My enthusiasm over Jeremy Davies' take on Noah's dove led me to an exciting new study of the importance of Noah's flood to emergent western thinking about humanity's place in the planetary environment.
After the Flood confirms something I'd ambiently known - that the Flood was understood by many European thinkers in the early modern period to have been the cause of great natural devastation - and spells out its new salience for the challenges of our own time. 16th-18th century debates about the Flood make it a kind of precursor to the Anthropocene discovery of the human species as a geological, planetary agent. The "age-old humanist distinction between human history and natural history" which Dipesh Chakrabarty thinks the Anthropocene disrupts isn't that old; in Flood narratives, the two are closely entwined, natural disorder the consequence of human acts.
But Lydia Barnett goes further. The idea of humanity as a planetary force emerged as a by-product of debates between and among Protestants and Catholics over questions about sin, salvation, and free will. (4) The story of the Flood makes necessary (and possible) a "universal history" of all of humanity and its spread over the whole earth - a history haunted by sin and the degenerative consequences of its punishment. The resulting accounts, speculating about what human bodies were like in Eden, about how the world was resettled after the Flood, and about the great Apocalypse denouement when this story ends served the interests of mission as well as imperialism, and fed fateful ideas of racial difference (the "curse of Ham"?!) and climatic determinism. Discussing the Flood this way was largely abandoned for the three centuries leading to our own time but, Barnett argues, it leaves an imprint on the ways we now fumble to make sense of the Anthropocene. It is perhaps no accident, she suggests, that diluvian language remains pervasive, as in Laudato Si´ description of a world "flooded" with human-caused disturbance. Further,
the images that tend to predominate, at least in popular and public-focused portrayals of anthropogenic climate change, are all of water: of icebergs melting, sea levels rising, waves lapping at the coast, and cities being inundated. This language and imagery, I suspect, derives considerable force from its recollection and reactivation of deep cultural myths about the awesome power of floods to ruin the world as the unintended result of human behavior. (19)
Human beings have not actually been planetary agents before (speaking non-biblically...), but in the "long seventeenth century" some relatively cosmopolitan Europeans imagined such agency. Since some of today's thinking about about our species' new status is probably subliminally guided by the Flood template, we'd do well to be aware of its "baggage."
There's so much to enjoy in After the Flood, not least the vindication of the excitement of early modern history (once my stomping ground) and of the possibility that religious and scientific thinking might be able to work together: when modern thought is ignorantly and ahistorically secularized it becomes brittle and proud.
But Barnett's argument is a little different from what I find myself wanting to argue about pre-Anthropocene imaginings of the entwinement of human and natural history. Naturally the kind of agency the Flood narrative imagines really has nothing to do with the actual agency IPCC reports confront us with; ours is not triggered by some extramundane force putting the kibosh on us, though there are ways its insidious and unintended effect resonates with earlier understandings of sin, and the richer Aristotelian understandings of causality of premodern Europe. Barnett would have us notice both the unexpected parallels and deeper differences such as this as ways of learning to free ourselves from the power of these "deep cultural myths," engaging though they may be.
I'm more inclined to want to reclaim early and pre-modern ideas. We were not "planetary agents" in the Anthropocene sense, but we knew we lived in dynamic exchange and relation with the more than human world. Stories like the Flood were extrapolations from more local experiences of entwinement and the unsuspected consequences of our cupidity. The Flood itself grounds a shared history of humanity in relationship with the rest of life if not the Earth, elaborated in well-intentioned ways by irenic early modern scholars, but it may not be one to reclaim for the reasons Barnett makes clear, and others too: I can't help seeing the post-Flood resettlement of the world as a template for a settler colonial understanding of human (read: European) history reclaiming terra nulls, for instance.
