In her dystopian 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood describes a pill called BlyssPluss that will make everyone happy and eliminate disease. But widespread use of the pill would hit pharmaceutical firms’ profits, so the companies pay HelthWyzer, a drug developer, to sicken users by inserting a virus into the pills. HelthWyzer can then double its profits by selling the antidote. “The best diseases, from a business point of view,” explains the scientist Crake, “would be those that cause lingering illnesses. Ideally — that is, for maximum profit — the patient should either get well or die just before all of his or her money runs out. It’s a fine calculation.”

The provocative thought here is deliberately willing the bad to produce the good. This is akin to the noted development economist Albert O Hirschman’s idea of “optimal” crises — deep enough to trigger progress, but not so deep that they wipe out the means of achieving it. Hirschman himself supported projects he thought likely to fail, in order to create “pressure points” for improvement.

All of this leads one to wonder about the meaning of the extreme events that many predict will occur in the coming century as a result of climate change — and, of course, about the significance of the more traditional plagues and famines likely to afflict us.

The source of this speculation is theological as well as prosaic: Why, if God is omnipotent and perfectly good, did he create a world with suffering and evil? One answer, according to Stephen Davies in his 2019 book The Street-Wise Guide to the Devil and His Works, is that Satan is placed in God’s creation “to test and examine the faith and virtue […] of humanity.” Another is that “evil is necessary to perfect the good.”

But the ultimate expression of this idea is Goethe’s Faust. In the opening “Prologue in Heaven,” God explains his problem to the demon Mephistopheles. Humanity, made in God’s image, has the potential for progress but is naturally lazy and incurious: “It’s so easy for men to slump and before long they want to do nothing at all.” God sends Mephistopheles to rouse them from their complacency, as the force that “would do evil evermore, and yet create the good.”

Will this, then, be the point of the extreme climate events that will likely befall us? After all, few now honestly believe either that the world will meet the targets set at the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), or, even if it does, that we will limit overall global warming to 1.5º Celsius above preindustrial levels.

In his recent book Decarbonomics & the Post-Pandemic World, the economist Charles Dumas projects a sequence of extreme events associated with rising temperatures. If global warming stabilises at 1.5ºC by 2025, we can expect faster desertification in North America and Africa, the slowing or ceasing of the Gulf Stream by 2100, the disappearance of mountain glaciers and parts of the Arctic, rainforest losses, and unprecedented hurricanes in the South Atlantic, submerging islands.

Such catastrophic events need not be divine judgment to serve as necessary wake-up calls. Whereas Enlightenment thinkers had faith in the linear progress of the human mind, attaining higher states of thinking and behaviour may in fact depend in part on extreme events.

History provides abundant support for this view: World War II, for example, was a necessary precondition for the establishment of the European Union.