Part 2 with Jan Golinski, author of British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here.
WF: This was the most interesting part of the book to me, and I have to risk being too general or generic here, but here it goes: it seems the terms of debate about what caused weather patterns in the 18th century map on closely to what we argue about today. I can go a few ways with this by way of clarification, but let me try this one first: In the Enlightenment, the contrast was between 'weather as understandable, and then perhaps predictable' and 'weather as unpredictable and random.' In that case, giving meaning to the debate was a question of the place and role of God. If the weather was understandable and perhaps predictable, then that was a topic of natural philosophy, then one could study how the weather worked by observing nature to understand better how God made the world. If the weather was unpredictable, though, then one could say a big God's wrath caused a storm and that God was punishing people for doing something deserving of such wrath. So, either way you cut, if I have this right it was a debate about the role of God. Today, the contrast is more commonly between 'weather as a natural pattern,' which means it is ahuman, versus 'weather patterns as caused by us,' which means it is (or can be) anthropogenic. In this case (notwithstanding the small contingent still carrying the God argument forcefully), the debate is not predicated on the place of God. If human activity has no bearing on the climate, then we can stick with a naturalistic explanation based on empirical observational evidence. Don't need God. But if human activity does alter the climate (more storms or fiercer storms or shifting temperatures), then we have a different understanding of the place of humans in non-human nature. Lots to say about that and I'm already abusing my space here, but here's what fascinates me: the main difference in the debates across the eras seems to be that humans have replaced God. It's the same debate, only with different key actors slotted into the two sides. God might punish immoral citizens in the 1700s and thus blast them with a storm; but today, we punish ourselves through industrialization and toxic production and whatnot, and blast ourselves with climate change. Sure, gone today is recourse to God as an explanation of why the climate is as it is. But in that absent space we have put humans. What do you make of this?
JG: I think you are onto something very important here, but I would want to qualify a few of your points. Not everyone in the eighteenth century thought that irregular or unpredictable weather was caused by direct divine intervention. Such events were anomalous or "preternatural," but not necessarily the immediate acts of a capricious deity. And today, there are still people who would point to divine intervention to explain things like hurricane Katrina, which some preachers said was inflicted on New Orleans to punish it for immorality. As you say, we have mostly replaced God in the way we think about these things--I would say by "nature" rather than by humans. Nature is now the avenging agency that punishes us for our transgressions against it. But this "nature" clearly occupies the space left by God in the historical development of our ways of thinking.
WF: That ramble aside, allow me to press the issue another way: what do your findings from the 18th century suggest about our situation today? How does this history inform contemporary thought and practice?
JG: I think it is helpful to realize that such issues are not quite as new as we might imagine. In the eighteenth century, people were already confronting the question of how to understand extreme and dangerous weather, given the assumption that nature was normally uniform and regular. They worried that such events were a kind of payback for human interference with the natural order, just as we do today. On the other hand, however, they also thought of human life as part of nature. They recognized that human beings were dependent on climatic forces for their health and emotional wellbeing, for economic prosperity, and the progress of civilization. My proposal is that that side of Enlightenment thinking is worth recovering to help alleviate our current climatic anxieties. We need ways to think about human life as part of nature, rather than as set against it, and I suggest there are resources within the Enlightenment tradition that can help. I am skeptical of the trend that says that we can only solve our current environmental problems by turning our backs on the whole Western tradition. As a historian, I don't think that can happen, nor should it.
WF: You refer to satires throughout your book. A work by Swift, a story that runs in Joseph Addison's The Spectator, some poems, and so on. What do those historical sources offer you? When you come across them in your research, do you scribble down the reference for later citation or do you read them to find out more about common cultural assumptions of the era?
JG: I enjoy these quirky, comic, or satirical documents, I must admit. You can make a case for their historical significance along the lines that Robert Darnton did for an eighteenth-century joke in his classic study of "The Great Cat Massacre." But I also think their meaning often goes beyond what is easily drawn out of them; they continue to challenge historians to interpret them. In this way, I hope readers will be drawn in by my first chapter, which describes a very idiosyncratic diary of the weather in 1703 by a hypochondriac--not to say, neurotic--writer who was previously unknown to scholars. The document is rather difficult to understand, but I found it all the more intriguing for that reason.
WF: Does it bother you as much as it bothers me when you're watching The Weather Channel and they call a storm or some such a "weather event"? Why can't they call a thunderstorm a thunderstorm?
JG: I don't watch The Weather Channel all that much, but I suspect there are some things that have not changed since the eighteenth century. You can "normalize" the weather as much as you like, collecting all the statistics and drawing out all the trends, and then a peculiar or extreme "event" occurs: a tornado, a hurricane, a lightning strike, or whatever. These things upset our sense of the order of nature and human beings' capacity to understand or control it. They often lead us to reflect that something is wrong in our relationship with nature. People were already reacting this way in the eighteenth century, as my book shows.
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