, New York and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and  museum-goers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not  look, first and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered  world of their inheritance? And when they fail to find them, 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 people from recognising the realities of their plight?&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A sobering yet splendid write up of the current state of affairsMeanjin.com.au\/essays\/unearthed by @cityoftongues &#8220;We buy cheap clothes without letting ourselves think too much about the manner of their production, eat meat without thinking too much about where it comes from, catch planes without thinking too hard about the impact of them, or of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[22,16],"class_list":["post-3380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff-that-matters","tag-collective-delusions","tag-performance-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irisherself.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irisherself.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irisherself.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irisherself.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irisherself.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3380"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/irisherself.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3386,"href":"https:\/\/irisherself.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3380\/revisions\/3386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irisherself.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irisherself.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irisherself.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}