It’s your right to protest, to bring your grievances to the attention of others, the world. That the world might not care about your grievances, or at least not care as much as, or in the way that, you might be a good line beyond which you shouldn’t go. But that’s such an old school notion, quaint and archaic.
You see, if you believe it’s important. it is important. If others fail to grasp its importance (fools), then they must be made to understand that it is the most important thing ever and must become the center of their universe because, you, a smart and passionate person, believe it to be so. After all, your opinion is entitled to respect. Everybody says so. And if people won’t respect your opinion, they must be forced to do so. And by respect, they mean you make it the center of your universe just as they have. Anything less would be heresy, and you know what happens to heresy.
This means blocking highways, not to mention the thousands of people on them with places to go and issues of their own to address, is fine. This means gluing yourself to the counter at Starbucks because they charge extra for soy milk. This means destroying priceless works of art because the world is going to end.
Ln Monday eco-protesters glued themselves to the frame of Constable’s painting The Hay Wain and covered it with an altered version of their own, doing minor damage in the process. On Saturday, eco-protesters rushed onto the track at Silverstone. Last Friday, eco-protesters glued themselves to a Turner painting in Manchester. Earlier in June, eco-protesters… you get the idea.
Isn’t climate change important? Isn’t it more important than some painting?
For all that people mourn the decline of social capital and cohesion in Britain, there is still a great deal of trust baked into the way the country runs. It’s easy to take this for granted, because under most circumstances we simply don’t notice it. Why wouldn’t we be able to walk into an art gallery with minimal security, and stand feet away from a priceless work of art? Why wouldn’t a museum confine its protective efforts to a polite sign asking us not to touch the exhibits? And of course we can sit happily in the stands at a racecourse, with only a handful of fluorescent jacketed marshals between us and the track.
For generations, norms have arisen that have constrained our worst impulses. We could rush at and damage a famous paining in a museum, because there it is, within reach, with no plexiglass wall between our sticky fingers and Van Gogh’s genius, and it was unthinkable that anyone would cross a velvet rope. Or shoot bullets into a crowd or a classroom. Or reinvent all of society to accommodate our most infantile whim. Norms prevented us from enjoying our most outlandish and harmful desires, and also enabled society to function for “everyone.”
But these things, wonderful as they are, are fragile. What is so deeply infuriating about the latest batch of eco-protests is the way that they directly attack social trust. We can have nice galleries which are minimally intrusive because we trust people to treat them with respect, and that trust is repaid. When attention-seeking protesters use this trust to behave in damaging ways, that trust is broken: institutions are forced to introduce security checks, barriers, and other ways to distance people from the art. A small minority ruins a beautiful thing for everyone else.
It’s one thing for an eco-activist to bomb a pipeline they believe to be an environmental disaster, even though the idea of engaging in such violence would strike most people as a terrible and destructive thing to do. Savior or terrorist? This is the way people who indulge their whims see it, that they are doing something sufficiently important and valuable because they personally believe that to be true. It’s their “truth,” and isn’t their “truth” the only truth that matters, even if that means their truth renders your truth a nullity because their truth demands destruction of things that everyone shares?
And it’s not as if these destructive protests are over silly matters, childish mattes, like the price of soy milk at Starbucks. They’re about the environment, global warming, an existential crisis? What good are wonderful paintings if we’re all about to burn up on this fireball of boomers’ creation? It’s the end of the world and so there is no extreme that limits what must be done.
Whether we’ve become inured to cries of existential crises, because everyone seems to be screaming about one or another constantly, and so we’re disinclined to let it seize the entirety of our existence or we simply don’t think it’s quite as bad as someone else things, the fact remains that others feel sufficiently passionate that they believe they’re entitled to break social trust, to ignore all norms to the contrary, and to act upon their beliefs to the detriment of society. What’s a masters’ painting compared to the end of life?
Or everything isn’t the end of the world, even if you believe that it is very important. Perhaps it is very important, even if it’s not an existential crisis. There are important things that won’t spell the end of human existence. What if you believe it is, but others do not? But you’re right and they’re wrong? A lot of people have grown to believe this is more than sufficient reason to act upon one’s idiosyncratic belief system. Sure, some might be right, but the vast majority will be wrong. Some will be dangerously, horribly wrong.
Something very silly and pointless was put in issue at a recent G7 conference, where the heads of state appeared in a photo without ties. Ties are silly, pointless things, that somehow became the accepted norm in serious business attire. The idea that heads of state would be photographed like this without ties would have been unthinkable a few years ago, and yet here they are, tieless, and bold in their refusal to adhere to norms. Even silly norms.
It’s hardly the same thing as gluing oneself to a painting or blocking a busy highway, but then if norms no longer matter, and even heads of state can’t be trusted to honor them, why should someone who passionately believes their feelings are the most important thing in the world? After all, they’re trying to save us from the end of the world.
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