Those Weird and Luminous Lights in the Sky Don't Necessarily Mean Bad News

 

In March 1716 Edmond Halley became one of thousands of northern Europeans to witness a powerful display of the Northern Lights. The aurora manifested in England as streams of reddish-yellow light, perpendicular to the ground but spreading at the zenith to form a “corona.” Halley, later famed for predicting the periodicity of a certain comet*, published his observations of aurora borealis in the British Royal Society’s principal periodical. His article proved remarkable for two reasons. First, Halley attributed the aurora not to the glory of God or Earth’s venting of luminiferous vapors, but to an effusion of “magnetical effluvia” that the Earth’s magnetism drew toward the North Pole. Halley was only partially correct - today we know that the Northern Lights are caused by charged solar particles impacting the Earth’s magnetic field - but he did at least connect the phenomenon with terrestrial magnetism.

 

Photo by AstroAnthony via Wikimedia

Second, Halley observed that the Northern Lights had become quite rare in Europe. Apart from a few low-powered manifestations over the winter of 1707-08, he knew of no recorded appearances of the aurora since 1621. The Lights had in fact appeared a few other times in the previous century: in 1661-62 over England and Germany, and a couple of times in Romania in the early 1700s. That aurora borealis had not been seen in Halley’s homeland in over fifty years currently seems indisputable, and worthy of explanation.

In The Global Crisis (2013, p. 13), Geoffrey Parker pointed out the likely cause of the aurora’s long absence. As the Sun is the active agent in producing auroras, during periods of reduced solar radiation they tend to weaken or disappear altogether. Halley’s Hiatus (to coin a phrase) coincided with a period of drastically reduced sunspot activity - strong evidence of weakened solar output - that modern Earth scientists call the Maunder Minimum (1640-1715). This same period saw, not coincidentally, intermittent spells of drought and foul winter weather throughout the world, culminating in the devastating winter of 1708-09. The return of the auroras to northern Europe coincided with an increase in sunspot activity and solar output, and the subsequent decades saw a steady increase in the world’s population and food supply and the stabilization of some of its more powerful empires (e.g. Russia and China). Foul weather and failed harvests did not become commonplace again until the late 1780s. What Halley and his contemporaries were witnessing, then, was not an ill omen but a predictor of better times to come - the climatological end of the seventeenth century.   

 

 

* A disappointing one, for those of us who remember the dismal display Halley’s Comet put on in 1986. I’m told that astronomers expect no better from the 2061 encounter.

The World Is a Garden and We Are All Flowers

“I for one do not lament the passing of social organizations that used the many as a manured soil in which to grow a few graceful flowers of refined culture” - Theodosius Dobzhansky, quoted in Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (1979), 186.

 

Dobzhansky himself, 1966 (via Wikimedia)

 

Raised by elitist parents and schooled at a high-toned college - “four years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery,” to steal a phrase from Orwell - I in my youth grew accustomed to the argument that high culture could not exist without social inequality. The masses toiled and were taxed and exploited so that mannered commentators could discuss affairs of state on Sunday-morning television, philanthropists could endow galleries of art by past and present masters, and well-educated authors could write of adultery and ennui in the suburbs. Friedrich Nietzsche, a popular fellow on high-toned college syllabi, epitomized this aristocratic view in Chapter Nine of Beyond Good and Evil, claiming that only “a society believing in…differences of worth among human beings” could produce men of elevated spirit. These great-souled men, in turn, should rule a society that “is not allowed to exist for its own sake, but only as a foundation and a scaffolding, by means of which a select class of beings may…elevate themselves to their higher duties.”

Exhausted and alienated by my parents' and contemporaries' elitism, how delighted I was to encounter, early in graduate school, Dobzansky's quote and his democratic attitude in a work by one of the modern masters of history. Braudel was a scholar as canonical in his way as Nietzsche, who nonetheless devoted his career to study and celebration of the everyday and common. People and the societies they create are ends in themselves, culture is produced and reproduced by everyone, the great innovators and artists of history owe much if not most of their insight to their teachers, contemporaries, and disciples, and nearly everyone has a good story to tell.* These observations and beliefs became all the more important for me to retain as American political and economic leaders adopted, in the early twenty-first century, the principles of one of Nietzsche’s bastard offspring, Ayn Rand. The United States’ headlong rush toward aristocracy slowed somewhat in the 2010s - more so during the recent unpleasantness - but the belief that most people don’t matter very much remains a compelling one for a powerful minority.

(The title of this post is from the underrated film Party Girl [1995].)

 

* I’d like to claim that I learned most of these lessons from my graduate-school training and subsequent reading, but actually most of it came incidentally, from magazine articles and genre fiction. I learned of the categorical imperative from one of George Will’s columns; of the diffusion of creativity and good stories through the general population by way of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and another underrated film, The Good Girl (2001); and of the idea that “solitary” geniuses were usually inspired by other, more obscure geniuses from some of Stephen Jay Gould’s articles. The universalist definition of culture I will admit to acquiring from the essays of Clifford Geertz.

Some Context

 

Last month's remark, "Everything is terrible," deserves some explanation. I have been privileged enough throughout my life to enjoy immunity from the effects of most bad news stories - the COVID lockdowns and the recent spell of high inflation being notable recent exceptions. Two new developments in June affected me directly, as they did millions of other Americans: the Supreme Court's lawless Biden v. Nebraska decision cost my family 10,000 dollars in student-loan forgiveness, and the wildfires in Canada poured enough smoke and exotic chemicals (e.g. formaldehyde) into southern Indiana that I developed a very bad cough, akin to that of a pack-a-day smoker. Sometimes it feels like the world is out to get you.

 

New York City, 6.7.23. (Aelthemplaer, Wikimedia Commons)

On the other hand, my better half and kiddos and I managed to avoid most of the hideously-hot weather afflicting the southern United States - and southern Europe, and eastern China, and the world in general - this July by visiting family in the Pacific Northwest, where we enjoyed cool days and sunny skies. We would have enjoyed them even more if we hadn't all come down with COVID, the pandemical disease that the rest of the world has supposedly managed to put behind it. One's misfortunes aren't always synchronized with those of the rest of the world.