Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present

by Philipp Blom

At the beginning of this book, I asked a straighforward question: What changes in a society when the climate changes? For the early modern period, it appears that the crisis of agriculture following environmental cooling accelerated a social and economic dynamism carried by a rising middle class, by stronger trade, empirical knowledge, expanding literacy, growing markets, and intellectual renewal. The result was a move from feudal to capitalist societies, from the fortress to the market.

Perhaps this is all too vast for us to take in, perhaps it is simply too inconvenient, perhaps it seems too abstract—but it becomes more concrete with every hurricane and every flood. The rich Western societies of today are no more effective in combating climate change than those that existed around the year 1600, albeit for different reasons. Historically, the idea of global climate change simply did not exist, and there were no data to support such a theory. Today, data and projections exist, but they point in a direction that is too frightening, and also simply too big, on an individual level, as well as too disruptive to national and global economies built on growth and expanding exploitation.

During the Little Ice Age, Europe found new

metaphors for thinking about itself. At the end of the sixteenth century, climate change was still understood as divine punishment, part of the central relationship between God and his creatures. Based on this metaphorical understanding, the initial reactions were rational but futile: Processions, penance, sermons, rituals, and exorcisms did little to change the weather.

It is instructive to see how reliant economic theories are on philosophical claims, and how profoundly bad philosophy can compromise those theories from the outset. After rationality, freedom, and equality collapse, so too do other axiomatic assumptions—the ascent to a perfect market in which freedom reigns supreme, and the reliance on an invisible mechanism that magically produces justice and plenty.

The Fortress offers security, control, a sense of self, a sense of dignity—a stable identity. In any Fortress, the inhabitants are all cut from the same cloth. As far as they know, they share the same historical experience, the same culture, the same religion, and, if possible, the same ethnicity. They remain convinced that liberty cannot be valid for everyone, that equality is an illusion, and that solidarity should be directed toward one’s own kind.

The Fortress and the Market once represented stages of historical development, but today they serve as ideological alternatives.

What of the nontheological Enlightenment, the ideas put forward by those who had to flee or were executed, and who were eventually marginalized or excised from the history books? What about the Enlightenment of Lucilio Vanini, Giordano Bruno, Baruch de Spinoza, or Pierre Gassendi? What difference would it make if human beings were seriously to consider themselves part of a material universe, of an evolved natural world, of the ecosystem? What if human societies banished any thoughts of subjugating the Earth and of intervention from beyond and concentrated entirely on the possibility of well-being or even just survival in a material universe? What if we gave up thinking of ourselves as the rulers of nature and instead regarded ourselves as a species of interesting primates dependent on their natural environment, just like any other species?