Ecce Homo and the Eternal Recurrence in Practice

I have spent the past two months reading Nietzsche. I had already read many of his works when at university, where I was lucky enough to have a teacher who seemed, with his dashing good looks and masterful command of the lecture hall, to embody Nietzsche’s idea of the superman himself. This time, however, I was reading them not for an essay, but for myself.

Nietzsche as self-improvement, as self-knowledge, is of course a dangerous path to follow. But I reasoned to myself that as I am no longer a teenager, I must be immune, or at least somewhat resistant, to the worst excesses of misinterpretation that people tend to employ as they let a cursory acquaintance with the philosopher allow them to be a complete asshole to everyone around them. Reading through Walter Kaufmann’s biography of Nietzsche also helped.

The last of Nietzsche’s works that I have made it to is his autobiography, Ecce Homo: How one Becomes What one is. I didn’t write about Nietzsche’s other books because I didn’t feel sufficiently confident in my grasp of them to write usefully about them. Check back in a few years, and maybe we’ll be there. Karl Jaspers used to tell people never to be satisfied with a passage of Nietzsche’s until they had found a passage elsewhere saying the exact opposite; this approach does not make for a decent blog post, but nor does resorting to rather weather-beaten interpretations that add nothing new. I would want to be able to go through Nietzsche with a knife (one of his favourite images is that of a vivisectionist), finding nuances in what at first seems absurd. This will take both time and living. And so, you are spared, for now.

Ecce Homo is not just an insane attempt at writing about oneself, it is also a fascinating attempt, I think, at putting into practice one of Nietzsche’s key ideas from his mature period – that of the eternal recurrence. That is the lens through which I will interpret the book in this piece, as a wilful struggle with his own history to say of every moment of it not just that it was worth it, but even that it was good. To affirm, where others would be resigned or even negative.

We begin with aphorism 341 of The Gay Science, also known as The Joyous Science. Here Nietzsche first suggests (“What if…”) the idea that things may run back on themselves in a loop. Here it is a mere thought experiment, but later on, Nietzsche even had plans of proving it scientifically and aimed to study seriously the natural sciences to find the necessary evidence. (Kaufmann notes that commentators seem unsure whether Nietzsche actually believed he had stumbled upon a secret truth of the universe, or whether it was and remained just an experiment. As far as I am concerned, it’s not important.)

Here is the aphorism in full:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?

If life is repeated, over and over, exactly as it was, then that makes every action have unlimited significance. It also means that every action that we take out of cowardice, that we regret, will haunt us for the rest of time. But Nietzsche does not ask us to act differently, per se. He asks instead “how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?” to withstand such a thought. The problem of cowardly actions is not as great as the problem posed by every minor, meaningless action, the ones that day by day cover our lives in sticky meaninglessness. The eternal recurrence is a demand primarily for a change in attitude. We must say to ourselves that everything that happens is just as we wanted it, and vest our actions with significance, affirming them for their essential value in making us who we are.

Growth, in modern-day parlance “personal development”, is everything to Nietzsche. And an attitude of affirmation (“the highest formula of affirmation that can possibly be attained”, so he informs us of the eternal recurrence), where we desire everything that happens to us, joyous or sad, awesome, or awful, is most likely to lead to the achievement of our most full potential.

The Gay Science is, of course, not the only work of the eternal recurrence. Thus Spoke Zarathustra treats the theme in greater detail, and it returns, briefly, in some other of his later works, such as Beyond Good and Evil, and in his notes. Here is an extract from Zarathustra which gives some indication of the creative process of reformulating one’s life into something one can affirm:

               I walk among men as among fragments of the future: of that future which I scan.

And it is all my art and aim to compose into one and bring together what is fragment and riddle and dreadful chance.

               And how could I endure to be a man, if man were not also poet and reader of riddles and the redeemer of chance!

               To redeem the past and to transform every “it was” into an “I wanted it thus!” – that alone I would call redemption.

              

The eternal recurrence is a creative act, where life is treated as an artwork. If everything experienced can be transformed successfully into a masterpiece, then that is enough – we do not ask questions about the experiences, we have eyes only for the work. Thus should we live, building a being of ourselves that makes use of everything that has ever happened to us, so that we could discard nothing, and everything – when experienced again – would appear to us joyfully, as a piece of the grand puzzle that is our developed self. 

Where, then, does Ecce Homo fit in? Written in a final burst of creativity, alongside The Twilight of the Idols, The Wagner Case, and The Antichrist, it was finished only a few weeks before Nietzsche went mad on the streets of Turin, allegedly after seeing a horse being beaten. It was almost as if he foresaw the end of his life and wanted to wrap it up nicely. Thus does it seem with hindsight, but it is more likely that he saw the end of a particular period of his authorship, and wanted to bookend it before carrying on. It is interesting to note in connection with this, for example, that The Antichrist is not given a chapter here, while all his other major books are. This is because itwas supposed to be the first volume of the epic Revaluation of all Values – it belongs to the new Nietzsche.

Ecce Homo is an autobiography, it is “one of the most intriguing yet bizarre examples of the genre ever written,” as Michael Tanner notes in my volume’s introduction. It ranges from “manic self-celebrations” to “parodistic orgies”, “high spirits”, and even “a tone of elegy”. Not only does it have a remarkable tonal range, but it is also full of outright lies about Nietzsche’s past which anyone can check up on with little difficulty. As a book, then, we oughtn’t go to it to work out what Nietzsche lived or even felt – we should go to it to see him crafting his life into something he can affirm. This is where its particular curiosity lies. After reading all of his other books, Ecce Homo is like seeing the practice of what had hitherto been simply theory.

The more we understand of his actual autobiography, the more challenging his interpretations of his life seem. The key moments – his friendship and break with the composer Richard Wagner, his unhappy three-way relationship with Lou Salomé and Paul Rée that cost him the friendship of both, his general ill-health, and his awful sister – are here transformed or disguised, so that saying anything negative about his life seems impossible.

Of Wagner, a man against whom he had written a book (The Wagner Case), whose Human, All too Human, was written after the crisis of their break, Nietzsche has only positive things to say. “Richard Wagner was by far the most closely related man to me… The rest is silence.” The reference to silence seems to suggest some resentment repressed, but Nietzsche does not stop here. Later on, he writes “I call Wagner the great benefactor of my life”. Why, how? Here he comes closest to expressing explicitly the project of Ecce Homo: “as I am strong enough to turn even the most questionable and most perilous things to my own advantage and thus to become stronger”, he can do this. The praise of Wagner as a man contrasts with Nietzsche’s savagery about his work. But the friendship was what was lived, and it is the friendship that needs affirming. 

Wagner is that big dark spot in Nietzsche’s life without which he may never have become himself: thus, Wagner was necessary. Other things were too. “It is my sagacity to have been many things and in many places so as to be able to become one person – so as to be able to attain one thing. For a time I had to be a scholar”, he says of his work as a university professor. He thanks his own sickness for allowing an easy, natural break with Wagner: “it permitted, it commanded forgetting”. He even thanks “Fräulein Lou von Salomé”, a woman of “astonishing inspiration”. The reality of their friendship was much less fun, but Nietzsche, without giving details (in the case of Salomé, he definitely seems to prefer silence), does at least allow himself to mention one of his characteristic views: “Pain does not count as an objection to life”.

In the chapter “Why I am so Clever”, Nietzsche decides to really embrace his role as a life coach. He tells us in great detail all the important “little things” we need to thrive: “nutriment, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness”. We get a detailed description of what to drink and eat, of the importance of knowing “the size of one’s stomach”, and how to relax (walking). This may seem ridiculous to us in the era of self-help, but to his readers, this emphasis would have been scandalous, for the alternative sources of personal growth and development – “all the concepts “God”, “Soul”, “Virtue”, “Sin,” “the Beyond”, “truth”, “eternal life” – are chucked out as only getting in our way. Now, in exploring those things that made him healthy – in his sense of affirmatively-minded, rather than physically fit – Nietzsche is giving a formula for living so life can be affirmed.

To turn everything into a blessing, to respond creatively to absolutely every stimulus – that is how I understand the command of the eternal recurrence. The creative response, however, is not merely individual pieces of art, but a holistic picture of the entire self. Life as art – as one long unbroken masterpiece of affirmation and reformulation. Within Ecce Homo, we see both the attempt to make a life-picture, and we also see the individual works of art that burst out of Nietzsche’s receptivity, such as this poem he wrote about Venice after the experience of hearing lovely music:

Lately I stood at the bridge

in the brown night.

From afar there came a song:

a golden drop, it swelled

across the trembling surface.

Gondolas, lights, music –

drunken it swam out into the gloom…

My soul, a stringed instrument,

touched by invisible hands

sang to itself in reply a gondola song,

and trembled with gaudy happiness.

– Was anyone listening?

Is Ecce Homo successful as the practice of some concept of affirmation, of laying the groundwork for life to eternally recur? We must ask late Herr Nietzsche, hurtling repeatedly back through his own life, to see what he thinks. As for us, there is enough here to see the book as a struggle to affirm that does not always work. Nietzsche successfully praises the friends who left him or whom he himself left. He finds such joy in certain moments that we can almost taste it – take, for example, the moment he completes the forward to The Antichrist: “The forward was written on 3 September 1888: when in the morning after this writing I stepped outside I found awaiting me the loveliest day the Ober-Engadin had ever shown me – transparent, glowing in its colours, containing in itself every antithesis, every mediant between ice and south”.

And yet, there is a lot of dissatisfaction here too. My book’s introduction by Michael Tanner notes the book’s parodistic elements, almost to excuse this. Any autobiography is self-centred and a little egotistical, so isn’t Nietzsche merely parodying that when he gives himself chapter titles like “Why I am So Wise”, “Why I Write Such Good Books”, and “Why I am a Destiny”? Yes and no. I don’t read this as a sign of his oncoming madness either. What we have here, however, is a struggle to justify himself against a world that just doesn’t seem to care about the way that he has completely overturned it. Yes, he says that some people are born “posthumously”, and he does praise Georg Brandes, the Danish academic who first started popularising him. But as for the Germans? All he heard were crickets, and it hurt him.

And so, he became more strident, his voice reaching a pitch that hurts to listen to, as if his assurances that he is perhaps the greatest human being ever to have lived is what was missing, the final push needed to convince people that they should take him seriously. “I come from heights no bird has ever soared to, I know abysses into which no foot has ever yet strayed, I have been told it is impossible to put a book of mine down”. “I am not a man, I am dynamite”. “I was the first to discover the truth, in that I was the first to sense – smell – the lie as lie … My genius is in my nostrils”. Of course, I write my “ha!” in the margin at such things. And there’s no denying that these are fun, brilliant descriptions. But it’s also sad. This is the desperate yelling of a lonely man into the void.

Or, perhaps, not even a void, but something still worse. Because the other sign of Nietzsche’s dissatisfaction in Ecce Homo comes from his feeling that he is already being misunderstood, that he is about to be misunderstood in terrible ways. (As indeed he was, after his scummy fascist sister started controlling his memory and his works, peddling them to the Nazis as the supreme justification of their hate). The closer we approach the end of Nietzsche’s oeuvre, the more he begins his aphorisms with the question “Have I been understood?” And less, because of his increased desperation and extremity of imagery, can we say “yes” to him.

Let’s take one example from the final chapter, “Why I am a Destiny”:

“I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful – of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against  everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified… There will be wars such as there have never yet been on earth. Only after me will there be grand politics on earth.”

Here’s what Kaufmann, whose book saved Nietzsche from the Nazis for new generations, writes: “He speaks of “war” even when he is evidently thinking of strife, of “power” rather than “self-perfection”. This approach generally works with Nietzsche’s other books, like The Gay Science, but by the time we look at his later works, it really is impossible. In Ecce Homo, he seems to want violence, not just of the spirit to “overcome” itself, but also between individuals, countries, men and women. Is that what he really means here? He hated nationalism, especially German nationalism, he really seemed to think that only weaker people would seek power over others as a substitute for power over themselves. But that’s not obvious at all here.

Nietzsche’s ambiguity about violence coming from his outrageous language, (“I am a nuance”, from the chapter on Wagner, I can imagine him yelling at me), just demonstrates the degree that he felt frustrated with his work’s reception, no matter how much the rest of the book is an attempt to tell us that his life was great. As an attempt to write eternal recurrence, “the unconditional and endlessly repeated circular course of all things”, is still the way I would read Ecce Homo. That the attempt is not wholly successful should not distract us from the sheer weight of affirmation that we do come across in the book: “supreme affirmation born out of fullness, of superfluity, an affirmation without reservation even of suffering, even of guilt, even of all that is strange and questionable in existence.”

This is a positive message, and if we do end up reading Nietzsche looking for some suggestions on how to improve our lives, it is one of the best things to take away. That he failed is of no matter to us. He thought he still had time… Let’s hope we do.  

Joseph Conrad’s anti-Russian novel: Under Western Eyes

Under Western Eyes was written by Joseph Conrad in 1911, after one unsuccessful revolution in Russia and before the rather more successful ones of 1917. It is a political novel, exploring the fates of revolutionaries abroad, while also displaying Conrad’s characteristic preoccupations with the conflicts of the human soul. When I read it for the first time, about four years ago, I did not like it. Its descriptions of Saint Petersburg were unrecognisable to anyone who had been there, but worse was Conrad’s virulent hatred of the Russian people and state, which in spite of assertions to the contrary in his author’s note, are neither well hidden nor very fair.

On a second reading, I now feel a little more understanding towards Conrad’s hate. I also have met various people whom we could call the Russian revolutionaries of our own day, including one friend who after a campaign against him involving physical beatings and bricks through windows was given 24 hours by the police to leave Russia or else his entire family would be charged with fabricated crimes. My personal experiences have also made me a little more sympathetic, including an incident one morning where the secret services raided my flat, throwing me against the wall and pinning me while masked men with machineguns and balaclavas conducted a search for something that wasn’t there and never had been (stolen cash).

Conrad’s novel talks a lot about the impulses we have to mysticise Russia: “that propensity of lifting every problem from the plane of the understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression is very Russian.” The problem is that the novel itself serves this mysticising impulse. Ultimately, Russia is not a special country. It is just a country with shoddy institutions and a consolidated media landscape which allowed autocratic rule to flourish in the early 21st century and reach a point where it was unchallengeable, even though the man in charge has lost his mind. Russia has sufficient democratic traditions to build upon, as some of the revolutionaries of the 19th century such as Alexander Herzen knew, but the informational control effected by the ruling powers has emphasised the more idiotic parts of Russia’s history – its sense of a special path, its victimisation and difference from everyone else. The result is that it is now indeed doing something unthinkable, insane, and uniquely awful in our day.

The story of Under Western Eyes concerns one Razumov (his name comes from the Russian for “reason”). An average student with no family, he dreams of winning a silver medal and establishing himself in a world where connections are everything. One evening, after the assassination of a member of Russia’s autocratic state apparatus, Razumov discovers in his rooms one Victor Haldin, who confesses to the murder. He asks for Razumov’s help in escaping the authorities and leaving Russia to join his family in Switzerland. Razumov, who has no revolutionary sympathies, first attempts to save Haldin, and then decides to betray him.

We next encounter Razumov in Geneva, where he meets Haldin’s sister Nathalie, and her mother. We also meet several other revolutionaries, encamped nearby, and the teacher of languages who narrates our story. To them, Razumov appears as Haldin’s successful accomplice, and he is welcomed in spite of his taciturnity and occasional outbursts of anger. In a letter to Nathalie Victor had described Razumov as one of those “unstained, lofty, and solitary existences.” He is the only friend he had ever mentioned, and this allows Nathalie to create a Razumov that blinds her to the real one.

But she is not the only one. Under Western Eyes is fundamentally about seeing – it’s in the title, after all – and what we cannot see. The characters are constantly making miscalculations and misjudgements. The first is Victor Haldin himself. He comes to Razumov, having come to believe that the latter’s quiet nature indicates his revolutionary sympathies – “There is a solidity about your character which cannot exist without courage.” It is not so. Razumov himself, like certain people I know in Russia, had believed that he could exist under autocracy without picking a side. That he could pursue his silver medal in peace. But as soon as Haldin enters his door, Razumov is forced to decide what he stands for. His illusions of the way his world is run are immediately knocked down.

When Razumov arrives in Geneva, Nathalie mentions her brother’s name to him and sees how “this distressed him. He was quite overcome.” She assumes it is affection for her brother and has no idea that it is rather guilt at being his Judas. When talking with Sophie Antonovna, another revolutionary, Razumov once again reveals something of his internal conflicts, to which she asks: “What is it? Self-reproach, or what? It’s absurd. You couldn’t have gone and given yourself up because your comrade was taken.”

Razumov himself notes that he has “the gift of inspiring confidence.” But of course, he too works at creating himself and cultivating these mistakes in others. While dealing with one revolutionary we read how “he remembered another detail and dropped it before her.” He uses what others know – the newspaper details of the crime, and secret letters that have reached the others, to tell them what they want to hear, while keeping himself from lying outright. They all believe him, some willingly, some after a little persuasion, but all do in the end.

The overall effect of this is to make an argument about the revolutionaries themselves – namely, that they are a bunch of incompetents. Conrad fits neatly into the tradition crafted by Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, which deals with revolutionaries, and he lies on the more cynical, dismissive end. His conservatism is similar to that of Dostoevsky in particular, which is funny because Conrad couldn’t stand the Russian. Peter Ivanovitch is a noted “feminist” whom Conrad demonises by showing how mean he is to a female servant. Various others are ridiculed by showing how dependent they are on money siphoned from the owner of the chateau where they all meet.

This is not new to us. Such irony we have encountered many times before, most obviously in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. The key revolutionary there, Bazarov, says one thing and eventually, after he falls in love, does another. At first, he demands the negation of emotions and the total reliance upon rationality and logic, and then he starts throwing around such ridiculous words as “feelings”. This irony was Turgenev’s secret weapon. It allowed him to create a novel which, when it came out, divided both conservative and liberal Russians – with both accusing him of being too soft towards the “other side”.

Conrad’s has two main problems in Under Western Eyes, at least when we look at it against the backdrop of its Russian forebears. The first is that it could never divide opinion in the way that Turgenev’s novel does. This book is obviously anti-Russian. The revolutionaries and the state are both stupid, mean, and petty. Or, as Conrad writes in the author’s note, Russian history is just a cycle of “senseless desperation provoked by senseless tyranny.” There are no sympathetic characters, except perhaps Nathalie Haldin. Even she appears out-of-touch and naïve. Razumov himself reads like a thing that an algorithm would churn out after having been forced to read Dostoevsky, over and over. He says cynical, spiteful, angry things without any real interest in them.

Sympathy is by common consent the thing that makes Russian literature most special. Conrad has no sympathy. He does not like his characters. He does not have any time for their views. And that leads to the novel’s second big artistic weakness – it really has very little to do with ideas. Nobody actually shares any interesting views on the rights of women or the future organisation of Russia. People are happy enough to advocate for a life of action and revolt over passivity, but that’s as far as we go. There are no debates, there is no passion. The only idea that really gets any airing is that Russia is a poisoned land, “where virtues themselves fester into crimes in the cynicism of oppression and revolt” and that autocracy is bad.

The attack on autocracy is made with some effectiveness. When at the end of the novel’s first part Councillor Mikulin, Razumov’s point of contact among the elite, asks Razumov where he will go next – “where to?” – it is positively chilling. We all know at this point that even though he has done something that benefits the state, he has also given up what little freedom he has had. Such relative subtleties are more effective than the constant complaints about autocracy, which quite frankly we do not need. Russian autocracy is/was awful – we do not need convincing. But learning about the way that it exerts its hold upon an individual is much more interesting for those of us with “Western Eyes.”

Razumov goes to Geneva as a servant of his state, and there his life unravels. The stories he is forced to tell about himself are insufficient to solidify his identity. In the end, it all collapses. To see the revolution from the side of an informer was new to me, and that is perhaps the most interesting thing about the novel. But the novel’s complex structure, namely a dramatization of Razumov’s journal by the teacher of languages, means that much of his soul is hidden from us. When we catch glimpses of it, it is suitably unattractive. “It was myself, after all, whom I have betrayed most badly.” Such words are ridiculous for a man whose actions lead to two deaths. So too are his excuses and justifications: “I was possessed!”

Taken as a whole, in its refusal to engage with the ideas of the revolutionaries, or even portray them, the novel comes across as somewhat empty. In some sense, amusingly, it conforms to its own ideas about how little those of the West can understand Russia. But this will not do. Russia is comprehensible, it just requires time and effort. It is not special, just extremely poorly run. An orientalising impulse serves no purpose other than to excuse and legitimise the actions of the people who control the place. And legitimisation is the last thing that these people deserve. All in all, the novel is just okay. In this at least in my opinion, four years later, has not changed.  

Glaciers, Climate and Humility

In The Age of Wonder Richard Holmes describes the delight at the discovery of nature’s secrets that animated both artists and scientists around the time of the Romantics. Wonder, that sense of awe in the face of the mysterious and great, drove men and women to explore the world on ship and saddle and plumb its depths and farthest reaches. Few things were more exciting than glaciers, those vast marble-white creatures that sit at the tops of the world and lour down at us mortals beneath.

It was the investigation of glaciers that led to the discovery of the climate and its changes which are of vital importance to the present day. Surprisingly enough, however, it was not until the late 20th century that fears began to focus on global warming rather than global cooling. Initially, it was these masses of ice who were our enemy, unpredictable beasts whose movement downwards was felt to be unstoppable and perfectly destructive. The cooling of the planet would decimate crop yields and lead to mass starvation and social unrest, and as late as the 1970s the CIA was preparing for such a potentiality.

We know now, of course, that the present problem we face lies not in cooling, but in heating. After first briefly looking at the history of our understanding of the climate, I briefly consider the relationship between the technological mastery of the earth and human nature.

It was a Genevan scientist, Horace Bénédict de Saussure, who set off the beginnings of our understanding of the climate towards the end of the 18th century. A committed Alpinist, in his Voyages dans les Alpes he first used the word geology but was puzzled by the question of why we did not freeze to death during the night. This seems slightly silly at first glance, but if you shuffle off your knowledge of modern science you can see it for the challenge it once was. When the source of most of our heat is clearly the sun, why does that heat not disappear the moment the sun sets in the evening? Saussure built a kind of mini greenhouse in the 1770s and thus discovered that the atmosphere itself is capable of holding heat long after its sources have been removed.

One problem was resolved, but others remained. In the 19th-century, people were interested in whether there had been an Ice Age at all – not just the posthumously christened “Little Ice Age” of the 16th to 19th centuries – but an actual period of frozen wastes and mass starvation. This was proven by Louis Agassiz, another Swiss scientist with a passion for glaciers. In 1837, he suggested that there had indeed been an ice age, and the evidence was all around us – valleys, gorges, mountains, and so many boulders and stones thrown far from their homes. Agassiz evocatively termed glaciers “God’s great plough” for their work. For proposing that global temperatures had indeed been much lower, and for an extended period of time, Agassiz can be thought of as the founder of the idea of climate and its changes.

Finally, John Tyndall, a British scientist with a passion for the Alps, began investigating glaciers and their movements. Building upon the work of the others above, he realised that some gases, in particular carbonic acid (carbon dioxide) and water vapour, contributed to the greenhouse effect that Saussure had discovered. This was not enough to cause concern about a changing climate. It was only when the Swedish professor Svante Arrhenius began modelling the effects of changing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, reaching conclusions that are not too far from our modern models, that cause and effect were truly linked. Arrhenius himself was not worried. Writing at the end of the 19th century, he believed carbon dioxide concentrations were rising very slowly, and that it would take over three thousand years for figures to double. That was far enough down the road, and in any case, he held the view, not uncommon until relatively recently, that warming could only be a good thing – making the world more hospitable and increasing the yields of crops.

Of course, at the end of the 19th-century things were indeed so. This did not last. As the 20th century got underway the world only produced more and more carbon emissions from new inventions such as cars, the widespread electrification (on a coal power basis) of developed countries, and from a growing population that wanted to consume more and more. How exactly the world would change was still a subject of contention, rather than the consensus it is now, but there was no denying that the atmosphere was indeed changing. An American scientist, Charles David Keeling, created the famous Keeling Curve using data gathered at the Mauna Loa meteorological observatory in Hawaii (and then elsewhere too). This showed in unambiguous terms that the amount of carbon dioxide within the atmosphere was growing, and growing fast.

The Keeling Curve, courtesy of the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. The shocking thing, and the one that really gives those sceptics who claim that the climate has always changed (and it has, that is true) and that humans have nothing to do with it no legs to stand on, is when we consider the curve over a longer period, as below.
The uptick is quite extraordinary, going far beyond the natural cycles beforehand. And it shows no signs of stopping.

It is amusing to think that we once thought that the ice was our problem, but not without its symbolic interest. Imagine a man or woman, standing before a glacier. The difference in scale is extraordinary. Unlike mountains, which are relatively stationary and thus pose no threat except to climbers, and bodies of water, which can be fished and dammed and bridged, glaciers are a force of nature that seems completely unmasterable. (These scientists were mostly writing before Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite in 1867). If a glacier came, or if the temperature dropped, death would seem inevitable. Crops would fail, and cities would be swept away. And that would be it.

The damage from cooling is easy to visualise – just last year the world was rocked by images of French farmers, huddled around grape vines with torches, an almost medieval scene, as they tried to prevent a cold snap from destroying their harvest. But such images also reveal the problem with this great fear of cooling – it is so clearly remediable by heating. Houses could be insulated even in the 19th century, trees could be chopped for firewood, coal could be burned, and warmer clothes could be worn. If one were really being chased by glaciers, then of course a couple of (hundred thousand) sticks of dynamite could be used to break up the beasts and let what sun remained work upon them more effectively.

This fear of cooling reflects, we can say, the legacy of a pre-Enlightenment view of humanity, one where we were small and vulnerable to the world and God’s whimsy. The Enlightenment was not just a time of new knowledge, it was also a time of new mastery and power over nature, individuals, and whole societies. Glaciers appeared as something that, in spite of our advances, remained frightening and uncontrollable – an uncanny reminder that we were not as great as we thought we were. A kind of living white injunction to be humbler. But then we kept advancing, and soon we no longer feared even them. Human arrogance had won out. The kind of arrogance that was the darkest legacy of the Enlightenment because it allowed us to commit the terrible social experiments of the 20th century (Stalinism, fascism, and so on), convinced us that we not only had the might but also the right, to change the world.

In the case of the climate, we really could have benefited from learning our lesson in humility the first time around. The world is warming rapidly, the human and other animal toll is likely to be massive and, worst of all, entirely avoidable. But unlike with battling glaciers, where one is not a Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, but actually capable of fighting back effectively, we cannot so easily deal with heating. Fire brings warmth, but what takes it away? Even if you have the answer, it comes to mind far less readily than fire does to the question of creating warmth. We can take our clothes off, but public decency demands we exercise this ability within certain limits, and in any case, there are only so many clothes we can take off before we need to look at other options.

Fridges and air conditioners are not the solutions they may seem to be. Both of them actually worsen the problem because of their own chemical and electricity demands, which leads to more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But even beyond that technical point, both fridges and air conditioners cool a small area, and an enclosed one. Hold the fridge door open and open all your windows and the cooling effects are so much reduced as to be essentially imperceptible. A fire might work the same way, but it heats much more effectively than these objects cool. And in terms of fuels, a fire can eat anything, whereas these things require electricity, which is comparatively complex to produce.  

Pretty much everything in the world is about heating. We heat oil to distillate it into its component parts, which we then heat to make our internal combustion engines work, build new chemicals, or power our power plants. We heat our food before we eat it, we heat our homes, and the production of the dyes we use in everything around us is dependent on heat too. Plastic is basically the result of heating certain chemical compounds to certain temperatures. The same is true of metals. How do you go from iron to steel? The answer, with some intervening steps, is heat.

Even when heating is not the primary factor, heat is the waste product. A gas-fired power plant heats water to produce steam, which puts a turbine into motion, generating electricity. What is left over is that heat. The smashing of mined ore that is part of its processing also produces heat. Within the home, our devices heat up when we use them too much. I am currently balancing my computer on a book so that it does not heat my lap. And speaking of my lap, the human body provides us with another example of heat’s omniprevalence. We heat up as we think, exercise, in a word live, and then lose that heat through things like sweating.

A glacier is an easy example of a cooling climate, the bad guy to be fought. When the climate warms, there is no such enemy coming. Instead, things just die. Deserts grow, plants don’t, natural disasters like hurricanes increase in frequency, and bad weather events like snowstorms and heat waves do too, but in all of these cases we are dealing with something essentially diffuse and impersonal. The problem cannot be dynamited away. And because it is a global problem, it is not as if we could just throw down a fridge and be done with it. Being a global problem, it is harder to accept it as our particular problem. A growing glacier is a specific issue for a specific place, while a shrinking glacier is a general loss, but because of its generality, we end up being only able to care so much about it.

This psychological issue is perhaps the main reason why so few people do any of the things that we can do to reduce global warming. (The complicating issue, one beyond the scope of this piece, is about whether individuals or corporations should be more responsible for emissions). Fire and heat are both easier to arrange than things to cool, they also have a more obvious effect with their burning. Likewise, the delayed effect of climate change, where today we are seeing the consequences of emissions released into the atmosphere quite literally before I was born, means that there’s an element of resignation in dealing with global warming which means that some people may simply not bother doing what they can.

I noted that at the time when people feared the return of the glaciers, they had every reason to do so, being comparatively less able to fight them off. Technological change prevailed, and the Enlightenment dream of power over all things was allowed to continue. Humans need to learn humility, but I doubt climate change is going to teach them it. Some of the most promising developments in fighting against carbon dioxide overproduction are likely to have the effect of letting us “off the hook” for our failure to reduce our consumption earlier. I have in mind technologies such as those for direct air capture, essentially giant reverse air conditioning units that suck carbon out of the air at immense cost and electricity demand, or perhaps nuclear fusion, which was in the news earlier this month.  

Of course, the alternative to being let off the hook – and I should be clear that these technologies are unlikely to save us, only compensate somewhat for our utter inability to do anything about reducing our demand for fossil fuels – is to watch our world disintegrate in fire and brimstone, metaphorically speaking and literally too in some places. A loss of diversity, a loss of nature, a loss of human life in the developing world, in particular, all of this is a catastrophe, even if it’s not “the end of the world”, only the end of “our world.” None of us wishes to see that either.

What then will change us? What then will bring humility? What then will lead a majority of us to take actions to build a better world, rather than continue statically upon the destructive paths that others have laid for us? I wish I knew. The world is a wondrous place, but wonder has not done enough, nor even has fear. Time will tell, I hope, what thing truly is needful. The alternative is not encouraging to think about.

This post was inspired by Daniel Yergin’s The Quest, and the information on the scientists comes primarily from it.