I've been plodding through Sam White's book
'A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe's Encounter with North America'. Thanks for the recommendation to all who have read it!
Its been good to read for two reasons. The first is that it's a great cautionary tale that highlights the calamity that can befall people who are unprepared. Unprepared, both in terms of supplies, but also in terms of the understanding of the natural world. The two are related - how you See reality and what you Do within it.
There were some significant errors in thinking that doomed them almost from the outset. They were operating on the assumptions of Aristotelian meteorology, which stated that the climate is determined only by latitude, regardless of local geographic conditions.
This led them to believe that the East coast of what is now America would have the same climate and growing conditions as the Mediterranean. They dreamed of growing olives in Maine, the poor creatures. But why is the climate different? Sam White's explanation was eye-opening for me.
We moderns know that the West coast of Europe gets a daily delivery of warmth via the Gulf Stream conveyor belt. Without that, the UK, for instance, would be excellent polar bear habitat. But the Gulf Stream is only one reason for Western coastal Europe being warmer than America's East coast.
The other reason is that in the Northern hemisphere, there is a consistent direction of the prevailing winds due to the Coriolis effect - it blows from East to West. It follows that in the Northern hemisphere, Western coasts are generally warmer because the wind arrives from across the ocean. Ocean winds are always warmer than land winds.
The Eastern coasts in North America receive wind from over land, which is always colder. One can look at an average monthly minimum temperature comparison between Vancouver, BC, Canada (on the West coast), and St. John's, NL, Canada, (on the East) to see this effect in play. They are basically at the same latitude, and they are both on the ocean - but the direction of the prevailing winds is quite possibly the determinant factor in St. John's being much, much colder. I'd lived in BC my whole life, and I'd never even considered why the West coast was one of the warmest places in Canada.
Sam White's book helped me to clear up some uncertainty and dread that was growing in me with regards to the Ice Age. I was gettin' worried. But - Knowledge protects! So I thought I might as well read up on the history of the most recent 'long winter' and learn a thing or two before I turn into a human popsicle. An educated popsicle is better than an ignorant one, no? That's the theory, anyways.
Although the book details story after story of misadventure, famine, disease outbreaks, crop failures - and also rising tensions between native populations and settlers in the context of climate-induced turmoil - it was interesting to note that life didn't just stop, frozen in the ice. People kept on living, striving forwards in their goals. Even ships still sailed the seas with regularity!
I don't know exactly what my assumptions were about the coming Ice Age - but there was dread, for sure. I think the dread came from a lack of data, and an assumption of chaos, and fear of the unknown. So this is the second reason why I like the book - it gave me a sense of relief just to read these detailed accounts, and establish a basic framework for extrapolating possible future scenarios. I still don't know if we're heading for a new Mini Ice Age, or a new Glacial Maximum, but 'A Cold Welcome' has had a significant calmative effect for me.
A third topic in the book that caught my eye has to do with religion, in particular prayers for rain. In certain times of significant drought, the natives asked the settlers to pray to their Christian god for rain, because the native gods apparently weren't listening. In a few significant cases, these prayers were 'answered' - rain happened to arrive just at the right moment. This led to mass demand for Christian crosses amongst the natives! So the Ice Age was also punctuated by social transformation and, notably, religious conversion. This amounts to an enormous change in the 'Map of Meaning' of all the peoples involved. And an important note is that after the settlers had established themselves as powerful weather-workers, when rain did not arrive due to settler prayers, the settlers themselves became scapegoats for bad weather.
This had me thinking about our current world. How will our own 'Maps of Meaning' change? What will we witness in the 'Maps of Meaning' of our neighbours, friends, family, community, nation - and humanity in general? Will there be a
new mass religious movement aimed at appeasing weather gods, like some kinda Ghost Dance? Will there be a materialistic version of the same human impulse to seek salvation? Will there be mass uptake into the already-existing monotheistic 'faiths', when people see that 'those other folks over there seem to have fine weather and plenty of food, so maybe we should pray to their god'?
I don't know - these kinds of transformations seem to be unlikely to gain broad traction in the West, given our widespread nihilistic cultural materialism. Without a grounding in the Spirit, the overall result may be more like increased confusion and despair in the face of increasing chaos. And then personal and social breakdown, scapegoating, violence, and war.
The PTB will deflect blame away from themselves for as long as they can, of course. We can see that there are several ready-made identities that are already primed to take the blame. If the Ice Age is pinned, for instance, to the Gulf Stream shutdown, which is spun to be an effect of Man-Made Climate Change, then every meat-eater and car-driver will be the primary 'sinners'. On an institutional level, the scapegoats would be the big energy and resource extraction corporations. On a geopolitical level, Russia and China are the obvious culprits, in particular the 'dirty, bad, irresponsible' hydrocarbon sectors of their economies. And the unvaccinated are already an excellent out-group for taking the blame for a real plague.
It is tempting to say that there will be a new Inquisition, or another Witch Craze, or WW3 - but I think modern government is a different beast than it was in the past. I've read in Foucault's
Biopolitics that sovereign power in the past operated on the basis of a certain maxim - 'Let live, and make die'. In other words, the common folk were allowed to live with a degree of personal bodily autonomy. Only when they broke a law would there be a swift and often disfiguring or lethal punishment. Sovereign power today has reversed this situation to a different operating maxim - 'Make live, and let die'. The common folk are forced to live a certain way, with maximal intrusion of the government into every aspect of their lives, their bodies, their minds, including now their DNA. And when they don't comply, they are simply abandoned.
The information in the 'VISA-666-Mark of the Beast' session gestures to a situation where 'all must belong or starve'. This suggests to me that the primary punitive measure would likely be silent abandonment of dissenters by the state, as opposed to more active forms of punishment, like the scapegoating of days past.
At any rate, what a show to behold as the 'maps of meaning' change across the entire realm!