The legend of the great Fernand Braudel, one of my historiographical heroes, is that he completed his doctoral dissertation in his head while sitting in a prisoner-of-war camp in the Second World War, and that in the course of his captivity the core thesis was turned upside down: from a conventional study of the Mediterranean policy of Phillip II of Spain, to the now-familiar revolutionary vision of how the Mediterranean – its environment, its climate, its underlying structures – shaped and limited the reign of Phillip in ways of which he was barely conscious.
There is both a pessimistic and an optimistic reading of this story. Pessimistically, the thesis reflects Braudel’s sense of powerlessness – the strict limits on his autonomy translating into a wider vision of the ‘limits of the possible’ that constrain all human life – and also the peculiar time of the internment camp, the dominance of small-scale everyday repetitions combined with the open-ended, unknowable duration of captivity (as J.G. Ballard confirmed from his own wartime experience in Shanghai, internment gives one an unusual relation to and consciousness of time). Optimistically, it relativises the triumph of the Nazis, and limits it to the ephemeral world of mere events; their victory is at best short-term, whatever their claims; the earth endures. Adolf Hitler and the Aryan Empire couldn’t conquer the blue sky…
My thoughts about Braudel this week have tended towards the depressing conclusion that we’re currently getting the worst of both worlds, the fuzzy end of the lollipop of his vision of history. There’s no doubt that we’re being overwhelmed by events, which command our attention and distract us from a proper understanding of what’s really going on; we’re caught up in l’histoire évenémentielle and its larger-than-life personalities in precisely the way that Braudel warned against, because it’s bright and colourful and dramatic, and corresponds to the pace at which we live our own lives. Trying to take the longer view may not bring much comfort – as it tends to accentuate our sense of our powerlessness to affect what’s happening – but it normally promises at least the consolations of understanding, and perhaps a degree of serenity.
However, the path of the optimistic Braudel seems to be closed to us. Of course Trump, Brexit, Le Pen and the rest are ephemeral from the perspective of la longue durée. Of course the earth will endure despite their victories. But reflecting on this theme brings home the fact that the earth may nevertheless feel the consequences of their triumph in a way the Nazis could never have dreamed of, at least at the timescale of centuries and millennia if not millions of years.* Perhaps there was never a big hope of halting global warming and other consequences of human activity over the past two centuries, but now there seems to be next to none; the possibility looms of the USA rejecting the Paris agreement altogether, and certainly there’s little sign of many Western countries (let alone the UK, obsessed with the impenetrable mystery of Brexit for the foreseeable future) devoting the necessary resources and ingenuity to the nightmarish problem that confronts us.
It’s possible to see the idea of the Anthropocene as a partial refutation of Braudel’s ideas, with humanity now having the power – however unconsciously and accidentally – to transform its environment rather than always being at its mercy, leaving him in the position of Phillip II, unable to comprehend the real forces at play. Still more, the last few decades – as people have come to recognise the dangers of the situation – seem like the revenge of l’histoire évenémentielle, as time and again short-term events have confounded efforts to respond to the crisis. Braudel will of course have the last laugh, as the limits of the possible re-assert themselves, and the costs of defying climate change and its consequences become ever more unmanageable for the vast majority of humanity. The idea that, for most people across most of human history, existence was a matter of regular repetition of more or less predictable rhythms and cycles within a more or less predictable environment will come to seem even more of a lost paradise as we enter times of change that will put the upheavals of modernity and industrialisation in their proper context…
* Given that, at least on this reality, they never harnessed the terrifying power of the infovores to carve the face of Hitler into the moon…
[Update 25/11: just a quick apology for everyone who’s come to this post via the Browser, and has been wondering what on earth is going on. Some blog posts I write with different audiences in mind, and so make sure I explain things that might be unhelpfully obscure. Some I write as a personal scream into the void, without any expectation of anyone reading them besides hardcore readers who already know all my references. It’s always a little disconcerting when one of the latter gets picked up more widely. Feel free to demand clarification in the comments!]
[Update 2 25/11: George Monbiot offers a handy list of reasons to be fearful.]
Sphinx 
I came from the Browser, and I understood it well enough. I thought it captured my feelings of there are forces at work on society beyond our comprehension and beyond our abilities to change. It captured my feelings of powerlessness well.
But still I grip to the idea that those forces we don’t understand and beyond our control may work in our favor rather than to our destruction. The idea I hold tightly is that despite all our efforts to the contrary, things are improving as described in these sorts of indexes: http://startupguide.com/world/the-world-is-actually-getting-better/
Thanks for this, and for the link. I think there’s no denying that lots of things have got much better over the last century or so, and not just for people in the West. The worry is whether this is remotely sustainable, given the trend of the environmental data in the post you linked to – not to mention concerns that even if humanity can shift to clean free energy etc as proposed, the benefits of that may be unevenly spread (likewise the adverse consequences of climate change), as in the pessiminisric scenarios in Peter Frase’s new book.