Heat is a particular trigger for people to behave poorly to one another. And knowing that we are in a warming world consigns the old salvation of summer fun to the cultural museum. Consider the classic blues song lyrics: “summertime, and the living is easy. Fish are jumping and the wheat is high.” Instead of embracing summer and its admittedly unlimited outdoor play possibilities (at least when compared to our many months of chilly Canadian winter), one would think that heat would be a passing concern, like remembering to check on our geriatric peers. Yet, a study of “relative risks (RRs) in mental health outcomes per 1 °C increase in temperature, and under different heatwaves definitions,” tell us that “a 1°C temperature rise was also associated with a significant increase in morbidity, such as mood disorders, organic mental disorders, schizophrenia, neurotic and anxiety disorders.” Thus, as the proverbial mercurial rises so, too, does our inner sense that it’s alright to exhibit our more unhinged interpersonal instincts. For many, feeling like one’s being borders on wanton depression now becomes a rite of passage into summer. What once was a joyous season in our temperate climate becomes just another cause for concern to be endured. And to complain about. As a dollar store wallet comedy card (akin to a fake driver’s license) states: “the carrier of this card officially possesses a license to bitch”. It would seem our culture has unleashed open season on expressing miseries and blaming the weather. Social theory often bears out the truth that as goes a culture’s definition of the meaning of a situation, in this case summer heat, so goes the populace in their acquired meanings and subsequent actions.
Feeling stressed and concerned about the climate means that we express our other struggles through the lightning rod of climate discourse. Michel Foucault, in his epochal study of madness throughout history, reminds us that “the essence of madness can ultimately be divined in the simple structure of a discourse” – that is, we become in turn less or more reasonable about the world and our place in it by how far we go down this or that apocalyptic ideological rabbit hole. We see this in children; on a hot day, lacking a sprinkler to run through or a water gun with which to ambush unsuspecting victims, they will revert to a primal level of tantrums and fussiness. Adults normally pride themselves on rising above the existential maladies of environment, traffic for instance, but when culture gives permission to indulge darker impulses of anxiety and frustration then all hell breaks loose.
Global warming may be a serious issue for our health, but the ante is upped exponentially when we give ourselves permission to express ourselves in increasingly unhinged ways based on atmospheric heat. Notions of hot-blooded personalities trickle down through the cultural eons for a reason. Venting, no pun intended, comes to be a normal coping mechanism for heat where previously a person might have kept quiet. Lashing out phsyically and with oral verbosity occurs not because we cannot control our impulses; rather, our cultural climate of environmental fear and recrimination increasingly augments us to liberate our more unwieldy tendencies from the shackles of social conditioning. As Foucault notes, “discourse is the silent language in which the spirit addresses itself in its own truth, and at the same time visible articulation in the movements of the body.” Lashing out, in the end, is a mental process.
Foucault further provides possible insights on how people’s mental decline can be triggered by climate concerns: it all starts with the apocalyptic world-on-fire imagery that we get when we see calamitous events on planet earth. The global village here turns against us in the sense that every trouble becomes our own and the raw reality that our climate is in decline comes home to roost on our smartphones on a daily basis.
Thus, we seem to be reacting quite reasonably, as anyone would, and yet, in this essence of reason, Foucault notes that in a mental health context there lies a kernel of radical unreason. “The madman never steps over the image that appears. He allows himself instead to be totally caught up in its immediate vivacity, and only gives approval in so far as he is entirely absorbed in it. Many people, not to say all of them, fall into madness by being overly preoccupied by a single object.”
Seeing is believing, after all, and in the media we do see an awful lot of climate miseries and read plenty of scientific dissertations on how we industrial humans are the cause for concern. In a sense, to be morose about the world would be the most logical reaction. We simply are what we see. “The marvellous logic of the mad seems to mock that of the logicians, as it shadows it so closely, or rather because it is exactly the same, and at the heart of madness, at the basis of so many errors, absurdities, aimless words and gestures, what is sometimes to be found is the deeply buried perfection of a discourse.”
This discourse, as you might guess, is one of permeability: we humans have always tended to see ourselves as products of our environment, and of somewhat mysterious climactic concerns. Astrology comes to mind, as does another old term for mental health difficulties: lunacy. Foucault writes of how early physicians concluded that “the moon, given the important power that its trajectory exerts on the atmosphere, is likely to act most on people whose nervous fibres are particularly delicate” (224). This intuitive truth comes from the mysteries of nature and our bodies; those who most feel lunar and environmental impacts are like canaries in a coal mine, “a sign of the peculiar sensitivity of the human organism…man is entirely surrounded by a group of elements to which he is sensitive to some degree, without being conscious of it.” To this end, our purported climate awareness vis a vis human-caused ecological decline only seems to be a unique product of our modern times. Instead, humans down through the ages have sought to explain maladies of their minds in terms of powerful and inexorable external environment forces. As the times change the purported causes of our troubles change too.
As students and thinkers, it behooves us to increase our sensitivity not only to that which seems obviously implicated in our mental well-being, like collapsing ecosystems, but also to the way that external environmental causes and consequences are framed, measured, and manufactured by the cultural powers that be. If we focus too much on climate change, we run the risk of not seeing that we humans are the framers of our psychological destiny; just as we can work smarter, not harder, we can care better without wringing our hearts and minds into a frazzle.
