Burn Some Witches; Save the Planet

It seems like it was only yesterday, but, in truth, it was the day before yesterday.

In my Sunday post, entitled, “Climate Apocalypse Now” I took serious issue with New Yorker author, Jia Tolentino. Normally sane and sober, Tolentino shared with us her nervous breakdown over climate change. The end is nigh, she suggested, doom is fast approaching, and she, miserable sinner that she is, is doing nothing to forestall the pending doom. She might even be contributing to it. Horror of horrors.

In the course of her mental perambulations Tolentino quoted a Washington based therapist, by name of Leslie Davenport, a woman who had an epiphany one day wherein she learned that human beings were causing the climate catastrophe, and that we could solve it by offering something like therapy for said reprobate humans.

So, imagine how interested I was to discover, via a reading of a chapter from a new book by Brendan O’Neill, that this theory was not new. It was, as they say, old hat. It dated at least to an Ice Age that descended on Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When good Europeans did not know what had produced the horrific wave of cold weather, they too decided, like Davenport, that human beings had caused it. Only they, the people of Europe, led by their clergy, called those responsible, witches.

So, witch hunts, witch trials, persecution of (mostly) women, one of the most appalling incidents of Western misogyny-- and now today’s liberated women, today’s climate change hysterics, today’s climate therapists, have taken us back to the times when people persecuted those who did not believe the right beliefs. That is, who denied that witches had caused the little Ice Age. One is tempted to trot out a statement-- by George Santayana-- that has become something of a cliche-- those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. 

The least we can say is that the leaders of today’s intellectual debate and discussion are impervious to fact, are ignorant of history, and are very easily manipulated.

O’Neill explains the historical background:

The women of North Berwick can be seen as among the earliest victims of climate-change hysteria, of that urge to pin the blame for anomalous weather on wicked human beings. And they weren’t alone. In Europe between the 1500s and 1700s, climate change was often the charge made against witches. In his 1584 book, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Reginald Scot, an English MP and author, outlined the common view of witches as climate changers. Many believe witches can ‘raise haile, tempests, and hurtfull weather’, he said, as well as being able to ‘inhibit the sunne, and staie both daye and night, changing the one into the other’. Scot was a witch-sceptic. He called for calm during witch-hunts. His view was that weather was a natural, or heavenly, phenomenon, not the plaything of allegedly evil people. ‘[It] is neither a witch, nor a devil, but glorious God that maketh the thunder’, he wrote. ‘God maketh the blustering tempests and whirlwinds’ as well, he continued. But his plea for reason fell on deaf ears. Too many people were far more enamoured of the view, soon to be promoted by James VI, no less, that a witch could ‘rayse stormes and tempestes in the aire’ (1).

For the record, the Little Ice Age overlapped the arrival of the bubonic plague, which dated to the mid fourteenth century. Clearly, the plague elicited persecution, and not just of witches.

Also, the greatest book about witchcraft, the inquisitor’s manual about witchcraft, the Malleus Maleficarum, written by a couple of Dominican monks, published in 1497, emphasized the way that witches caused sexual dysfunction and how they compromised what it called the generative purpose of the sex act. One might, and some people surely have, connected this book to Freudian theory.

Back to the witch hunts and their connection to climate change hysteria, consider this, from O’Neill:

Witch-hunts in mid-millennial Europe were inextricably linked with concerns over climate change. This was the era of the Little Ice Age, the period that roughly spanned from 1300 to 1850 during which the Northern Hemisphere experienced exceptionally cold winters. The impact of the Little Ice Age was devastating. The frigid weather violently disrupted harvests in Europe, especially the grain harvest. Following particularly cold periods in the 1500s, it took 180 years for grain harvests to return to their previous levels.

How many witch trials were there?

It is no coincidence that around 110,000 witch trials took place in Europe during those most climatically unstable of centuries, with around half of those trials ending in conviction and execution. As the cold, starving peoples of northern Europe knew from the Bible, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’, especially a witch with such power that she can conjure storms in which ‘sea and sky became one’.

Today, we no  longer use terms like witch. As O’Neill says, we speak of “climate criminals.”

As I have often remarked, and as others have also noted, climate change hysteria involves a religious experience. It has nothing to do with science. It rejects skepticism and declares that the science is settled. And yet, as everyone knows, science is never settled. Settled science is dogma.

The issue has been moralized and placed within a guilt/punishment narrative. Bad weather has been caused by the Industrial Revolution. It is our just punishment. We must do penance, by shutting down the electrical grid, discarding our gas stoves and turning off the air conditioners. We must return to the state of nature as soon as possible.

Mark Lynas has also described weather anomalies as god-like chastisements of industrious mankind. He said of floods that Poseidon is clearly ‘angered by arrogant affronts from mere mortals like us’: ‘We have woken him from a thousand-year slumber and this time his wrath will know no bounds.’ 

Scary stuff. Time to go out and round up a few witches, because that will surely solve the problem. If you ask what is so thoroughly agitating Jia Tolentino, you might say that she has lost her mind over the thought that she might just be one of the witches who is contributing to the pending climate apocalypse.