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

by Philipp Blom

Which immediate and secondary effects flow from a change in the natural framework of societies, of cultures and mental horizons? The long, wintry seventeenth century serves as a test case for investigating this question and mapping the effects of climate change on all aspects of life, from agriculture to philosophy.

Any history of transformative processes must acknowledge their fundamentally untidy and frequently paradoxical nature.

We have inherited so much more from the seventeenth century than may be obvious at first glance.

Essays was published in 1580, and several editions came out during the remainder of that century. There were enough wealthy customers—books were expensive—who valued his unblinkered, skeptical humanism. The first English edition was published in 1603. William Shakespeare and Francis Bacon were among its readers.

Potatoes had great advantages, but they also had a powerful foe: the instinctive conservatism of rural populations.

One year later, Béthune became Grand Master of Artillery, Grand Voyeur de France (which translates, slightly disappointingly, as Chief Street Builder of France), and Superintendent of Fortifications.

The expulsion of the Moriscos apparently was not very popular with the Spanish people at large. Italian mercenaries had to be hired to deport the Morisco families. Within three years, 300,000 people had been deported, most of them to North Africa, where they had never lived. A personal catastrophe for those deported, it was also a disaster for the Spanish economy.

But it was above all Spain’s cultural and intellectual rigidity that drove its relentless decline. As the mightiest nation on earth, it had seemingly had no need to adapt to changing economic and social circumstances, but within less than a century, the former superpower was relegated to Europe’s margins, where it would remain for some four hundred years.

René Descartes (1596–1650) was one of the new men; his intellectual adventurousness was regarded with hostile distrust by most churchmen and many princes, too, because they threatened to upset the supposedly divinely ordained social order.

Working in many countries under more or less draconian censorship, philosophers and other writers often chose to work with rhetorical ruses and strategies, hints to sophisticated readers, allowing them to grasp the author’s true intentions and arguments while leaving simpler minds convinced of the surface argument. Radical and controversial ideas were very often projected between the lines of a text, rather than in the words as they literally appeared.

For scholars, it was normal to expect books to be written with a powerful and craftily wrought subtext. Next to the usual allusions and quotations (often designed to make a curious reader consulting the original text stumble across the lines preceding or following the quoted ones), one favorite device was the elaborate and orthodox refutation of a heretical idea.

The work of these unpaid or barely paid people underwrote palaces and cathedrals, parliaments and courthouses, theaters and universities, and armed forces, including those employed to force them to keep working.

The only thing believers are left with is the worst argument of all, writes Bayle: “there has never been anything more impertinent, anything more chimerical, than astrology, anything more ignominious to human nature, to the shame of which it will eternally be true to say that there were men deceitful enough to fool others under the pretext of knowing the things of heaven, and men stupid enough to give credence to them.”9

Atheists believe neither in God nor in the devil and therefore cannot be of help to Satan. Their erroneous belief system is therefore certainly not as dangerous as that of people who still worship the gods of antiquity, or those who see comets as heavenly signs, thus doubting God’s omnipotence. Idolatry, not atheism, is the true enemy of faith.

Trading centers such as London and Amsterdam could only flourish (as Voltaire would later write home enthusiastically) because Catholics could trade with Jews and Huguenots, and Lutherans with Muslims, and because they all knew that they could by and large trust one another—and the laws protecting them all.

Europe’s urban centers needed the concepts of coexistence and tolerance if they were to grow into successful larger and more complex societies.

Spinoza would have been unthinkable without Descartes and the Amsterdam freethinkers, without Jewish thought and the ongoing formulation of scientific principles, and his work would be carried on, seminal material for generations of thinkers. Spinoza’s ideas could be attacked, but they could not be unthought.

History, generally written from the perspective of its winners, too often tells the story of the rise of the most fortunate as though it had been the story of the rise of all.

For the rural poor, for day laborers, for farmers fleeing wars and religious persecution, and for those living in Europe’s expanding network of colonies and slave plantations, the rise of newly efficient markets, administrations, and military tactics was a near-unmitigated disaster.

Human nature may not change, but human behavior can and does: Within a few generations, we can learn to act differently, to survive in new surroundings, to plan and make strategies for a future we can anticipate and try to comprehend.

Poverty was seen almost exclusively as a management issue, not a question of social justice.

As economic growth based on exploitation became the magic formula of Western dominance, more and more energy and sophistry had to be invested in appearing to reconcile it with the noble ideas of the Enlightenment.

In his famous novel Candide, he had warned that every sack of sugar from the Caribbean was stained with human blood, because it had been produced by slave labor, but he was nonetheless happy to invest his own money in the Compagnie des Indes,

It is a common mistake to condemn the past according to the morality of the present, but there were some people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who did not believe in the superiority of European civilization.

there were also some who believed that the Europeans’ superiority in engineering, military technology, and navigation did not entitle them to plunder and subjugate other peoples.

The moral horizons of a period may be limited by custom and culture, but these horizons are movable, and it is the task of philosophers to move them.

“What is tolerance? It belongs to humanity. We are all full of weaknesses and errors: let’s forgive one another our stupidities; that is the first law of nature.”

(Voltaire)

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.

Viewed from a historical perspective, our present situation shows all the hallmarks of a prerevolutionary period:

Our success and failure in dealing with climate change will depend to a large extent on how societies shaped decisively by the Enlightenment deal with this heritage, and how the Enlightenment itself is understood.

The rationalist Enlightenment owes its position not to its inherent truth but to its social energy and to the fact that it could be grafted onto an older, well-established intellectual tradition: Christian theology.

A new kind of messianic hope was now introduced, a different kind of religion, a new theology. It was less created than—appropriately for such a religious idea—resurrected from the dead, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was the gospel of the unimpeded rule of the free market.

Humans are largely driven by the same instincts as other animals; their rationality, that echo of the immortal soul, sits atop, and cannot completely control, the animal passions below.

Humans often do not act out of rational self-interest at all. Their fundamental motivations are, as so many seventeenth-century thinkers knew, driven not by profit maximization but rather by sex, fear, and a striving for recognition.

Equality may exist as an idea, but there is hardly a place on earth where it is not eroded by powerful patterns of exploitation and discrimination. In an economic context, it cannot be said to exist at all.

This now-outdated neoliberal concept of how a human economy works does not begin with an understanding of human nature or social structures or goals. It elides complex motivations and constraints into a posited rational self-interest.

Transcendence used to be in heaven, but the Enlightenment converted it into an abstraction—liberté, égalité, fraternité. It enters the free market first and foremost through the act of consumption—

democracy is in danger of being chewed up and spat out by business interests, or transformed, as in Russia and even the United States today, into a submissive rubber-stamping mechanism, enacting laws that cater to powerful corporate interests.

The idea of a “free market” is a tempting but mistaken conflation of economic ideas and Enlightenment rhetoric. Of course, no market could ever be free in any meaningful sense of the word. To be able to function at all, markets depend on regulation and oversight, on courts of law and legal frameworks to make contracts enforceable, on infrastructure and social priorities, on roads and ports and schools.

Even in the richest societies, rising poverty and increased inequality of income and opportunity indicate that acceptance of “beggar thy neighbor” policies has made a successful return.

Thus far, partly because of low investment, renewable energies cannot provide viable substitutes for fossil fuels,

We are trying to stay ahead of economic failure by destroying the natural environment we need to flourish in—perhaps even just to live and breathe in. The doctrine of economic growth based on exploitation—the legacy of the seventeenth century—has become a mantra of collective suicide.

In the competition between ideas of a common good and the drive for private wealth, the latter has surged ahead. Our contemporary societies are edging closer to the world of Thomas Hobbes than to that of Spinoza.

The Enlightenment has not failed. It has merely been hijacked and castrated.