As the temperatures rise in this sweltering heat, our summer sears our bodies and steams our minds, with little relief.

Is the excessive heat related to increase aggressive motivation and often aggressive behaviour? Scientists concur.

Mounting evidence shows that unbearable heat impairs cognitive ability, productivity, and aggression. People are outside during the summer months, creating opportunities for disputes and discord. It is usually a hot-head who starts a riot or turns a peaceful protest violent. Excessive heat causes changes in emotions and behaviour, resulting in anger, irritability, discomfort, stress, and fatigue. Bear with us, our bodies are not built to handle heat above 35 degrees Celsius. No wonder we argue more in hot weather.

Heat alters those nasty manners because of its impact on serotonin, the primary neurotransmitter that regulates our mood, leading to decreased levels of stress and anxiety.

Physical or mental pressure makes us inclined to interpret negative thoughts and retaliatory aggression. A direct correlation between higher temperatures and hot tempers leads to bad performance, even to violent crimes, aggravated assault, rape, terrorist attacks, mass shootings, even to murder and worse. Many a war was triggered by dispassionate minds.

Climate Change is by no means a modern observation. Now, as it was in ancient times, weather has always been closely followed. Social commentators have alluded to alterations in weather shifts, heeding adverse conditions. From Cicero to Montesquieu, climate changes were aware of such fluctuations.

Shakespeare constantly used the weather as a mirror reflecting the emotional intensity and conflict between characters. How famous is the warning of “the Ides of March” in Julius Caesar. They discuss the bizarre weather that Rome is currently experiencing “as though fire is falling from the sky”. In Macbeth, the weather foreshadows the grim aftermath and its consequences.

Baron de Montesquieu (1748-1989) alluded in his works to the increased rates of revolutions during the hottest times of the year.

No need for a scientist to asses human’s difficulties, externally and internally. When the heat fuels the cool mind, it rapidly becomes wildly mad in the midst of summer’s firecrackers.

Summer or otherwise, it is open season for massacres by the Israelis on the citizens of Palestine. Habitually, no one heeds the victims or the perpetrators.

Killing is common; assassinations are significant. The only subtle distinction is the murder of anyone by someone, or killing by someone famous, as a celebrity or a politician.

Assassinations date back to the earliest governments and tribal structures of the world.

Though written records are scant, it was the Egyptian Pharaoh Tet of the Old Kingdom, Sixth Dynasty (23 centuries BC), who was the first victim of assassinations.

The practice continued through the 20th Dynasty in the New Kingdom, when Ramses III narrowly escaped an attempt on his life.

In the five century BC, the military leader of China, Sun Tzu, wrote his treatise on The Art of War, with special mention to tactics of assassinations.

The oldest tools of power struggles, assassinations spread among many lands and seas, Persia, India, Macedonia, among others. Foremost among them was the many Romans and their Caesars. None had as much bearing as the formation and history of the Roman Empire, not to mention the most famous and most numerous of royal schemers.

As the world moved on to the present day, not much has been changed in the human psyche, forever the same heat, the same greed.

The stakes of political clashes of will continue to grow to a global scale and the number of assassinations multiply in the heat of power and profit.

The great powers are at more war with each other than they are against the enemy.

In Russia, five emperors assassinated each other within less than 200 years: Ivan VI (1740-1741), Peter III, Paul I, Alexander II and Nicholas II (1868-1918), the last reigning tsar of Russia.

They are not less competent at assassinations in the US, having gunned down four presidents in even less time: Abraham Lincoln, 16th president (1809-1865), James Garfield, 20th president (1881), William McKinley, 25th president (1901), John F Kennedy, 35th president (1963), and Theodore Roosevelt, (1912). That is one up than the Russians.

Moreover, six presidents survived assassinations: Andrew Jackson, Franklin D Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump.

We must mention the assassination of national leader and pacifist Marin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, younger brother to president John Kennedy, campaigning for the presidency, and the gentle Beatle, John Lennon.

America, the country of the most wars in its short history, shows as much desire for murder and blood for its citizens and celebrities and with equal zeal.

The “Father of the Nation”, India’s Mohandas Gandhi, was shot and killed in 1940, by a misinformed Hindu.

Egyptian president Anwar Al-Sadat was the victim of an assassination at the hand of the Monstrous Brotherhood.

Even a cold war has been unable to slow down the heat of political assassinations. Religious fervour, political ideology, revolution and counter-revolution, ambition, power, revenge, and greed drive men to fell for a cause other than themselves.

Judging by global temperatures and record-breaking heat waves baking parts of the world, human beings keep bouncing and flouncing on a hot tin roof.

 

“What dreadful hot weather we have. It keeps on in a continual state of inelegance.”

 Jane Austen (1775-1817)

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* A version of this article appears in print in the 8 August, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly