"We have lost yardsticks by which to measure": Arendtian ethics and the narration of scale in the anthropocene

The scalar disjuncts of the Anthropocene lead to a gap in anthropocentric perceptions and those of the species with whom we share the biosphere. This creates cognitive dissonance between attending to and accounting for the reality of multispecies agency on the one hand and retaining a sense of human-sized responsibility (and the agency that accompanies this) on the other. This is the ethical dilemma at the heart of the Anthropocene. How, then, to retain a human-sized dimension to narrative that is yet sufficient to activate human responsibility and agency? First, I consider how Anthropocene questions of spatial and temporal scale are also questions of representational and ethical disjunct. However, as conventional versions of literary-especially, narrative-ethics tend to operate at the human scale, and only exacerbate a sense of disconnection, I turn to political thinker Hannah Arendt for a literary ethics that privileges human thought inasmuch as it uses that thought to imagine a new scalar awareness, but allows that thought to decenter itself even as it operates. Finally, I briefly consider the science-fiction novel, The Three-Body Problem (2014), by Chinese author Liu Cixin, as an exercise in Arendtian thought.