Meteorologists predict that that extra-hot summers will become more frequent, and more extreme. The bad news (and there is nothing but bad news) is that the political party conventions are scheduled for some inscrutable reason at the height of summer, when the delegates are already inflamed by their respective political ideologies — the Republican Convention last week in Milwaukee, where the temperature was in the 80s, and the Democratic Convention in Chicago next month, when it may be hotter still. We don’t want them to be hot, we want them to be cool. But not the icy, inhuman cool of air conditioning, which gives us the illusion that we are above nature and so leads to many other dangerous delusions.
Hot weather is bad for politics. There is such a thing as a political thermometer; just watch the television news. You will see plenty of political action all around the world. Most of this action consists of young men rioting, setting fire to things, waving machetes, looting stores firing guns in the air, and generally behaving badly. The scene is so familiar that we tend to glaze over. Where is this particular riot happening? Who can tell, who cares? All we can say for sure is that the participants are almost never wearing overcoats or fur hats or snow boots. They are very casually dressed, as if for the beach, and this is because they are warm, usually in the subtropic or the tropic zone, somewhere between latitudes twenty north and twenty south. Look at what we may call the “sensible” countries further north and you see quite a different picture. Name a genuine, fully-functioning democracy anywhere in the tropical zone. Compare a map of average temperatures with a political voting map. Climate seems to be destiny, if not fate. There have been important exceptions — Russia in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s — both of which fell into dictatorship without any help from the weather.
Even in more moderate latitudes, a period of warm weather can spell trouble. The Paris police, for example, will not go into certain suburban areas on hot days. But the warmth doesn’t last long in Paris — that’s the important thing. When the usual freezing drizzle returns, behavior improves. Nineteenth-century social philosophers, following the great Enlightenment thinker Baron Montesquieu, took it for granted that climate created culture. They knew and cared nothing about political correctness, so they referred to the “warm-blooded races” of the tropics. Now we understand that blood and race have nothing to do with it — it’s warm weather that causes trouble. Hot weather cultures are different from cold weather cultures, politically speaking — and it seems obvious why. Heat makes people irritable, combative, and uncomfortable in their skin. Nobody can think clearly when they are hot; they forget about the uncertainty principle and easily succumb to extreme and utopian thinking.
Cool weather, by contrast, reminds us how fragile and uncertain our lives are. It promotes rational reflection and useful activity. Few people can sustain extreme political faith, let alone enthusiasm, through a New England winter.
What we have to worry about is this: as southern-style weather moves north, southern-style politics may move with it.
