Did they triumph? Certainly, such politicised “raids” on cherished artistic artefacts and spaces seem evermore common today, from statue topplings to Old Masters splattered with soup. Last weekend was no exception: at Trinity College, Cambridge, an activist protesting the Israel-Palestine conflict destroyed a 1914 Philip de Laszlo oil painting of Lord Balfour using red spray paint and a box cutter.

Much has been written about how this represents an attack on the West’s values and legacy. But surely, if this were what we believed, the response to this vandalism would be swift and punitive. And yet no such response was forthcoming: Trinity College managed little more than a limp expression of “regret” and an offer of counselling to anyone affected. At the time of writing, no arrests have been made. A cloud of official forgetting seems already to have settled over the event.

This is less bewildering, though, when you understand the “intervention” by Palestine Action not as an attack on our artistic heritage, but as a profoundly conservative expression of that heritage: in particular, of the modern legacy of permanent revolution, inaugurated by 20th-century radicals such as the Situationists.

For this group, the 1958 art critics’ conference was just one more deplorable iteration of the “society of the spectacle”, a pervasive form of capitalist tyranny propagated by mass media and consumerism. Here, image-making takes precedence over material reality, while obedience is ensured by dissolving organic social relations. Needs are replaced with commodified desires, consumers become purely passive, and capitalism becomes inescapable.

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The Situationists set out to break down this regime by challenging “the spectacle of a false encounter”. They developed disruptive forms of performance, participation and collective authorship. Cultivating randomness, they sought everywhere to re-invigorate the masses by disturbing the manufactured consumer spectacle.

Did it work? Well, yes and no. The Situationists were certainly influential. And their legacy has spread well beyond the art world: the climate activist group Extinction Rebellion, for example, were explicitly inspired by the Situationist International. Was it radical, though? Again, yes and no.

In one 1966 manifesto, the Situationists decried “the bygone excellence of bourgeois culture” — a legacy they believed had already given way to ugly managerialism governed by “the rhythm of the production line”. In this context, “the university is becoming”, they argued, “the honest broker of technocracy and its spectacle”. Within this flattened, hollowed-out infrastructure, the Situationists argued that “the banality of everyday life is not incidental, but the central mechanism and product of modern capitalism”. And, they argued, to resist it “nothing less is needed than all-out revolution”.

This would, they imagined, free the entire accumulated legacy of the now-defunct bourgeois order for revolutionary purposes, enabling radicals to “destroy the spectacle itself, the whole apparatus of commodity society”. This “liberation of history” would spell the end of all repression, in favour of “revolutionary celebration” and “untrammelled desire”.

Or so they hoped. The manifesto heavily influenced the Paris ’68 riots: Situationist slogans were distributed by the “Occupation Committee of the People’s Free Sorbonne University”. Half a century on, though, re-reading the Situationists’ declarations evokes a sense of both admiration and tragedy. Admiration, for how prophetic they were; tragedy, for how partial their revolution turned out not to be.

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Given now-common complaints about universities enabling the spread of technocratic managerialism, it’s hard not to see the Situationists’ critique as prescient. And in this context, taking a box-cutter to a 1914 oil painting might make sense — for the world that painting depicts has already been emptied of meaning, and there’s no legacy to protect.

Except there is: the legacy of the ‘68ers themselves. Today, just over half a century on from the riots, it’s the inheritors of the Situationists and ‘68ers that command the heights (such as they are) of contemporary culture. Radical critique is the default mode of the modern academy; you’ll struggle to get funding for research that doesn’t set out to problematise, deconstruct, decolonise, queer or otherwise liquidate the last moribund fragments of the bourgeois culture Debord was already pronouncing dead in 1966.

The art world, meanwhile, has comprehensively re-institutionalised the once-revolutionary style of Situationist intervention, via an often publicly-funded infrastructure whose default stance is also — within certain limits that artists violate at their peril — radical critique. And across academia, the arts and the rest of the progressive consensus, untrammelled desire is so unchallengeable a good that those trying to restrain their own masturbatory habits are traduced in the press as fascists. Meanwhile, respectable academia and publishing knocks ever louder on once-forbidden sexual doors, such as bestiality or paedophilia, while government-funded quangos dole out hundreds of thousands in grants for hardcore sex films masquerading as “art”.

In other words: everything the Situationists called for is now institutionalised. And the final tragic irony of this partial triumph is the way Situationist-style interventions, staged for the camera, critique “spectacle” through spectacle itself.

For Debord never anticipated the internet. His critique of “spectacle” targeted mid-century mass media: cinema, radio, and television. These forms had one thing in common: they were one-to-many. The effect of such image-making was to impose the synthetic, consumerist fantasy-world of the ‘spectacle’, in a tyrannically top-down way. In response to the autocratic stranglehold this exerted over the public imagination, the aim of Situationist praxis was to jolt the masses from mediated passivity into active, decentralised re-engagement with the world’s strangeness — and its revolutionary possibilities.

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What happens, though, when the media is no longer one-to-many, as it was in the Sixties, but many-to-many, as is the case with social media? Back in the Noughties, when social media first exploded, the leftist arty circles I frequented at the time responded to this new decentralisation of image-making with a revived interest in Situationism. Creative collectives sprang up; performance art and street protest merged; it seemed for a moment that internet-enabled image-making and subversive organising might offer a way out of the deadening passivity of mass consumerism.

How naïve that all seems in hindsight. For these supposedly liberatory new forms were almost instantaneously colonised by the spectacle they sought to disrupt. The interval between the first spontaneous, playful flash mobs and the adoption of this format by marketers was vanishingly brief. And a decade or so on, such content is the bread-and-butter for a new, still more total, economy of spectacle — in which all of us, all the time, are called to be both content and consumer.

Clickbait creators skip from discourse to discourse, spreading discordant viral material; even brutality and horror have currency less for the reality they represent than as the spark for online discourse. Street fights; stabbings; cannibalism; servants falling out of windows: it’s all fodder for the dispassionate-seeming phone camera, and for those farming chaos for engagement. In this economy, too, street protests exist only to the extent they’re represented in the digital spectacle: every such gathering attracts the same complaints of mainstream press cover-up. Smaller-scale protests, meanwhile, increasingly explicitly orient themselves toward the virtual, prioritising not political change but pure virality, whether via soup-based interventions, vandalism, or bodily fluids.

To what extent does any of this transgress anything? Well, some kinds of subversive intervention in the image-making space still incur real-world punishment. Even a regime supposedly ordered to permanent revolution retains some taboos. But the list of genuinely forbidden opinions and acts doesn’t seem to include vandalising paintings of dead politicians. On the contrary: damaging a surviving fragment of bourgeois culture reads less as revolutionary today than as an act of slavish devotion to orthodoxy.

And the only way to make it even more completely orthodox is to stage it for the camera. Today the Situationists’ subversive energy has been re-absorbed by a new orthodoxy — one even more completely governed by commodified “spectacle” than that of Debord’s time.

No wonder, then, that the Trinity vandal is clearly a dutiful young consumer, transporting her vandalism kit in a Mulberry Cara backpack: a limited-edition designer accessory that retailed for £995 when released, and still sells for hundreds second-hand. In the new order she represents, vandalising the crumbling remains of bourgeois culture is less radical than routine: only a slightly more pronounced version of the “queering” and “decolonising” that every generation of progressives has been engaged in since ‘68. And the calculated staging of this act in turn signals the total recapture of Situationist disruption, as merely another form of digital spectacle.

The Trinity event reveals today’s crop of young pseudo-activists as they are: suffocatingly conservative, iPhone-wielding foot-soldiers for the reigning dogma of permanent revolution. Designer backpacks on their shoulders, they dance on the weed-choked tomb of a civilisation their grandparents destroyed: “confused and empty chatter about a decomposed culture” is all they have.

This one lasted barely 21 minutes. A group of 50 centipeded past Nelson’s Column, some in Berghaus fleeces, some in moth-eaten donkey jackets, and all in hi-viz orange vests. Fewer than half of them, the “arrestables”, took to the road at the speed of a hearse; the rest remained on the pavement shouting support. And the moment they hit Whitehall, the police began to pick them off. The entire column was kettled onto the pavement, each orange beset by four or five yellows: wrestled, handcuffed and scooped into the waiting vans. The police worked from back-to-front, leaving the dwindling vanguard of the column to pace resolutely on, like captured admirals walking the plank. One woman on the pavement was crying, cursing the police, cursing the burning planet. But those under arrest were placid, serene, unblinking. They lay there quietly as the police took their details and unbuckled their watches into evidence bags. 

Eventually, the only person left was a tiny old woman, still clutching her banner, and shuffling down the street. “Is there anything we can do to make you leave the road?” the police asked. She didn’t reply. “Gentle,” someone shouted as they swarmed her too. “She’s 80 years old!” “There’s plenty more people to be arrested,” one of the organisers called from the touchline. “This is not going to stop.” The combination of farce, dauntlessness and misallocated courage was unmistakable. After months of background hibernation — occasional snooker stunt aside — Just Stop Oil are back. Today, tomorrow, and the day after, they are repeating the above process, churning phalanx after phalanx into the rough embrace of the Metropolitan Police.

This is the radical fringe of the climate movement, which will come to define the coming decade of politics, if not the century. It’s aiming at a political revolution. But for now, it still sits somewhere in a Venn diagram of risible-meets-despised in the collective mind. First there was Extinction Rebellion (XR), which briefly captured the public mood before squandering it in a symbolic clash between working-class commuters and middle-class activists at Canning Town Tube. Then Insulate Britain emerged as an extreme splinter, dissatisfied with the slow progress of XR. Finally, defeated on the motorways of Britain, it morphed again. Just Stop Oil is the latest phase of evolution: its nimblest, most creative and worthiest form yet. 

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There is overlap between the groups — one woman in Trafalgar Square confides that she’s there in breach of contempt of court charges dating from the Insulate Britain protests two years ago. But each name-change has been accompanied by a detectable lurch in timbre. XR’s 2019 protests were comparably joyful, colourful, carnivalesque. Their successors strike a more militant mood. You can read the difference in the logos. XR’s: a jagged hourglass; a stop sign. “Time is running out.” Just Stop Oil’s: a weeping, staring, chop-fallen skull. “This is humanity’s deathly future.” 

Between them these groups have made the threat of interrupted football fixtures, Heinz-splattered artwork and choked highways a new part of daily life. But they remain outside of politics, at best a parasitical feature of public debate. And, like any other radical movement of our time, they are an eccentric receptacle for wayward political anger.

This round of marches has been in the works for months, and JSO recruited hard in anticipation. On a dark and blustery October night, I went along to a welcome meeting, held in a cinderblock discussion space just off Brick Lane called Newspeak House. There were about 100 perched on secondary-school chairs, ready, or at the very least willing, to join JSO’s merry men. 

Here such climate fears are mobilised; here they are put in uniform. The star speaker was Roger Hallam, Extinction Rebellion co-founder and Just Stop Oil’s in-house eschatalogue. He was there to tell us how bad it all is — in fact how it’s much worse than we can possibly believe — all delivered in his distinctive rambling, potty-mouthed, and wilfully apocalyptic rhetorical style. “It’s not gonna be a choice between it being ok and it being shit; it’s a choice between it being shit and it being so fucking shit you can’t possibly imagine!” The scroll of doom he unfurls is essential to understanding this movement. In 1968, radicals were told to take their desires for reality. Now, they take their nightmares for prophecy. 

Hallam leans heavily on the 20th-century horror imaginary for his figurative conjurings. The Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide, atrocities in the Congo — they’re as nothing compared with the moral crime and mass slaughter our political elites are carrying out right now. This religious imagery — Hallam’s mother was a Methodist preacher — is now the lingua franca of the movement. They too talk of “genocide”, even of “reckoning”. We have sinned against our planet, and now we must be punished. Perhaps, as the Christian climate scholar Catherine Keller has written, only “theology… articulates what unconditionally matters”.

Hallam’s showstopper claim is that if we breach two degrees of warming above pre-industrial averages this century, “one thousand million” people will die. This is the end for everyone, everywhere, and animals too. The “sixth extinction” is already underway. 

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But, Hallam told us with a wild grin, “once you find yourself in that police cell, you know you’re doing the right thing”. I looked around Newspeak House and saw nodding heads, and flashing, inspired eyes. A young activist then outlined the strategy. The plan was to “slow march” on roads until the government caved to our demands. The target for each of us was to get arrested five times. And, he yelped excitedly at the end, “When you’re in court, say ‘fuck you’ to the judge!”

How do you turn a muddled mob into a militia? With “nonviolence training”, held in a cosy Quakers’ reading-room in central London. Not since I crept the boards of youth theatre have I faced such a punishing gauntlet of breathing exercises, “chairs to one side”, and choreographed morality tales. But this is how the campaigns that have immobilised our cities for the last year and a half are war-gamed and strategised. Arranged in a circle of chairs was a medley of Just Stop Oil regulars. Veteran Greenpeace-niks, lifelong RSPB-donor twitcher-types, dyed-haired student-radicals, school-leavers stranded on a domestic gap year. And — still overwhelmingly the spine of this movement it seems — the white middle-class middle-aged. Well: who else is free for this sort of thing on a Wednesday afternoon?

This crowd was very much the newly converted. They explain how they’ve learned to feel climate guilt at having had their children, or, discussing road accidents caused by JSO marches, exclaim that such incidents are the fault of those who continue to choose to drive. These feelings are here to be diverted into the studied dispassion of “nonviolence”. The protest philosophy attempts to plot a third way between violent action and apathy, resisting and disrupting in such a way that avoids causing harm. Blocking roads is thought to be a method of causing disruption without utterly alienating Just Stop Oil from the wider population. 

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On our feet, we marshalled for the battles we’d face on the road. What do you do if a driver agitates that they’re losing work because of the protest? Calmly apologise and explain that you’re here to protest the climate crisis. And if someone claims they’re driving someone to hospital with an injury? Groups must use their discretion. The level of anticipated confrontation was uncomfortable for most of the people there. And this is where that eerie stupor of detachment that seems to possess JSO activists on marches comes from. It’s a form of withdrawal from chaotic surroundings, submerged beneath the moral demands of the movement.

“I don’t understand why we’re marching on the roads at all,” one women said. Why don’t we challenge the supply-side of the fossil-fuel industry instead? The trainer explained that in April last year, JSO activists blocked the 10 largest oil terminals in Britain with hundreds of activists and forced ExxonMobil to suspend operations at the sites. The demonstration generated little media coverage, and was quickly forgotten. It was deemed a failure.

Just Stop Oil claims that its arrest tactics are meant to place pressure on the judiciary and police, compelling the state to concede its demands. But the new powers given to the police in the Public Order Act have made arrest a formality, as it was this week on Whitehall. It’s clear that the strategy really is to convey a form of scandal-symbolism — which is also why artworks and now church services have become fair game. And this places the group in an uneasily dependent relationship with the motorists it disrupts and the “Right-wing” media it so resents. It needs the rage and the coverage to make its protests worthwhile. Shock can only carry you so far though. This round of arrests has been reported, but generated nothing like the commotion of XR’s 2019 campaign, let alone JSO’s earlier efforts.

But they’re not after everyone. Just Stop Oil has inherited XR’s aim of converting 3.5% of the population to the cause, a numinous figure drawn from a study of protest movements that showed inexorable social change flowing after that point. But many of the social movements they take their cue from (including JSO’s own hall of fame: Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela) took place in pre-democratic or semi-democratic societies. Resorting to civil disobedience is a more obviously moral option when the ballot box is sealed. But to stage an occupation of something as quotidian as a B-road, justified or not, comes across as a statement of political superiority, arrogance even.

The climate writer Richard Seymour has argued that Extinction Rebellion represented one variation of “technopopulist” politics — a genuinely grassroots campaign which nonetheless advocates for solutions located above and beyond usual party politics. Just Stop Oil is another example of this scrappy phenomenon, which emerged as a symptom of the very social failures it seeks to redress. Speaking to tearful activists on pavements of Whitehall, they gnash and rage: “We’ve tried protests, we’ve tried petitions, we’ve tried everything…” But as the road is quickly cleared and the cars start moving again, you have to ask the obvious question: is this changing anyone’s minds either?

It still feels strange to say the King, impossible to utter it without savouring the phrase as if in quotation marks: no other British title quite embodies the same tension between the lost magic of the realm and the banalities of modern public life. Replacing the careworn grandmother embodying the post-war diminution of the British state, our new king, part Athonite mystic, part pampered dandy, remains a mystery.

Just like the juxtaposition of Extinction Rebellion’s pagan eco-mysticism with the box-ticking, bell-ringing passive-aggressiveness of Sunak’s cycle cavalry, the King represents two divergent paths for Britain’s future. To supporters like myself, inclined to hail him — partly seriously and partly ironically — as a post-liberal figurehead, a champion of small family farms and a lost way of life, the King may still signal a renaissance of sorts. To his detractors, he represents all that is wrong with the 21st-century establishment. Some view him as the herald of top-down bureaucratic eco-austerity for the masses while the elites preserve their wealth and contentment; others see his recent capitulation to the race grifters and betrayal of a loyal family servant as evidence of all that is most destabilising and harmful about modern British life. There are two kings within Charles waiting to be crowned, just as there are two rival Britains struggling to be born.

The Queen’s funeral, with its sombre pomp and reassertion of the power and majesty of the state, could be interpreted as a rejection of modern Britain as much as the great festive events of her later life proclaimed a celebration of who we are now. What rich stores of symbolic meaning, then, await us at the coronation?

The sheer strangeness of this event, its apartness from modern Britain, is the essence of its meaning. When our king is anointed as God’s chosen in the great stone sepulchre of the British people, we will witness something strange and literally magical. So divorced from modernity as to be almost incomprehensible, we will witness, like puzzled anthropologists, the ancient rituals of our own lost British tribe. The choice of music, of court dress and of religious benedictions that will attend this descendant of both Vlad Dracul and Mohammed, in this most Catholic ceremony of a Protestant country, are rich fodder for grandstanding and debate. All politics, all power, is at heart symbolic, resting on ancient foundations like a modern church on ancient monoliths: only once or twice in our lifetimes will the state draw back its robes and reveal her hidden mysteries to us.

How is Charles to rule and bring this strange duality, the ancient and the modern, into public life? For decades, he was mocked as an eccentric, a weirdo who talked to his plants and praised the rustic hardships of traditional peasant life from within his palace walls. This urge to call him weird as an insult, springs from the same source as the eye-rolling ironic epithet “normal country” levelled at Britain. Instead, it is a compliment. Britain is not a normal country, whatever that would be, and thank God.

From the beginning of recorded history, Britain has always been viewed as a place strange and apart from the rest of Europe and the world, an insular realm of eccentric people and half-understood customs. In the awkward adolescence of his reign, between the inheritance of his role and his donning of the crown, Charles has perhaps hidden his own essential weirdness, in an attempt to fit how he felt modern Britain wants him to be. It is only now, as he prepares to assume the role, that Charles has begun to let his weirdness show.

In its true meaning, wyrd is “fate”, the supernatural destiny imposed on all men, just as Charles’s destiny, long-delayed, has finally settled upon him. We must encourage, through Charles, the wyrd’s manifestations in public life.

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Consider Charles’s much-analysed choice of the Green Man as his symbol on the Coronation invitations. What does it tell us about our new king? What makes it so fascinating is not that it is a submerged pagan symbol buried beneath Christian decoration — a popular claim modern folklorists reject — but rather the very knowing ambiguity of the Green Man, a Christian symbol of rebirth that gains its power from the winked suggestion of older, deeper roots. It is a symbol so intentionally rich in opposing meanings, so downright weird, that no settled meaning can ever be found: it was created to be puzzled over, argued about, and in doing so to uncover hidden truths. It is time for the Green Man to run riot in SW1, for Charles to enrich British public life with his own fertile ambiguities.

How, for example, would our Green Man king bridge the gap between Palace Green’s eco-protesters, fearful of what they believe to be an apocalyptic near-future, and the opposing political tendency, fearful of what they believe to be a dawning age of eco-austerity? In an age where our dependence on Russian energy and neglect of nuclear power has driven ordinary families into financial difficulty, the argument that Britain’s antiquated housing stock requires better insulation has been widely adopted by urban yimby commentators, evidence of one path through a divided political sphere.

King Charles, tireless promoter of traditional craftsmanship, could make the still-little-known case to the public that it is precisely because Britain’s housing stock dates from before the 20th century, and was built with traditional breathable materials such as lime, that insulation with modern impermeable materials, as Insulate Britain promote, would worsen the problem. This simple truth, well-known to heritage professionals, has been entirely neglected. And who could have a better pulpit to make the case for a better way forward? For if Britain’s largely Victorian houses could be insulated using traditional materials by a scaled-up, newly-trained workforce of high-skilled, high-wage craftsmen, a major political and economic problem could be resolved according to the methods Charles has spent a lifetime promoting.

Similarly, the recent collapse of much of Britain’s intensive agriculture model has heightened the growing clash between those who believe it is the way to food security, and those who believe it is despoiling Britain’s fields, forests and waterways; nor does it keep the nation fed and healthy, nor our farmers in business. As a longstanding advocate for the small family farm, King Charles can bridge this gap: instead of lecturing the nation on how to do better, he could show how the best nature-friendly farming systems work by converting Buckingham Palace’s 40 acres of private gardens into a working small farm. Imagine a rural oasis of hay meadows and rippling fields of grain in the centre of the capital, a haven of wildlife watched over by our benign farmer king. Through taking action, the king can become a living bridge between the capital and the countryside, the old ways and the new.

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While ideas like these may seem trifling and eccentrically small-scale to both the eco-modernists, enraptured by grand geoengineering projects, and to large-scale rewilders alike, it is their pure simplicity that grants them power. While fate has planted him at the nation’s apex, the abiding characteristic of our new king is his genuine love and affection for the humble and vernacular, even if only expressed in an occasional holiday from the super-rich luxuries of his permanent existence. It is a rare head of state who mends hedges and sleeps in peasants’ cottages and monasteries for relaxation (even if his personal lodgings are more those of abbots’ quarters than monks’ cells); he can now share the same powers of regeneration these simple pleasures must bring to him with the nation as a whole.

It is only through converting the advocacy of the Prince of Wales into the necessary labour of showing and doing that our Green Man King can make himself and the monarchy a central, guiding presence in British public life. To heal the new divisions of the coming age, and make the coronation a genuine period of national rebirth, there are worse options than embracing the sheer Weirdness of Charles III.

Those essays and articles could be rolled into one easily enough, and sometimes it seems as if they have been. The formula is always the same, and can be usefully applied across the political spectrum. Start with talk of the “rising tide of authoritarianism” all over the world, as evidenced by “populism”, Brexit, Giorgia Meloni, Viktor Orbán, Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump, Joe Biden or any other leader you don’t like. Move on to explore how much of this “rising authoritarianism” is reflected in environmentalism, as evidenced by Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, the Green New Deal, the Great Reset, Bill Gates, Greta Thunberg or [insert name of bête noire here].

After this, list the historical inspirations for these new green authoritarians: Ted Kaczynski, Pentti Linkola and Dave Foreman should do for starters. Dig into the most miserable chans and Reddits of the internet and “expose” a few anonymised avatars promoting race war in the name of the planet. Mention the Christchurch shooter. Use the phrase “dark undercurrent” a lot. Chuck in the names of a couple of nature writers from the Thirties who became fascists. Mutter darkly about how Hitler was a vegetarian. Did you know there was an organic garden at Dachau? Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Having got here, you can move on to the meat of the thing: sombrely intoning about the “new threat to democracy” represented by this frightening movement. Depending on where you’re coming from, you can now explain how these new eco-authoritarians represent either a threat to our God-given right to drive, mine, manufacture, fly, burn oil and freely enjoy the glories that only Western Progress can provide, or a threat to diversity, equality, human rights, LGBTQIA++ people, refugees, “global justice” and a woman’s right to choose. Either way, the conclusion will be much the same: a non-specific but ominous call for more monitoring of “problematic” views, more work to tackle “radicalisation”, more laws to prevent protests and “hate speech”, and probably more internet regulation. For the safety of us all, of course.

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The problem, though, is that actual “eco-fascism” is notable mostly for its absence. Dark corners of the internet aside — you can find any craziness there, after all — it’s hard to find a single “eco-fascist” anywhere out in the real world. No public intellectuals, no writers, no philosophers, no politicians, no popular movements embrace anything of the kind. Plenty of people get the label applied to them of course — without the prefix, the word “fascist” has been a meaningless, all-purpose insult for decades — but they all reject it. I was in and around the green movement for a long time and I never met an eco-fascist, though I did have the pleasure of being called one.

So why all the dire warnings? I can think of two possible explanations.

The first is the simplest: there is something we can’t bear to look at, and we are trying to distract attention from it by screaming at the people who are pointing it out. The thing we are avoiding is the thing that we used to call “nature”, and the reality that we are trying to distract attention from is that we are part of it, we live inside it and that everything we do to it we also do to ourselves. Change the climate out there and it changes in here. Erode the soil, erode your soil. Poison the oceans, poison your culture. This is how it works, and this is what we are now facing.

And we cannot face it, even those of us who think we can. Whatever we think our politics are, we have no idea what to do about the coming end of the brief age of abundance, and the reappearance, armed and dangerous, of what we could get away with denying for a few decades: limits. Those who point these limits out — and who point out, especially, that the very existence of industrial modernity might be the root cause of the problems we currently face — can expect to be smacked down with the worst insults our culture can conjure.

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This is one explanation for the mysterious rise of the ghostly eco-fascists. But I think there might be another. The phrase “eco-fascist” is a label which is increasingly being applied to the wrong kind of environmentalist: those who offer up a vision of humanity and nature that involves roots, traditions, smallness, simplicity, a return to previous lifeways. They are contrasted with the right kind of green: those who are modern, global, progressive and — most important — friendly to the onward march of the technological society.

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote an essay called “Dark Ecology”, about the state of environmentalism. In it, I wrote about the emergence of a tendency in green circles which I called “neo-environmentalism”. The neo-greens — who preferred to call themselves “ecomodernists” — emerged as a reaction to the traditional green movement, which in its infancy had been relatively conservative, low-tech and focused on the human scale. The neo-greens rejected all this as backward, impractical and even dangerous. They believed, as I wrote back then, that: “Civilisation, nature and people can be ‘saved’ only by enthusiastically embracing biotechnology, synthetic biology, nuclear power, geoengineering”. The “new environmentalism”, they declared, in manifestoes like this one, would be, as we might now say, “grown-up”.

Sucks to be right, as the kids say. Since I wrote that essay, the neo-greens have, as predicted, mounted an effective corporate takeover of most of the environmental movement. Examples of what we might call Machine Environmentalism have been embraced by the corporate sector, big NGOs, global institutions and most of the intellectual class, most obviously in the “Green New Deals” that are popping up like summer daisies in all corners of the globe. Meanwhile, the green movement is splintering into camps, determined by attitudes to the kind of intrusive and novel technologies that the Machine Greens are pushing.

In Britain, this divide has been illustrated recently by attitudes to green pundit George Monbiot’s latest book, which embraces the neo-green vision. In the humbly titled Regenesis, Monbiot, an urban vegan intellectual, makes a case — based, naturally, on the “peer-reviewed science” — for the “end of most farming” and the replacement of much of its output with vat-grown, bacterial “food” manufactured via “industrial biotechnology”. The vast acreages of land which have been stripped of their farmers can then be “rewilded” in various Monbiot-approved ways, which mainly seem to involve growing forests for always-on urbanites to go wolf-spotting at weekends.

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In promoting a high-tech, globalised food system (perhaps overseen by the world government he has previously argued for), and casually calling for the destruction of the basis of post-Neolithic human civilisation, Monbiot offers a perfect example of what a neo-green future will look like: utopian, hyper-urban, technological, rational and most of all, “efficient”. What matters now, as he explains, is mathematics:

“It’s time we became obsessed by numbers. We need to compare yields, compare land uses, compare the diversity and abundance of wildlife, compare emissions, erosion, pollution, costs, inputs, nutrition…”

Welcome to what the greens have become.

A number of actual farmers who are also first-rate thinkers have taken aim at Monbiot’s Machine Green dystopia in recent months (Simon Fairlie, Chris Smaje and John Lewis-Stempel offer some of the best critiques), but while they might win the battle they are, for now at least, losing the war. Only last month, a pioneering Finnish “solar food” company championed by Monbiot was given EU permission to roll out production of their new “sustainable protein” (as part of the “European green deal”). The company says that the laboratory in which it produces this “novel food” — which it calls “Factory 01” — is part of a “food revolution” that will, for the first time in history, detach food production from the land, the farmers who work it and the culture it creates. Excitable admirers are already explaining that this may give us the ability to one day 3D-print our own food. I’m salivating already.

Older, crustier greenies like me, labouring under the yoke of a pre-modern sensibility which makes us reluctant to eat the sludge and live in the pod, might feel that something has gone terribly wrong with the numbers-obsessed rationalism that underlies this new, corporate-friendly green technocracy. But we have no five-point plan of our own, and we can’t peer-review our intuition, so our complaints don’t convince anybody who matters. And now that the localists, the deep ecologists, the peasants, the small farmers — and anyone else whose human-scale vision might interfere with the march of Progress — have been conveniently designated “eco-fascists”, we are able to behold the only legitimate form of environmentalism which remains: a globalised technocratic, “progressive” push for “sustainability”, led by intellectuals, entrepreneurs and professional activists.

The green movement, long ago co-opted by the Left, has now been co-opted too by technocrats. For this reason, the neo-green (or should we say soylent green?) food future can’t be viewed in isolation. It is only one aspect of the unfolding phenomenon which has been dubbed the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — a revolution in which the Machine Greens, wittingly or otherwise, are playing a key part.

Dreamt up, like so many other catchy corporate catchphrases, by the World Economic Forum in 2015, the Fourth Revolution is a way of describing our historical moment. That same year, Foreign Affairs produced a book by the same name, to accompany the annual Davos gathering of politicians, business leaders and Bono. In it, the inescapable Klaus Schwab explains, in prose that could make a Martian invasion sound boring, the import of the times we are living through:

“The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanise production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third… It is characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.”

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The rest of the book, made up of offerings from various scientists, engineers, politicians and philosophers, explores the implications of this “blurring of lines” between created and uncreated, natural and artificial, wild and tamed. Now that we inhabit what the neo-greens like to call the “Anthropocene” — now that we are, in H. G. Wells’s formulation, Men Like Gods — what do we intend to conjure with the thunder and the lightning that pours forth from our just and rational fingers?

All of the contributors stress that overcoming the old-school distinction between the digital and the natural is the essence of the thing. Neil Gershenfeld, for example, defines the “digital fabrication revolution” — the one which will soon be growing our tank-bred bio-sludge dinners — as “the ability to turn data into things and things into data”. “Intelligent” buildings, wearable sensors, implanted chips: six years ago, when this book was written, these may have seemed radical. Today, it feels as if they have been almost normalised.

Partly this is because of the ubiquity of Amazon Alexas, Smartphone apps and endless, boosterish narratives about the exciting future that AI is building. And partly it is because the Covid pandemic was used as a trial run for precisely the kind of technologies — smartphone-enabled passports, digital population tracking, media-driven narrative control — which are now increasingly sold to us as a means of “saving the planet”. It is no coincidence that some of the loudest proponents of Machine Environmentalism were also fanatical supporters of the Covid biosecurity state. We are being trained to like what is coming — or at least to shrug our shoulders and accept its inevitability.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the Fourth Revolution, though, is what has been called “datafication”. The book’s chapter on “Big Data” explains that the knowledge available to each of us today on the Internet dwarfs that which would have been available in the Great Library of Alexandria, the greatest repository of learning in the ancient world. But size, as they explain, isn’t everything:

“Big data is also characterized by the ability to render into data many aspects of the world that have never been quantified before; call it ‘datafication’. For example, location has been datafied, first with the invention of longitude and latitude, and more recently with GPS satellite systems. Words are treated as data when computers mine centuries’ worth of books. Even friendships and ‘likes’ are datafied, via Facebook.”

Here we see the same “obsession with numbers” that George Monbiot demands of us as we contemplate how to produce our food and live in our landscape, and it reveals the elision between Machine Environmentalism and the elite-driven tech revolution it is part of. What we can see is that both achieve their goals through the process of datafication: the quantification of everything. The pattern of reality will be transformed into bits and bytes, comparisons and yields, numbers and statistics, until even novels and friendships and meadows and family meals on winter nights can be measured and compared and judged for their relative contributions to efficiency and sustainability.

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There is a rift here, and we should gaze deep into it, because there is something down there that we need to make out. It is the ancient rift between those who embrace the mindset of “datafication” — which is, in the form of sums and written language, one of the foundations of civilisation — and those who are repelled by it. I suspect it can never really be healed, because it marks the border between two distinct ways of seeing. The philosopher Jeremy Naydler has referred to them as ratio and the nous, but we could just as well call them left and right brain, mythos and logos, or — perhaps most simply — the sacred and the profane.

The Fourth Revolution and the Machine Environmentalism which it contains offer us a profoundly profane vision of the world. Life in this understanding is not a sacred thing but an engineering challenge. It is something which can be studied, quantified and constantly tweaked until we arrive at the most efficient version. This may be done with the best of intentions (or it may not) but the things which cannot be measured will, of course, be left out of the equation, and the things which cannot be measured happen to be the stuff of life. Love. God. Place. Culture. The profound mystery of beauty. A feeling for land or community or cultural traditions or the unfolding of human history over generations. Song. Art. They’ll “datafy” all of this soon enough, no doubt, or try to. But the kind of people who think that the Great Library of Alexandria contained “exabytes’ worth of information” rather than the collected fruits of hard-won wisdom are lost before they ever sit down to their datasets.

If you have ever wondered why climate change has so utterly dominated the green debate to the exclusion of so many other problems which stem from industrial society — mass extinction, soil erosion, the collapse of human cultures, ocean pollution — then the answer, I think, is here. Climate change is a problem amenable to numerical questions and technocratic answers. It is, furthermore, a problem which, almost by definition, can only be solved by elites. If you can’t read or understand the “peer-reviewed science” then you are open to being intimidated into fearful silence by those who can, or claim they can. And those people — drawn, as all green “thought leaders” are, from the upper strata of society — will bring with them a worldview which treats the mass of humanity like so many cattle to be herded into the sustainable, zero-carbon pen. If you’re wondering where you’ve heard this story before, just dig out your dirty old Covid mask. It will all come flooding back.

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Interestingly, some of the progenitors of the Fourth Revolution are themselves uneasy about where some of it is leading. Even Klaus Schwab, who these days is often lazily presented as a volcano-dwelling Bond villain pulling the global strings, admits to unease at the speed and scale of change. In the book, he expresses his timid concern about how our “quintessential human capacities such as compassion and co-operation” might be eroded by deep shifts like these. “It is already changing our health and leading to a ‘quantified’ self,” he writes, “and sooner than we think it may lead to human augmentation”.

Even as he proselytises for the Fourth Revolution, Schwab can see what is coming. Google maps and smartphone apps were always just the beginning. We are headed into a Brave New World of all-knowing Smart homes and vat-grown sludge for breakfast, and every step along that road will make perfect rational sense. A Panopticon world, remade at the nano level by the allegedly well-meaning, lies just around the corner. C. S. Lewis understood the trap well: “Of all tyrannies,” he wrote, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive… those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

What the Fourth Revolutionaries never seem to grasp is that the question you ask will frame the philosophy you develop. If your question is “how can we remove all this atmospheric carbon to avoid what these computer models say is coming?” then the answer can only lead you to a globalised technocracy. If, on the other hand, the question you ask is “how can we build lives which offer us meaning, in alliance with the rest of nature?” then you may be led in a very different direction.

It is the first kind of question that a Machine society will always ask, and there will always be endless, multiplying justifications for asking it. Ecology, equality, feminism, democracy, public health, growth, security, the war on terror or crime or drugs or whatever: there is always a reason for Big Data. The control is always necessary to prevent a greater evil. Even a movement which once challenged this grim way of seeing has today been bought and sold by it.

For at least 200 years we have been thoroughly undermining the foundations of all of our assumptions. Now, new cracks in the masonry are appearing daily. Can we caulk them up with vat-grown eco-sludge and hope they don’t spread? Can Big Data come to our rescue? What can we measure, manage, monitor, to help us escape from this? This is what I think, though I often wish I didn’t: we are living now through what may be the final triumph of Rational Man. The tower he has made has nearly touched the very roof of the world. Every old story can tell us what will happen next.

But isn’t “Milk Pour” just a little hard to swallow? Doesn’t it actually stink of First Worldism? A cynic might even suggest that Skylar Sharples and her friends are the dupes of the billion-dollar alt-milk industry. Despite its we-save-the-world advertising, alt-milk is implicated in enough environmental destruction to turn you green, but only with sickness at the hypocrisy.

We all know the problems with dairy. It’s Daisy the cow’s methane burps, and the fact that livestock takes up so much of the globe’s surface. Except that the prime reason for the planetary extent of livestock is that vast tracts of the Earth consist of grass and scrub — food humans cannot eat, but which Daisy and her ilk can turn into nutritious meat and dairy, stuff that humans can chow. Far from being upscale food, as “Milk Pour” would have you believe, dairy — that is cow, sheep, goat, buffalo, donkey, horse milk — is the necessary subsistence food of millions of pastoralist peoples across the world, from Eastern Africa to Mongolia. I cannot wait for Skylar and her activist friends to spread the word to Maasai herders, to chuck away their milk while declaiming a “plant-based future”.

“Milk Pour” might also like to consider, before their next student farce on the shop floor, the UN Environment Programme’s conclusion that “pastoralism is increasingly recognised as one of the most sustainable production systems on the planet and plays a major role in safeguarding ecosystems and biodiversity in natural grasslands and rangelands”. Extolling “plant-based” as a worldwide cure is senseless. It is nothing but Western cultural imperialism, missionary veganism.

“Milk Pour” leaves a very sour political taste in the mouth at home, too. Animal Rebellion says it targets high-end grocers because it doesn’t want to bother people struggling with the cost of living. It seems not to have occurred to them that those people would probably appreciate some of the milk bottles the kids are upending. Milk prices have increased by 50% in the last year. And consider the most basic consequences of the protest. Who clears up the mess? Add contempt for shopworkers to the list of privileges Animal Rebellion need to check. And I say that as a proud former member of the shopworkers’ union, USDAW.

While the media obligingly laps up the Milk Pour stunts, the heads of the alt-milk firms must feel like fat cats who have got all the synthetic cream. The protests are a convenient diversion from the crass environmental profile of their own products, now drunk by one in three Britons, and worth £400 million a year. Take almond milk. Or maybe not, if you value biodiversity — hell, even if you even fancy a drink of water. Industrialised almond agriculture requires five litres of the blue stuff to produce a single nut. A litre of almond milk drink requires 158 litres of water, or 20 times as much as dairy.

Such has been the millennial demand — almond milk is the most popular alt-milk — that California, which produces 80% of the world’s almonds in its arid Central Valley, saw land planted with almond trees grow from 1,958 square kilometres to 6,475 square kilometres over the last 20 years. The result? Drought, desertification, and almond-growers having to grub up their trees due to lack of water.

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It gets worse. Almond growers invariably douse their crop in quantities of glyphosate — known to be lethal to bees. According to Nate Donley, a senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity, sending bees to pollinate the California almond industry is “like sending the bees to war. Many don’t come back.” In California, bees are dying in record numbers due to habitat loss and exposure to the pesticides of the industrialised almond industry. Animal Rebellion? When vegans drink almond milk, they are complicit in Animal Extinction.

What about uber-trendy coconut milk? Well, coconut trees only grow in tropical climates. Western demand is causing the exploitation of workers in poorer nations: just ask a small farmer in the Philippines or Indonesia on $2 a day for back-breaking work. And, er, what about the food miles?

Or the destruction of rainforests? It’s not just coconut milk that’s guilty on this front. Large swathes of the Amazon have been burned to make way for soy farms, and the soy goes into alt-milk as well as the cattle feed. But don’t be fooled into thinking the solution is to start growing them closer to home, in the northern hemisphere. Of the soybeans grown in the US, 94% are genetically engineered. According to a study published in Food Chemistry, when sprayed with the ever-popular pesticide RoundUp, genetically engineered soybeans accumulate high levels of glyphosate — which is not just toxic to bees but, says the British Medical Journal, likely carcinogenic.

Still fancy, soya? A study published in the Journal of Applied Animal Nutrition suggests that cow milk is far more sustainable for the planet than “milk alternatives”, especially soya-based ones, and especially if the cows are in UK systems based on grass. According to the lead author, Professor Mike Wilkinson: if you’re a British consumer, “drinking milk from cows in the UK uses 11 times less soya than consuming drinks made directly from soya”.

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Wheat has corrupted humanity

By John Lewis-Stempel

But maybe oat milk, most famously purveyed by Swedish company Oatly, is the great white hope of vegan faux dairy? Oats are grown in cooler climes such as the northern US, Canada and Scotland — and are therefore not associated with deforestation in developing countries. Alas, the negative of this would-be guilt-free option is that most oats come from highly industrialised operations in which they are sprayed with none other than Roundup. A study by the Environmental Working Group, an American public health organisation, found glyphosate in 43 of 45 foods it tested containing conventionally grown oats — while the Pesticide Action Network reported in 2019 that 94% of oats tested contained residues of more than one pesticide. Oatly insist that their alt-milk products are glyphosate free.

You would hope so at the price. Oatly Whole Drink costs £2.00 per litre. As they sloshed dairy milk about the floor of Waitrose, complaining about “the cost of living crisis”, Animal Rebellion might have considered real milk rather than quaffing alt-milk? I mean, Waitrose’s top-end Duchy organic dairy milk is 99p a litre — a 50% saving right there. And surely, any halfway-credible protestors against conspicuous consumption would have targeted the cartons of Rude Health Chilled Organic Almond Drink at £2.40 litre? Oh truly, for those of us who believe that sustainable livestock farming is a boon for nature, human health and cutting CO2, vegan alt-milk is the comedy gift that just keeps giving. That Rude Health drink contains 1% almonds and is essentially rice and water. Frankly, it has close to zero nutritional value, and is essentially sugary flavoured water. For £2.40 litre.

And it ain’t doing much for the environment. Early Oatly adverts also suggested that by drinking oat milk instead of dairy you personally can save a whopping 73% of your total greenhouse emissions. No, you cannot. The claim is based on Oatly’s estimate that their milk generates 0.44kg of CO2 per litre compared to dairy milk’s 1.58kg. This figure is based on methane metrics that have been shown to be biased against animal foods, ignore the fact that dairy cows also end up in the human food chain as meat (reducing other CO2 food demands), and do not account for livestock pasture’s carbon sequestration.

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Then you have the overwhelming problem in standard calculations of how much greenhouse gas food emits: the sums are based on gas per food kilos or food calories. Calculations based on food quality, rather than quantity, make for very different answers. As Jayne Buxton notes in her comprehensive survey of vegan food, The Great Plant-Based Con (2022), when the metric used is CO2 per micronutrient content, the footprint of dairy milk is less than a third of that of oat milk.

Alternative milk is not a milk equivalent. Oatly claims in its adverts that its product is “like milk, but made for humans”. Made in a machine, that is. It is weak nutritional stuff. Typically, dairy milk naturally provides protein, calcium, vitamin D, vitamin A, phosphorus, vitamin B 12, riboflavin, potassium, the list goes on; a glass of original oat milk typically has calcium, vitamin D, vitamin A, riboflavin and iron — all, apart from the last, added artificially. Oh, and in the case of Oatly, the “milk” comes with added rape seed oil, phosphates (linked to kidney disease) and sugar. After being called out by Campbell Soup, of all people, Oatly deftly decided to stop marketing its oat milks as containing “no added sugars”, because its convoluted ultra-production process — in that inhuman machine — breaks down oat starch into simple sugars, primarily  maltose. So you get 7g of sugar with a single serving of Oatly Original. Hence US blogger Nat Eliason’s famous assertion that Oatly is “The New Coke”.

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People are getting rich off the faux white stuff. Although Oatly promotes itself as a folksy, right-on, climate-change-busting start-up, it is a $2 billion business, the world’s largest oat milk company. Top investors include that well-known friend of the people Goldman Sachs, and the equity group Blackstone. According to Bloomberg, the CEO of Blackstone, Stephen Schwarzman, donated $3.7 million to Super Pac America First Nation, which supported the reelection of Donald Trump. This is the Trump whose administration took more than 130 separate steps to stop fighting climate change.

Elsewhere, one of Oatly’s most recent commercial initiatives has been to partner with the German petrol station network Aral, to launch the Oatly Barista Edition in approximately 1,250 of Aral’s sites. In other words Oatly, whose Number 1 “Pillar of Action” is “to drive a shift toward more sustainable, low-emission practices”, has done a deal with sellers of… petrol.

That loud sound from the meadow just down the lane? Daisy the cow, natural maker of milk for humans for 6000 years, laughing her hooves off at the stupidity and gullability of humans. I’ve just told her a joke. It’s the one about alt-milk.

I was lying on a sun lounger when a call came through to ask if I would like to take part in The Reunion, a Radio 4 programme bringing together those involved with Occupy to reminisce about the significance of that movement. I wearily declined. Being over 2,000 miles away from the steps of St Paul’s made this an easy decision. But I may have declined anyway. My protesting days are over.

“I have sung Joan Baez’s We Shall Overcome for years, but nothing has changed” was how an old friend of mine expressed the same weariness — not so much a cynical acceptance of the status quo, more a feeling of being beaten down by political reality. Many of the friends I made during the Occupy protest had various sorts of breakdown after the camp was cleared. Some made for the woods to find themselves again, some were burnt out and plunged into depression, others found the emotional wherewithal to reboot their protesting energy, and I admire them for this. We Shall Overcome began life as a Methodist hymn, words taken from the letter of Paul to the Galatians: “Let us not grow weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”

Protesting, even to the point of civil disobedience, has a great deal of religious energy about it — one might even say Christian energy. It is not insignificant that protester and Protestant share an obvious etymology. In the letter to the Galatians, Paul was exhorting his fellow Christians to place faith above the religious law. His major concern was a distant dispute about circumcision, but the philosophical way he addressed this issue — setting faith and law against each other — has provided a kind of justification for protesters ever since. It makes no difference that this may be a misreading of Paul, whether the target is the government or the Pope, the disruptive energy of Galatians has reshaped the world. So why am I rooted to my sun lounger? Am I not convicted by this inaction, especially as I am slapping on the sunscreen whilst directly facing the Sea of Galilee, a few miles from where all this disruptive energy was first expressed, at least in my tradition?

Yes, there are things about the “spirituality” of the protestor that have come to bother me, not least an overconfidence in what they think of as “doing good” — an overconfidence that can spill over into self-righteousness, that abiding condition of many on the progressive Left. Is it really OK to block the path of ambulances on their way to hospital or people trying to go about their legitimate business? If the cause is weighty enough, the means can be justified. This can provide a dangerous licence to behave badly, the virtue of the cause obscuring an obligation to common human decency. But there again, if the cause is something like the Civil Rights movement and yes, even the Climate Catastrophe, then emergency measures can feel necessary. I wish I knew how to square this circle.

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Back in the late Sixties, the two famous Czech writers, Milan Kundera and Václav Havel, began an ongoing spat about the value and dangers of the protesting mindset with respect to the so-called Prague Spring of 1968. Following a period of liberalisation and democratisation — “socialism with a human face” they called it — the Soviet Union sent half a million soldiers into Czechoslovakia to reverse the changes. Eight months of protest followed: some sabotaged street signs, some set themselves ablaze. Havel admitted that there was no hope, but nonetheless proposed “risky” protest. In a fierce essay called Radicalism and Exhibitionism (1969), Kundra went for the jugular.

“Havel states that no hopes endured, but unlike most people this does not arouse in him resignation or defeatism, but on the contrary a strengthened longing for action. But to what end action, when no hopes endured? … Such action has only a twofold aim: (1) to unmask the world in all its irreparable amorality, and (2) to display its author in all his pure morality.

“In this way what was originally a purely moral attitude (the rejection of the unjust world) has turned into pure moral exhibitionism. The effort to publicly demonstrate the beauty of one’s own morality outweighs the effort to change things for the better…”

I do not want to take a deep dive into Czech politics, but it should be said — contra Kundera — it was protesters and the memory of those who had given their lives during the Prague Spring that kept the energy going and helped topple the Soviet regime in 1989. And, of course, Havel became President. This is the moral dilemma: Kundera has, to my mind, a compelling point about the moral exhibitionism of protest, but Havel seemed to be on the right side of history.

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This same energy of protest is now being focused, not just against those who deny the gravity of the current environmental crisis, but also against the Tories whose indifference to the cost-of-living crisis seems evident to many of us. Around 1,500 people packed Manchester Cathedral on Tuesday evening to protest that “Enough is Enough”, and call for a national day of action on 1 October. Another movement called Don’t Pay UK is co-ordinating a mass non-payment of energy bills and blockades of petrol stations. As a church we are thinking about establishing ourselves as a “warm bank” for local people who may have to choose between food and heating, even in a relatively prosperous place like Kew.

But we want affordable energy and we want environmentally friendly energy — not necessarily a straightforward combination. We want to stand with the people of Ukraine, but we flinch when the Russians turn the gas off. I can’t say I like the look of this coming Tory government and their cold-heartedness towards the poor. But it’s not all about the Tories.

Protest is often a legitimate cry against the detrimental impact of human action towards the world and especially the most vulnerable, but it is not always the best means of providing solutions, especially ones with full democratic legitimacy. “We shall overcome” is not a programme of action.

So am I still the protesters’ friend? I may be tired and still a little burnt out, but I know what I have to say: of course. Because in the end, despite all my Kundera-like pessimism of human nature, I am equally Eeyore-ish about change ever taking place without grassroots political pressure. So perhaps I should lift myself off my metaphorical sun lounger and get back involved. I still feel a little emotionally burned from my experience during Occupy. I too felt the darkness after it ended. And I do still fear the way in which protest can become morally high on its own supply of virtue. But I must get over this debilitating melancholy. Sometimes we have little choice.

Rapturous applause filled the room, though that was hardly unexpected. Conferences run by the CCP are not usually marked by dissent, especially when they’re attended by the likes of Xie Zhenhua, who led China’s delegation to Cop26, and vice premier Han Zheng, one of the seven standing committee members of the Politburo, the Party’s supreme elite. Indeed, as the room fizzled with optimistic eco-rhetoric, you could almost forget that China is the world’s biggest source of greenhouse gases — and that the new coal-fired power stations in its construction pipeline alone have a greater capacity than Britain’s entire generation fleet.

What was remarkable about this meeting, though, was the surprising presence of an external delegation: joining the CCP apparatchiks on a collection of screens dotted around the room were a number of enthusiastic Britons and other Westerners. According to the official conference report, the “foreign committee members and partners lauded China’s ecological civilisation building and its new and greater contributions to promoting the construction of a clean and beautiful world”.

Who were these people? Strange to tell, they consisted of a veritable Who’s Who of British, European and American climate activists.

Here, for example, was Professor Lord Nicholas Stern, Chairman of the Grantham Centre on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, and a longstanding government adviser who wrote a report for Blair’s Labour government on the need to go green. He told the meeting the world is beginning a “new growth story” that “fits well with China’s vision of an ecological society”.

Here too was Kate Hampton, chief executive of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), which is mainly bankrolled by the billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn, a key financial backer of Extinction Rebellion and one of the world’s biggest sources of green largesse. During the meeting, Hampton said she “supported Chinese leadership on setting the global path for fulfilling Paris goals” — the attempt to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — and praised China for “supporting green Covid-19 recovery”.

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Others were equally fulsome, including Laurence Tubiana, France’s former climate ambassador and now chief executive of the European Climate Foundation, which also gives millions to British green campaigns, such as UK100, an alliance of local authorities pledged to turn Net Zero by 2030; and the Conservative Environment Network.

Also present were representatives from ClientEarth, a law firm that tries to block development in Britain and other countries on environmental grounds in the courts; the Worldwide Fund for Nature, whose president is Prince Charles; and representatives from rich and influential organisations based in America including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Resources Institute and the Energy Foundation.

And yet in the weeks since the CCICED meeting, Cop26 has come and gone; and largely thanks to China, any hope of a meaningful deal has evaporated. On the last day, British minister Alok Sharma was reduced to tears when India and China refused to promise to phase out coal. Back in the real world, President Xi Jinping has said China will increase annual coal production by 220 million tonnes.

Such moves have, unsurprisingly, attracted robust criticism. Professor Jun Arima of Tokyo University, one of Japan’s Cop26 negotiators, told me that allowing China to benefit from cheap, coal-fired energy will only consolidate its industrial domination. Lord Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, pointed out that China’s leaders have repeatedly shown they are not “men of their word”.

Yet those in attendance at the meeting in September have been unified by their reticence. Why?

Last year, in their book Hidden Hand: How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World, Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg revealed how China influences Britain and other Western democracies by seducing their elites. Its ‘useful idiots’ often believe they are acting for the common good, but become blind to Xi’s avowed ambition: for China to achieve global supremacy by 2049, the 100^th anniversary of the Maoist revolution.

Nowhere is this more effective than in the climate movement. I asked a specialist researcher fluent in Mandarin to examine open-source material from the Chinese web. The results suggest Western greens have become prime targets. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising: before he was a climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua helped run the Party Discipline Commission, which operates a secret prison network where torture, according to Human Rights Watch, has long been rife.

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I asked Hamilton if China’s wooing of Western environmentalists explains why the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide has aroused so little protest? He believes it is likely: “They’ve fallen for what the Party calls ‘discourse control’ — to shape the way the rest of the world thinks and talks about China, presenting the Chinese government in a favourable light. Toadying to the Party leadership is letting them off the hook.”

For Lord Stern, this is nothing new: his environmental record is littered with papers saying CCP leaders are making great progress, and suggesting — prematurely — that their coal use and emissions have already or will soon peak. In 2014, for example, he claimed in a paper for the World Economic Forum that China was “emerging as a global leader in climate policy”. His co-author was He Jiankun, a ‘counsellor’ to China’s top administrative body, the State Council, and the director of the Energy, Environment and Economy Institute at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. Three years later, following the the annual WEF jamboree at Davos, Stern said: “The world is looking for a climate champion. In China, it has one.”

Has Stern been naïve and let himself get too close to the CCP? Certainly for the Party, Tsinghua University has a special role: it is Xi Jinping’s alma mater, and home to multiple labs conducting secret research for the People’s Liberation Army. Yet the pair still work together: Stern’s spokesman told me that Tsinghua and the LSE are joint leaders of the Global Alliance of Universities on Climate, which held two international meetings before Cop26 with contributions from Alok Sharma, US climate envoy John Kerry, and — of course — Xie Zhenhua.

This year, for what it’s worth, Stern has called on China to stop building new coal-fired plants. But he still spoke at this year’s CCICED, while his spokesman told me that China remained “keen to learn from the UK’s example of world-leading action on climate change” and said the rate of increase in its emissions had slowed enormously. While this may be true, China’s emissions continued to rise even through the pandemic, and now exceed the total produced by rest of the developed world.

On paper, at least, you might argue there’s no harm in that. After all, the CCICED’s “mission” is to build “a more beautiful China and a green and bountiful world”. Who could possibly object?

Hardly anyone, I suspect, until they learnt that, the CCICED’s Chinese members include not only top Party bosses but officials who work with China’s United Front Work Department, one of the CCP’s main instruments for exerting influence abroad. Among them is Li Xiaolin, a top party cadre and the daughter of China’s late president Li Xiannan. Until recently, she was the chair of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries — which, as Hamilton and Ohlberg show in their book, is one of China’s most important foreign influence organisations.

What does this mean in practice? According to Patricia Adams, director of the Toronto-based environmental think tank Probe International, in 2017 a new Chinese law forced foreign NGOs there to submit to “close supervision” by the Ministry of Public Security, responsible for crushing dissent and controlling China’s secret police. Any organisation deemed to have “harmed the national interest” risks having its assets seized, its staff jailed, and being permanently banned.

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Adams knows this fully well: in 2014, when the new law was being discussed, two Chinese academics she was working with were arrested and later jailed, and Probe International named as co-conspirators. Their crime? “Picking quarrels and provoking troubles” for speaking out on issues such as the rule of law. After that, Adams tells me, “it was no longer safe for us to work in China”. As for the Western environmentalists who still do, she adds: “They hope they can influence China’s leadership. But they are also aware that for them, to publicly criticise China’s policy would be suicide.”

Take, for example, the aforementioned CIFF, whose Chief Executive attended the CCICED gathering in September. Along with the WWF and ClientEarth, it has a branch in China which is subject to CCP control. There, the CIFF employs one Wang Yi as its “independent adviser on climate projects”. As chance would have it, he also happens to be a high-ranking member of China’s puppet parliament, the National People’s Congress.

To what extent that compromises his impartiality is anyone’s guess. But it is striking that the CIFF — a registered UK charity — gives away millions of pounds to projects in China. These include an £18 million grant to “help contribute to peaking China’s emissions”, £14 million to give China “evidence-based recommendations” for renewable energy, and, most astonishingly of all, £8 million to assist China “in global climate governance”.

This might not matter quite so much were Sir Christopher and the CIFF not prominent funders of green causes in Britain and Europe. He has personally given £50,000 to Extinction Rebellion, with a further £150,000 from the CIFF. When these payments emerged in 2019, Hohn said: “I recently gave them £50,000 because humanity is aggressively destroying the world with climate change and there is an urgent need for us all to wake up to this fact.”

But not, apparently, to China’s role in it. When I asked an Extinction Rebellion spokesperson why they never said anything about China, she told me: “It would be divisive to put pressure on one particular nation. It would be hypocritical.”

Yet the CIFF’s China connection extends well beyond Extinction Rebellion: it is also the biggest funder of the European Climate Foundation, based in Brussels but with an office in London, to which the CIFF donated £29 million last year. Strikingly, the ECF’s deputy chair is a familiar figure: the CIFF’s Kate Hampton.

Like the CIFF, the ECF website provides few details of the groups it funds. But its UK ‘grantees’ include ClientEarth and the Conservative Environment Network, an alliance of more than 100 Tory MPs and peers set up by environment minister Zac Goldsmith and his plutocrat brother Ben.

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Its ‘global ambassador’, meanwhile, is the Prime Minister’s father, Stanley Johnson, a self-declared “Sinophile” who said last year that China “will come over to our side”, and it was vital “not to raise the temperature” by criticising them. He added he had recently enjoyed “a wonderful, wonderful meeting with the Chinese ambassador”, at which, after discussing global warming, they had sung the Flanders and Swann song ‘Mud, Glorious Mud’ together, inspired by mud’s supposed ability to absorb carbon dioxide.

And yet for all the pledges made in recent years by China and Western environmentalists, the evidence suggests that any future action will be strictly on China’s terms. For many years, Chinese leaders avoided trying to promote the Communist system in the West, but since Xi took power in 2012, this has changed. China, says Clive Hamilton, now touts the ‘China model’ as superior to the West’s.

Anyone doubting this had only attend yet another Beijing meeting, held in June at a Chinese government office by the Foreign Environmental Cooperation Centre, part of China’s environment ministry. The meeting’s attendees included staff from the CCICED, and discussed “the building of ecological civilisation and the community of common destiny”. One leading participant was Chen Xiangyang, the Director of China’s Total State Security Outlook Research Centre — an arm of the Ministry of State Security, which has helped to direct a regime of surveillance against Chinese citizens.

Meanwhile, Qiushi, the CCP’s theoretical journal, published an article in Chinese this year which explores how foreign environmentalists can be utilised. The idea of ecological civilisation, it says, is “Marxist and scientific by nature”, and will have a big role in spreading the China Model’s appeal.

None of this is hidden. This article uses Chinese documents, but all are available on the Mandarin web. Yet climate change activists continue to blindly give China a free pass on its emissions and continued use of coal.

An ECF spokesperson told me: “Climate change impacts every country and so we work with every country, and of course that includes China.” A CIFF spokesperson added: “China is the world’s largest emitter and its transition to a net zero economy is therefore of utmost importance to the entire world. CIFF’s work in China aims to accelerate this transition.”

ClientEarth said: “As a result of our work delivering legal training, the legal system in China is now used to hold Chinese government bodies to account… We are focused on reducing pollution and bringing down emissions both in China and from its overseas investments.” And a WWF campaigns chief added: “All countries need to contribute towards reducing emissions to net zero by 2050. By promising to stop building coal plants abroad, China had ‘given an important signal’.

Ultimately, however, the meaning of that “signal” remains unclear. Is it a sign that President Xi is seriously committed to saving the planet? Or is it a sign that he understands how to fool an influential group of Western environmentalists, with the intention of making that planet his own?

We’ve stolen your land, they say, and we’re very sorry about this terrible injustice — but we’ll keep it all the same. Similarly, when purveyors of political discourse claim that America is now a white supremacist or even Nazi state — as in this response to the Rittenhouse verdict — you wonder why they aren’t urgently fleeing to some safer location, or at the very least organising some kind of underground armed resistance movement. People say all kinds of wild things, but if they don’t follow through on the logic of their claims, then it’s very hard to actually believe them.

A similar dynamic is observable in terms of climate change discourse, particularly with the Extinction Rebellion movement and its offshoot, Insulate Britain. Both their activists and spokespeople make the most alarming claims about the imminent end of civilisation, perhaps within the next couple of decades. But their revealed preferences don’t seem to match the intensity of their predictions. 

Personally, if I genuinely believed that Britain was going to become a post-apocalyptic wasteland within the next twenty years, I wouldn’t be campaigning for the Government to retrofit British houses with insulation: I’d be selling everything and fleeing to the hills in a desperate effort to keep my family alive. And yet they don’t. I have friends who go on XR demonstrations, and repeat their most apocalyptic prophecies, yet show no inclination of altering their middle-class lives in London: their revealed preferences therefore cast great doubt on their stated beliefs.

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This is how civilisations collapse

By Aris Roussinos

It seems that, with climate change in particular, there are only two modes of thought for most people: either nothing will change at all, or everything is about to collapse in horrible and world-destroying ways. There is a more obvious conclusion that people seem resistant to thinking about: that things will change, in many ways for the worse, but life will go on. As the Green philosopher Rupert Read asks: “why do we find it so hard to think about a world where the climate has changed massively, veering between ‘it won’t make much difference, everything is going to be fine’ to ‘it’s the apocalypse, the end of the world, there’s nothing we can do’, but refusing to think about the awful, but more middling realities?” 

It would seem more productive, then, instead of continuing with the path of climate change mitigation — which is probably now too late to succeed — or of giving everything up for lost, to instead focus popular attention on adaptation: on making the best of a situation we cannot change, but which is far from an apocalypse, at least for the UK. 

The issue at hand is that Britain is responsible for a mere 1% of global carbon emissions, so that even if we achieved Net Zero tomorrow, nothing will change in terms of arresting climate change. China’s increase in coal production this autumn alone is already greater than Britain’s total carbon emissions: halting this process is, in the real world, almost entirely out of our hands. 

But if we can’t change what is about to happen, we can at least prepare for it. If you read the Climate Change Commission’s risk assessment for the rest of the century, it assumes that Britain’s temperature will rise by two degrees by 2100, in the worst scenario as much as four degrees. Such an outcome will be disastrous for much of the world’s population, and I am not dismissing the gravity of the situation for billions of guiltless people.

But I live in Britain, and for Britain having a similar climate to central France will not be the end of the world — but we should start planning for it now. Just as no-one now starves their families in solidarity with the hungry of the Global South, it is absurd and irresponsible to not plan a resilient and comfortable near future for our own country out of fatalism or an inchoate sense of global solidarity.

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Inside Insulate Britain

By Aris Roussinos

A rise of two degrees will return Britain to its climate during the Roman Warm Period, when an admittedly lower level of civilisation functioned perfectly well. The risk assessment highlights the risk of flooding in low-lying areas, the risk of drought in summer, and the risks of disruption to international trade. But its observations are all, with sufficient planning and adaptation, perfectly manageable. It even observes that there are opportunities as well as risks, and promotes a vast expansion of vineyards on British soil, which with appropriate planning could become a £50 million annual industry. In just such a way, if the British government cannot change what is about to happen, it can at least start shaping the inevitable near future in ways that are beneficial for this country. And by doing so, and by being seen to act as if they believe what they claim to believe, the Government is far more likely to convince people about the inevitability of climate change.

To understand why, consider the early days of the Covid crisis. When governments and newspapers were dismissing the severity of the coming pandemic, I was convinced to take it seriously by witnessing friends stockpiling masks (while we were being assured they were useless and even harmful) and laying in stores of food and other essential goods in case of trade disruption. Seeing people whose opinions you respect take a potential crisis seriously, and planning how to navigate the changed world that comes with it, is a convincing signal that you should take action yourself. It means far more than hearing the government warn about doom on the horizon and then doing absolutely nothing — like closing the borders — to mitigate against it. Deeds are convincing in a way words are not.

In the same way, I personally take climate change seriously. I believe in the predictions of the vast majority of the world’s scientists, and thinking through the potential outcomes of such a world-changing process, I am planning how to adapt my lifestyle to best manage what is seemingly inevitable. In the New Year, barring some unforeseen eventuality, I will sell my house and buy a smallholding somewhere hilly (and so at less risk of flooding than the coastal town where I currently live) and with enough land that I can ensure my family’s food supply in case of trade disruption or rising prices. Already, in suburban Kent, we produce our own eggs and grow our own vegetables, but I want to be self-sufficient in meat and milk, beer and cider, clean drinking water and bread. (I intend to document our progress in this column.) 

It’s a way of living some are calling Doomer Optimism: I don’t believe that society will collapse within my lifetime, or that starvation will soon stalk the land. But I do think there’s a strong possibility that the cost of living will become significantly higher within the next two decades or so, just as the after effects of Covid are now manifesting, to such a degree that it makes sense to rethink my family’s way of living now to ensure a decent future quality of life in the years ahead. 

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The question here isn’t one of survival in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but of ensuring an atmosphere of comfort and plenty in a likely world of consumption taxes and restrictions brought in through poorly-thought out climate change mitigation efforts, the intervention of corporate interests, and occasional disruptions to international trade. The current discourse around radically limiting food consumption presents such a dystopian and wildly unattractive future that it is no wonder people reject it, especially when it does nothing to address the over-consumption of the world’s richest. I will not, as they say, live in the pod, and I will not eat bugs, and neither should you. We should demand better, and there are alternative futures. 

But first we need to show that we’re tackling the problem seriously. As Rupert Read remarks in the recent book Deep Adaptation, “every time we are seen to be preparing for possible/likely hard times ahead… we are making it possible for people and politics to start to really face climate reality.” As he observes, if you act as if you mean what you say you believe, people will believe you. If you don’t, they won’t. In this way, Read argues, “it is a political act to act as if collapse is possible”, even if you don’t believe it is likely, just as you still install fire alarms even if you don’t believe your house will imminently burn down.

As with individuals, so with government. The Government’s push for Net Zero is expending a great deal of political capital on a mitigation effort that, whatever its moral worth, will do nothing to alter the risk of climate change one way or another. In doing so, it is alienating many people who appreciate, even if only subliminally, the vast disjunct between what the Government claims is about to happen, and its broader actions. If the threat is so real, people naturally think, why isn’t the nation mobilising to deal with the coming effects? The narrow focus on Net Zero, along with the attempt to prioritise individual, essentially meaningless mitigation efforts like eating less meat, is at this stage wildly counterproductive. 

Instead, the Government should, like my family, say that they can’t change what is coming, but that we can at least adapt to it now so that the wrench is less painful when it comes. What would that mean on a national level? If we accept that flooding is likely on Britain’s most productive agricultural land in East Anglia, we should be planning to open up currently marginal hill pasture for crops to ensure a more stable food supply. What would that look like? It would probably be less mechanised, and smaller scale, simply due to the topography: so we should be relearning how to manage such a mid-20th century form of agriculture at sufficient cumulative scale, which we are currently not doing.

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If the Thames floodplain is at risk of occasional but devastating flooding, not from the sea but from built-over inland rivers, we should discourage building in flat estuarine land — as insurers are already warning — and instead rezone hilly land in London’s outer suburbs for housebuilding, as well as improving London’s overwhelmed Victorian drainage infrastructure. 

If the Government is incapable of building HS2 properly, it is surely poorly-equipped to deal with the amount of adjustment that will be necessary to maintain currently functional levels of infrastructure. We should be making railtracks more resilient to flooding, building viaducts where necessary and digging new water features and marshlands to absorb sudden deposits of water. We should be overhauling our water supply to minimise the risk of drought and prevent avoidable water losses through leaky pipes. We should be pedestrianising and planting trees in cities now to make them cool and shady in twenty or thirty years time, and building clean new transport infrastructure to take the place of cars. We should be building more houses, relaxing planning restrictions for family homes in the countryside so that more people are affordably able to take control of their personal family food supply. If we claim that disasters are on the horizon, yet do not build up the infrastructure now to cope with them, why should anyone take these claims seriously?

There is a great deal of ingenuity in this country only now being focussed on technologies such as nuclear fusion, which may soon provide clean sources of almost limitless energy, or on fast electric aeroplanes and capacious electric airships, which may be better used for freight than for human transport. The medium term may be uncomfortable, but the long-term future may be very good indeed, if only for Britain. 

To manage this will take a certain frontier spirit, a willingness to make the best of and thrive in a harder situation than we are accustomed to. Instead of prophesying doom and then doing nothing about it, we should be imagining a positive vision of what a Britain adapted to climate change would look like: a country of high-speed trains hurtling across tall viaducts between new hill towns, with lush vineyards overlooking the broad new wetlands on what was once farmland. It is not too late to make the Britain of the near future not just liveable, but an improvement on what we have now. Life will go on: it is our duty to make it as comfortable and prosperous as possible, not just as individuals, but as a nation.

But now the kids are back in the public domain, in the form of Greta Thunberg and her ageing entourage. The future is back on the table. Our 95-year-old monarch has urged world leaders at COP26 to make sacrifices “not for ourselves, but for our children and our children’s children, and those who will follow in their footsteps”. The wrinklies gluing themselves to roads for Insulate Britain claim they want to “protect future generations everywhere”, while their nihilistic godparent Extinction Rebellion says its goal is “creating a world that is fit for generations to come”.

Yet none of this talk about future generations is really about children, or the future. Rather, it is better understood as a highfalutin form of presentism; the projection of a state of emergency into the years ahead, to provide moral cover for political and economic decisions made by global elites above the heads of their citizens. Forget the present day, and the choices of the current demos. All that matters is action — and the only people who can act are those with the power to do so. Otherwise, as Greta says, it’s all just “blah blah blah”.

Such rhetoric might be widespread. But it cannot mask the fact that questions such as what to do about climate change are ripe for democratic decision-making — particularly because they involve weighing up the costs and benefits of policy measures in the context of our lives today and our children’s tomorrow. Indeed, rather than engaging electorates in a long-term debate, we see a global elite hell-bent on wrapping up international commitments in a two-week conference, egged on by protesters demanding that they “talk less and do more”.

Unfortunately, this call to bypass citizens in the project of ‘the future’ has some appeal — not least among young people, who have been socialised into the idea that that democratic power counts for little, and that if they want change to happen, they need to look to those with the power to bring it about. “We can’t be the ones that will make that change, we can just show that it needs to happen,” a participant in the COP26 ‘school strike’ protests told the BBC, speaking to the infantilised assumption that meaningful solutions can only come from the top down.

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Implicit within this, climate activists express the sentiment of living in a ‘risk society’, in which human experience is framed by a magnified sense of threat and uncertainty, and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. The concept of risk society was theorised by sociologists such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens in the late 20^th century, to capture an ‘end of history’ situation in which globalised modern threats render human agency obsolete. From this perspective, the problems confronting our society are insurmountable. When confronted with the threat of a climate emergency, to which the only possible solutions presented are swift, global, and significant measures, democratic decision-making by citizens in separate nation states seems ineffective at best and counter-productive at worst.

And yet our current state of crisis has exposed a contradiction in this denial of human agency. During the Covid pandemic, and now with the climate emergency, a fatalistic accommodation to the survivalist mentality of the risk society has accompanied a fantastically hubristic narrative offered by world leaders in politics, science, Big Tech and other globalised entities. An insistence on the unprecedented, super-infectious deadliness of Covid ran alongside proclamations that humanity could eradicate this virus; that, as in a war, we can win. With the climate emergency, however, overwrought claims of standing on the brink at “a minute to midnight” are offered as excuses for the idea that we can, in a few short years, stop the warming and turn the whole thing around.

What is offered, in this vision, is a ‘new normal’ starting from actions made today, designed to undo the damage caused by actions of the past and start again. It is a form of techno-survivalism that can only be achieved by citizens, acknowledging their powerlessness and demanding that elites use their power to make a change.

This situation was elegantly anticipated by Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish sociologist, in his 2011 book Collateral Damage. Discussing the “divorce between power and politics”, Bauman noted that “the discrepancy between available means and postulated objectives of action takes the form of a perpetual confrontation between politics afflicted by a chronic deficit of power, and power freed from politically imposed limitations”.

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Bauman suggests that in our perpetual state of global emergency, the nation state is written off as insignificant, with national democracies either unfit, or incapable, of enacting the change that needs to happen. Voters are consigned, by their chronic deficit of power, to shouting at each other on the sidelines, while global elites enjoy the freedom to do whatever serves their interests according to the mandate of saving tomorrow. While consent is marshalled, or manufactured, through the spectacle of campaigners demanding that political elites do whatever it takes, techno-survivalism offers an enormous opportunity for the powerful to exercise their interests.

And yet it also creates significant problems for the elites themselves. Take the interminable sleaze scandal dogging our Tory government. With a majority of 80, Boris Johnson’s lack of opposition, both in terms of its size and its ideas, combined with its extraordinary power grab over the course of the pandemic, has handed the Executive huge latitude to do whatever it likes — something for which it is now being punished with unflattering newspaper front pages every day.

If Bauman is right, and politics has ceased to count for anything meaningful, what does that mean in practice? Ultimately, in detaching themselves from the demos, our political elite has detached themselves from the means of working out what they should be doing. And this could ultimately be their downfall. As Christopher Lasch noted in The Revolt of the Elites, by isolating themselves from their societies, elites undermine the foundation of their legitimacy.

As much as they benefit from wielding their power, an untethered elite also finds itself buying into the fantasy that the world will keep turning without human agency — of any sort. But it clearly won’t. During the pandemic, initial ‘work from home’ orders were swiftly counteracted by a swathe of exceptions, as governments were forced to acknowledge that ‘essential’ jobs required people to do them; while later attempts to cajole the WFH crowd back to the office was met with a sullen resistance. Likewise, the ‘green revolution’ planned by COP26 can be imposed from above, but will require a buy-in, with people choosing to replace their cars and boilers while calculating what this means for the quality of their lives.

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The great climate change fallacy

By Tom Chivers

As trust in politics declines, people find other means to exercise their interests; and these are less susceptible to mediation and control. For elites, legitimacy is the thing that enables them to retain authority. And that requires building a relationship with the past and present, rather than annihilating it in the name of ‘the future’.

Edmund Burke — hailed as an inspiration by the ‘intergenerational equity’ crusade — explained this rather well in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Society, he argued, should be understood as a “contract” to be looked upon with reverence, because it was not only about the needs of the present day. It is a “a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection”, which transcended the contribution of any particular generation, thus becoming “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”.

Yet today’s modern conservatives are guilty of a spectacular misreading. For them, the intergenerational contract can only be honoured by ripping up the past and legislating on behalf of the future. This free-wheeling power-grab might yield some short-term gains; but at some point, the wheels will come off. It won’t just be the future generations of the apocalyptic imagination that will bear the consequences, but those of us who are living with them right now.

Along the way his identity parade (all guilty, m’lud) takes in hardened malefactors such as “false dichotomy”, “guilt by association” and “straw man”, in addition to more exotic wrong’uns like the “motte-and-bailey tactic” (a kind of medieval cousin to that old lag “moving the goalposts”) and — a new favourite of mine — the “Texas sharpshooter fallacy”. First you fire a bullet into the barn door. Then you paint a bull’s-eye neatly round the hole. Ta-da! Much investment “advice” comes right out of that Texan barn.

Almost any arena of opinion and argument offers the prospect of a full card at Pinker Bingo. Political knockabout of the sort you hear weekly either in Westminster or on Question Time gives you the chance to shout “House!” within minutes. Even public debate that should bow readily to evidence-based reasoning, such as the international response to climate change, will throw up fogs of rhetorical pollution. Look at the preliminary positions, from both drastic-action radicals and kick-the-can gradualists, staked out in advance of the imminent COP 26 conference in Glasgow. With the planet’s future at stake, advocacy groups still tend to smother the clear light of reason in a dense cloud of confirmation bias, special pleading, guilt-by-association — and so on. You could argue that the comforting litany of targets and initiatives intoned by governments and agencies also deepen the sleep of reason. 

Trust in technocratic fixes may also function as a kind of mind-numbing cult. A century ago, the pioneering sociologist Max Weber — whom Pinker cites much less than he should — saw that the “iron cage” of bureaucratic rationality that defined modern life would become an official religion, prone to heretical pushbacks in the form of mystic, charismatic or ecstatic movements. The stand-off between top-down climate-change bureaucracy and the gestural militancy of the radicals proves him correct.

As in eco-politics, so in media, education, culture and even (arguably) the social superstructures of science itself. Within modern institutions, and modern selves, the sphere of rationality Pinker toils to expand cohabits with what he calls the “mythology mindset”, immune to reason’s charms and claims. Behind the Pinker project lies a teleology of his own, the a priori conviction he permits himself. That is the belief in long-term human progress — measured in indices such as declining violence, improving health and longevity, expanding empathy and solidarity — set out in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) and reinforced by Enlightenment Now (2018). 

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By Razib Khan

Critics dismiss this principle of incremental betterment as groundless optimism. He treats it as simple historical factuality. “Progressives don’t like progress,” he has quipped about his radical detractors. “Our picture of the future,” he insists in Rationality, “need not be a bot tweeting fake news forever. The arc of knowledge is a long one, and it bends towards rationality.” 

Pinker’s steadily advancing reason is no alien, Mr Spock-like logic machine or unfeeling calculus of personal advantage. He often cites David Hume, who claimed in his Treatise on Human Nature that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”. Take “slave” here to mean something like “operating system” and you approach the Pinker ambition to subject our goals and drives — some selfish, many others not — to a more reflective scrutiny of the mental processes that underlie our choices.

Pinker’s wide appeal rests partly on the self-help, how-to character of his arguments. Wherever your will and desire (those driving passions) make you want to travel, rationality’s toolkit will help you reach your destination. Thus rational-choice theory, which he expounds in the new book with typical brio and lucidity, may serve idealistic as much as self-interested ends even though it sounds “about as lovable as Ebenezer Scrooge”. It powers, for instance, the results-oriented philanthropy of the “effective altruism” movement ­— to the dismay of puritans who expect guilt and lamentation, sackcloth-and-ashes, from would-be social reformers . 

Pinker, though, also wants to uphold truth and morality according to his own liberal-secular lights. So he inflects his value-neutral account of the pitfalls on the road to reason with warnings against the dangers of populist irrationality in power. Enjoyably, he does point out the logical flaw in saying that “we’re living in a post-truth era” (if it’s true, it’s false, like that ancient Cretan liar). Still, the Trump years and their perceived assaults on reason have shaped this new work and — together with glancing allusions to the pandemic — given it a topical edge. He deplores the “myside bias” and skewed “motivated reasoning” of a polarised, them-against-us culture. And he rightly dislikes most forms of binary reasoning. 

In the end, however, Pinker himself reverts to a simple dualism between the “reality mindset” he endorses and the “mythology mindset” that underpins supernatural faith, elects frauds who tell 30,000 lies to the US presidency and — most recently — has killed thousands of conspiracy-prone anti-vaxxers. Near the end of Rationality, he reinvents the oldest wheel on the cart of sociology and anthropology when he states: “The function of these [mythological] beliefs is to construct a social reality that binds the tribe or sect and gives it a moral purpose.” Of course, but what then? How should we try to connect myth and reality? 

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Raymond Williams mapped mountains

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The pandemic has shown us that, even in the best-informed societies, the spread of evidence-free “mythological” beliefs and the willingness of millions to act on them can cost lives on a battlefield scale. The task of building bridges between the magical thinker and the reasoning creature — both of whom coexist in every human mind — feels more urgent than ever. Can Pinker’s mental toolkit span the gap?  

Pinker has little sense of dialectic. His clean-cut antithesis between “reality” and “mythology” in human thinking belongs in the lab, or the lecture-room, rather than in the messier interpersonal spaces where we live most of the time. Even Nietzsche — whom, again, he could have profitably consulted more than he does — saw the eternal wrangle between the reason, order and control of Apollo and the frenzy, fury and bliss of Dionysus as a perpetual to-and fro rather than a winner-takes-all struggle. With Pinker, the cause of reason tends to look like a zero-sum game: the light advances and the darkness diminishes, or vice versa.

Pinker is above all a teacher — a professor of psychology at Harvard since 2003. And teachers — unless, perhaps, they teach literature, philosophy or even quantum physics – need truth to vanquish falsity. His career-defining mission to advocate and communicate the tools of reason draws its strength from a pedagogic model rooted in his home-ground disciplines of experimental psychology and psycholinguistics. He may have written an entire book to disprove the tabula rasa picture of the human mind — The Blank Slate in 2002 — but he does believe that sustained effort can help rewrite our pre-existing scripts.

Like any caring teacher, Pinker sometimes has to make us suffer — but it’s all for our own good. “Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence,” he warns, “is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.”  

It’s not all pain in the Pinker classroom, though. Much of the fun of Rationality comes in the counter-intuitive exercises that our keep-fit instructor sets his cerebrally flabby pupils. If these don’t make your brain (pleasurably) ache as dormant muscles flex into action, then they should. Few readers will forget in a hurry his probability work-outs, especially this one: “Suppose that the prevalence of breast cancer in the population of women is 1%.” A breast-cancer diagnostic test has a true-positive rate of 90% and a false-positive rate of 9%. A woman takes it and tests positive. What are the percentage chances she has the disease? Between 80 and 90%, a sample of doctors estimated. The correct answer is around 9%.

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“Bayesian reasoning” — a key component of Pinker’s procedure in Rationality — will direct our attention to the “base rate” of any phenomenon (that 1% prevalence) and avoid distraction by the surface noise of the foreground figures. Base-rate neglect, as he demonstrates, plagues much policy-making, as does the cognate vice of the “availability heuristic”. Rare plane crashes sway behaviour more than frequent car crashes, a blue-moon terror outrage outranks the long-haul attrition of air pollution, and so on. Our judgments, individual and collective, repeatedly succumb to “psychological amplifiers such as recency, vividness, or emotional poignancy”. Hard, or lurid, cases make bad laws — and bad decisions. 

And so on, as the skittles of error fall to reason’s conquering ball. Pinker disentangles our confusions of correlation and causation. He guides us through the moves of formal logic that let us unpick the assertions of advertisers and pundits (some of them deeply intuitive, as when we sceptically say “that’s a big if…”). He outlines game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma that asks us to choose between potential gains, or losses, with no knowledge of the other players’ actions.

As a primer for cognitive hygiene, and a booster pack for your powers of critical reflection, Rationality does what it says on the box — and lots more. Yet in Pinker’s pay-off chapter, cheekily titled “What’s wrong with people?”, his grasp falters. His recommendations for improving rationality in public affairs sound either self-evident or anodyne: those rule-governed contracts; scientific peer review; media fact-checking; “statistical and critical thinking” in education; “evidence-based evaluation” in health and social policy. Lamely, he suggests that “It would be nice to see people earn brownie points for acknowledging uncertainty in their beliefs”, or “questioning the dogmas of their political sect”. And who would bestow those coveted points on repentant zealots? Party activists rewarded for loyalty? Social-media corporations that profit from traffic-driving division? Although he throws harsh words against the blowhard simplifications of media commentators, Pinker’s own nostrums often hover around the op-ed level. The “mythology mindset” that flourishes both in party politics and social activism would find little advantage in his forms of deliberative doubt. Just now, polarisation pays.

A teacher to the last, Pinker knows, supremely well, how to lead willing students towards a greater light. What’s missing is a robust model of the “impartial” agencies – communal and political – that might enable people to learn, cherish and deploy the tools of rationality as citizens, not just as pupils or professionals. Correctly, Pinker regrets “the decline of class-crossing civil-society organisations”, like churches and clubs, where people meet for a shared, connective purpose – rather than gather virtually in “sociocultural tribes” made up of uniform but atomised opinion-consumers. But he can’t say much about how super-charged rationality alone would heal the rifts between “myside” and your side.

Curiously, just across the Harvard campus, a solution of sorts might await. The great Bengali-born philosopher-economist Amartya Sen fails to rate a single mention in Rationality. Yet Sen – a Harvard professor since 2004 – began his career as an analyst of “social choice theory”. He has devoted more than half a century of original work to the role of public reasoning in entrenching and enhancing democratic norms.

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Sen grew up in Rabindranath Tagore’s utopian community at Santiniketan: the Bengali polymath’s visionary scheme to ground practical reasoning in peaceful and productive daily life. From famine prevention to women’s empowerment and the codification of the UN’s human development index (which he co-created), Sen has argued that the collective pursuit of rationality can serve common goods and deepen the bonds of belonging and community. 

Sen, an admirer of the Adam Smith, believes that strong institutions of collective reasoning can mitigate self-seeking and that “It is the power of reason that allows us to consider our obligations and ideals as well as our interests and advantages” (Development as Freedom). From village councils in India to the building (however incomplete) of accountable global agencies, he has done a lifetime’s best to make democratic rationality work in the public square. Think of it as a project to make Pinker’s “reality mindset” yield the same sort of collective pleasures and rewards as his “mythology mindset”. 

Pinker notes that, on a private level, people to tend to make pretty good sense, and good choices, about their lives. Sen asks how co-operative politics may do that too. For now, Pinker’s Rationality can tell us with forensic verve and agility how to catch out those faith-driven diehards as they blunder through their faulty premises, false syllogisms, illusory correlations and so on. So far, he can’t show convincingly how — or why — they should play a better game.  

Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters by Steven Pinker (Allen Lane, £25)

Only days later, another of these creatures from Arthurian legend wandered into the post-industrial landscape of suburban Liverpool. Having failed to capture it, police shot it.

Their actions were couched in the language of safety, procedure and reason. “There was no option to let the deer wander as it could be a danger to motorists and members of the public,” said a Merseyside Police spokesperson. “As a result a decision was made in the early evening to euthanise the deer.”

All very reasonable and understandable, from the perspective of a body of public servants whose task is acting as the “thin blue line” that maintains our rational public order. The general public, though, was outraged. Responses were clearly powered by a sense that a crime had been committed at some symbolic level. A creature of legend had been destroyed by “health and safety”. Liverpool-based writer Nina Antonia called it “a very bad omen”.

In folklore, the white hart often appears to signal the presence of the uncanny. And the death of this white hart lent a note of deep weirdness to an already-brittle mood at this year’s party conference season, which kicked off the same day. The combined effect was of a political class determinedly bickering over trivia while dangling over a howling pit of monsters.

First, we witnessed the hijacking of Keir Starmer’s sublimely bland 14,000-word effort to reboot the Labour Party by a bitter religious dispute. Forget the future of public services, is it blasphemous to say only women have cervices? This argument, at heart a metaphysical one concerning the true relation between material and spiritual planes, almost entirely drowned out the usual business of shouting about neoliberalism and insulting the Tories.

For the party of government, meanwhile, it has been less metaphysics, more apocalypse. A conference crowd less than half the size of 2019’s applauded the launch of this or that paper, to widespread indifference save among politics junkies. Meanwhile, outside, the country devolved into fist fights and knife threats at petrol stations, and British farmers faced the prospect of a million-pig sacrifice to the god of self-correcting labour markets.

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The Remainer class lurched out of their sarcophagi to say they told us so, and that leaving the single market was an irrational thing to do. This is of course true, but rather misses the point that a core question in the Brexit debate was whether or not, from a holistic perspective, the “rational” policy is always the right one. And sometimes “rational” and “right” are as incommensurable as police safety procedures and a beast out of legend. Do we want higher wages or cheaper goods? Are pig culls and lorry driver shortages an acceptable short-term price of correction or evidence of terminal decline?

Further back, the “rational” arguments for offshoring industry had political tradeoffs, as did the “rational” arguments that took us into the EU. Those social classes who didn’t win out used Brexit to make their protest known at the concatenating political effects of our supposedly technocratic, post-political regime.

Today, though, as the technocratic mode of politics limps on, it seems an ever feebler vehicle for stark political choices made against a backdrop of increasingly existential dread. And whether thanks to the pandemic, climate change or the global fracturing of supply chains that once seemed seamless, such decisions are now everywhere: cancer victims or flattening the curve? Young people’s need for affordable homes and a fair tax burden, or social care funding and the preferences of Green Belt Tory voters? And no one wants to think about the prospects for the welfare state if (or when) growth stalls permanently, or if birth rates continue to crater.

And if climate catastrophe looks grim, so does climate mitigation. It was rising fuel prices which triggered France’s “gilets jaunes” riots in 2018; they’re still ongoing. And the global tilt toward “clean power” has prompted what Bloomberg predicts will be the first of many energy crises, plunging many UK families unexpectedly into fuel poverty.

To compound the mood of apocalypse, an offshoot of the environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, sought to raise awareness of such thorny questions by glueing themselves to the M25. As a result, an elderly woman suffering a stroke was delayed for six hours on the way to hospital, and is now permanently paralysed. In a sense, the group’s fanatical willingness to risk literal paralysis in elderly women, in order to make a point about political paralysis in climate policy, serves as an eloquent metaphor for the ugly reality of climate-policy tradeoffs.

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And we continue to not talk about who will bear the brunt. As George Monbiot pointed out, the only real way to reduce our carbon footprint is less of everything. Who takes the hit? There will never be enough batteries to make electric cars as widely-available as the internal combustion variety. Who goes back to walking? There will never be enough renewable energy for us all to leave the lights on: who has to sit in the dark? No one has yet worked out how to power an aeroplane on electricity; who, then, still gets to fly? Our meat consumption is unsustainable; who makes the swap to bugs?

Greens usually gesture vaguely at “redistributing wealth” while also curbing it. But those with the greatest power to coordinate international climate policy are the world’s 2,000-odd billionaires – who are also the ones sitting on most of that wealth. This rarefied group may be as motivated as the rest of us to avoid climate catastrophe, but if doing so means someone has to take a financial hit, they’re unlikely to volunteer themselves.

Instead, among the rarefied echelons of bodies such as the WEF, papers and videos are published by more technocrats who discuss the pandemic as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bed in permanent changes in the name of climate mitigation. Perhaps the masses can be persuaded to buy and travel less; to own nothing and be happy. Perhaps one more Economist article about eating insects will persuade someone other than Sam Bowman to give these crunchy delicacies a try.

Further down the food chain, despite omens and outbreaks of gender theology, our political class is still grimly reluctant to set down the comfort blankets of data, technocracy and “growth”. Nor are they keen to talk frankly about political choices; even about how on earth “net zero” squares with waving through expansion plans at every major UK airport.

The exasperated result has been a growing minority of Britons abandoning reason altogether as a viable register in which to debate anything, instead forming what Clive Martin recently called “Radical Normal”. This increasingly vocal protest cohort coalesces into placard-waving flash-mobs, with grievances ranging from masks to Pfizer, 5G masts, adrenochrome and the New World Order.

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From a technocratic perspective it’s easy to dismiss such people as crazies. But while people as a whole may be largely uninterested in politics, that’s not the same thing as being stupid. And having lived through all the rational arguments for de-industrialisation, and the “rational” case for EU membership, the public is now seeing the same woefully inadequate “rational” mindset being turned to climate policy. Meanwhile the painful political trade-offs involved both in doing something and in not doing something become increasingly evident.

In a sense, reverting to the language of omens is a perfectly sane thing to do, when the world has become so complicatedly unpredictable that an everyday person might as well read the auguries as try and master it through data.

Eric McLuhan, son of Marshall “the medium is the message” McLuhan wrote that “Our New World of chaos and complexity is too volatile, too precarious, too important to be left in the hands of the merely practical administrator.” The uncanny white deer often warns of change and danger — or perhaps now, of a future running too menacingly wild for mere technical management. In seeing this message clearly, the people of Britain have been quicker than their rulers to read the omens.

Back in 2006, Brafman had co-authored a popular book on organisational structures, The Starfish and the Spider, in which he compared the difference between biological organisms like the spider, which have a small head that controls its body, and the much stranger organisms, like the starfish, that don’t have a centralised structure but whose limbs can regenerate, even when severed from the main body. Chop off the spider’s head and the spider is dead. But the starfish doesn’t have a head and many of its functions have been decentralised, allowing it to keep going even when a major part of it has been cut off.

It turns out that the US Army was much taken with the spider and the starfish as metaphors for different organisational structures, mainly because of the trouble they were having with ISIS. The Army was a spider, with a strong command and control structure, while many terrorist organisations were radically decentralised, specifically designed to avoid infiltration or decapitation. And it worked – they were proving extremely difficult to destroy.

Writing a thesis at the US Military Academy at West Point a few years later, Major Luciano Picco explained why the US Army was having such trouble dealing with the starfish way of doing things.

“Due to a long history of success by embracing the hierarchical structure,” he wrote: “indications are that as a whole, the Army has a hard time conceptualising the decentralised ideas presented by Mission Command and inculcating those notions throughout the Army.”

But it wasn’t just the Army that was getting interested in Brafman’s ideas. Ten years ago this month the Occupy movement first arrived at Zuccotti Park in New York’s financial district, proclaiming the slogan “We are the 99%”.

But it wasn’t just the message that was radical, it was also the way they organised themselves — the fact that there didn’t seem to be anyone “in charge”. Despite the need of the media to isolate leaders around whom to tell the story of a movement, Occupy operated on starfish principles. It was held together not by some central leadership group, but by a shared sense of conviction. Policies would not be handed down from a central committee, but would emerge from assemblies of the faithful.

This was a real headache for those tasked with negotiating with the protesters. When I was involved with the dispute between Occupy and St Paul’s Cathedral, it was clear that the City of London authorities, the Police and the Cathedral couldn’t quite understand what they were up against.

Their instinct was to approach Occupy with the familiar request “take me to your leader” — after which they would negotiate with them and perhaps strike some sort of deal. But there wasn’t a leader, and because of this the authorities had little idea what to do. From the Occupy perspective this meant there was no one who could sell them out, no central figure(s) who could be discredited or strong-armed into compromise. The spider had no idea how to deal with the starfish.

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The police eventually cleared the Occupy camp at St Paul’s in February 2012, evicting the protestors. But that was not the last that the police saw of these faces. Over the years, many of the same people who were there went on to help set up Extinction Rebellion and were also influential in other protest movements like Black Lives Matter.

The aims morphed and adapted, and new limbs to the protest movement were grown – ideas were “emergent”, to use the organisational jargon. You cannot evict an idea. And this model is not just a feature of the Left. The Tea Party movement was just as horizontally organised. After all, who was its leader? It’s hard to say. Does it even matter?

Unfortunately, the Church of England learned very little from its encounter with Occupy. Just this week it was unveiling a new plan for its future organisational structure, and it is a doubling down on the whole centralising tendency that has been going on for the last 30 or so years. Just as protest movements were out there “taking the knee”, Church leaders were poring over their spread-sheets and flow charts.

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Organisationally, the Church of England is a mess of overlapping and competing powers — bishops, synods, councils, pension boards, parliament, parishes — which is a real irritation to the pathologically tidy-minded. Formed as a shotgun marriage between two very different, perhaps incommensurable, approaches to religious authority — the Catholic and the Protestant — it’s little wonder the Church of England is an organisational hotchpotch.

Calling for greater “clarity”, this new plan announces that there is a “considerable confusion… about decision-making authority, a lack of understanding about which decisions different bodies are empowered to make and how those decisions are reached.”

So this review proposes a new body to take over most of the central functions of the Church. And inevitably it has an organisational flow chart and an acronym CENS – the Church of England National Services. Now there’s a rallying point to stir the blood and drop the faithful to their knees in wonder!

It’s as if the Church has decided to invest in Blockbuster Videos just as everyone else is switching to Netflix. All over the world, decentralised systems are on the ascendency. The Taliban have seen off the US Army. Blockchain technology has allowed radically decentralised crypto currencies like Bitcoin to flourish. eBay may have a CEO, but its real power lies in the millions on mini-encounters between buyers and sellers.

As Brafman observes in a more recent book, The Chaos Imperative, it is often from the edge of human networks that the serendipitous encounters driving innovation and creativity take place. In Church terms, these edges are called parishes — often small, semi-independent pockets of half-organised goodness, spreading out into their communities rhizomatically.

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On this traditional model, the bishop is not primarily a leader or a manager. He or she is concerned with the promulgation of doctrine, renewing the core message with inspiration, and the care of the clergy — a vicar to the vicars. These days, unfortunately, we have too often dulled their spirit by locking them in committees and chaining them to laptops to write bloodless reports. And the parishes are becoming sucked into this whole top-down managerialism led by bishops who go on leadership courses and do half-baked MBAs. God save us from people with MBAs.

What Brafman maintains is that the crucial thing keeping inherently messy organisations together is a belief in the cause. They don’t even need better management flow charts, they don’t need more command and control – often less of it – they need better preachers. And the Holy Spirit has no need of acronyms.

The Church is becoming more spider-like just as everyone else is learning the power of being more like a starfish.

Like countless other precocious teenagers before me, I waited until university to rebel against “the system”. Then, for about two years, I dedicated every Saturday and dozens of other evenings to sitting, cross-legged, in a circle in the centre of Cambridge, discussing the end of the world. Climate change, after all, was the issue of our time. Forget the petty squabbles and internecine conflicts of the Left — the revolution would be green, not red.

While I jumped from one political identity to the next — Social Democrat, Corbyn loyalist, Anarcho-Syndicalist, Bookchinite Social Ecologist, Trotskyist — there was a single constant: to defeat the forces of capital, Leftism needed to be centred around sustainability. Climate change was one crisis capitalism couldn’t overcome: it had an extinction date.

It is difficult for me to separate how much of my political certainty was a product of the Left-wing populism that electrified campus politics, and how much was born from youthful arrogance. Either way, I was convinced we were the only ones left to protect the working classes against the forces of reaction. So it stung to have them reject us for what we were: jumped-up students looking out for our own interests.

Still, I enjoyed being a “radical”. I would walk around campus brandishing my own Little Green Book. Entitled Make Rojava Great Again, it was a hilariously delusional manifesto influenced by Murray Bookchin, and attempted to explain how a small, anarchist-in-name-only Kurdish commune was the future for global Leftism. The irony that Rojava was only able to exist thanks to the imperialist interventionism of the Global American Empire in Syria was, of course, lost on me and my comrades.

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It was amid this revolutionary fervour that I was introduced to Extinction Rebellion (XR). They were, at the time, a relatively unknown collection of old-school conservationists, ageing animal rights campaigners and credentialed academics who seemed utterly clueless in comparison with our own more militant group, Zero Carbon. Before one meeting between our two respective groups — we had planned to discuss the importance of racial justice — several XR members started shouting at us for failing to have brought chairs. They were, it quickly transpired, simply too old to sit crossed-legged in a circle like us students.

My comrades and I used to chuckle over photos from their rallies, full of middle-aged, middle-class hippies who looked as if they had wandered off from a People’s Vote protest. That this raggedy group would go on to become the most influential face of environmental activism was inconceivable three years ago.

As for their ideas and strategies, they were even easier to mock. How exactly did they expect to build a popular front against “extractivist” climate-plundering while simultaneously irritating ordinary people with their thoughtless disruption? Where was their consideration of class? How dare they cloak themselves in the language of revolution despite clearly posing no actual threat to the regime.

Yet there remained a tacit understanding that we were on the same side. We shared meeting rooms, supported their direct actions and invited them along to our own. Our memberships became increasingly blurred, with the next intake of freshers often touting loyalty to both Zero Carbon and XR.

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I became friends with XR true believers, kindly old activists who would cook me vegan chilli and explain how I could safely chain myself to a fence or gate. Their provincialism was charming; while we enlightened radicals understood the need to destroy bourgeois capitalism, they simply wanted Cambridgeshire local council to declare a “climate emergency”.

But then, during a Zero Carbon protest at the 2019 Oxford-Cambridge boat race, also my 19^th birthday, it all unravelled. Our plan had been to protest the universities’ decision not to divest from fossil fuels. We were, though, quickly caught by a pair of very patient police officers, who humoured our Bolshevik playacting for a while. But then, I watched in dismay as my comrades started complaining about police brutality, crowding around the officers and shoving phone cameras in their face.

The sight of their ridiculously exaggerated outrage quelled my revolutionary zeal. There we were, wearing straw boaters, planning to drop a banner over Hammersmith Bridge and set off a few flares for… what? Was this what we were all along: pantomime activists? We were no better than the XR hippies singing outside the Cambridgeshire County Council office; worse, actually, because we weren’t even having fun.

Samuel Biagetti has described the dynamic inherent within modern Leftist politics as that of a parent and child, with liberal elders viewing young activists as juvenile and subordinate. I saw then what he meant. My comrades and I thought we could radicalise our XR mentors; in reality, they had merely been indulging our silly fantasies. They knew that, eventually, we would learn to give up the pretence of Marxist revolution and accept the inevitability of reform.

So I left eco-activism for good. Better to be reviled as a reactionary traitor than have to live with the humiliating realisation that I essentially held the same politics of my parents. And there is nothing rebellious about XR. Just look at Roger Hallam, who co-founded the movement after studying for a PhD in civil disobedience at King’s College London. His thesis was that mass outbreaks of civil unrest — like those seen in the last few weeks in central London — are the best way to force governments to act. “Extinction Rebellion” is therefore a misnomer: the group doesn’t want to overthrow the system, but to petition it.

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Liberal democracy isn’t going to solve the climate crisis. The same conditions that triggered the climate collapse will persist, and no amount of performative anti-capitalism will remedy that. XR’s rallies over the past week have seemed little more than narcissistic spectacle, a way for well-meaning people to gather and feel righteous and alive for a few hours.

Just as my comrades and I lacked any substance beneath our vague faith in the power of “revolution”, there is nothing hiding beneath their costumes. They have achieved the platonic ideal of liberal protest — all style, no substance.

It would, of course, be all too easy to laugh at them, were it not for the gnawing realisation that their warnings contain an element of truth. It is too late. This really is the last gasp of the old regime. And there they are: dancing as the world burns.

“Who is society?” asked Thatcher in 1987, in an interview for Woman’s Own magazine. “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families.”

The unravelling of both state provision and large-scale political organisations was fertile ground for new forms of politics. Thatcher cannot have been pleased when one of these sprouted at Greenham Common RAF Base in Berkshire. The Greenham Women’s Peace Camp was an embodiment of women taking their lives into their own hands, taking responsibility for themselves and their actions, and not being held back by the fact of being women. Like a muddy, plural, mirror image of Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, it reflected the new individualism in an emerging form of political dissent.

There has always a danger in reading history backwards from where we are now, of finding in it the seeds of how we understand the world today precisely because we’re looking for them. Out of the Darkness — a new book of stories about Greenham — is told by women who were there 40 years ago. It explicitly eschews any claim to be an official history, but the claim that the Women’s Peace Camp had a lasting influence on politics still deserves to be taken seriously.

Begun by a handful of peace campaigners who walked from Cardiff to the gates of an air base chosen to house American nuclear Cruise Missiles, the camp grew organically after a few people decided to stay on. It wasn’t initially women-only, but after several discussions, a vote was taken and the few men were asked to leave the camp.

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The initial decision seems to have been pragmatic. “They didn’t do the washing up, help with the food, look after the kids,” said Jill ‘Ray’ Raymond, “they get drunk, they are violent and they won’t do the washing up.”

Bear in mind that 1981 was only six years after the Sex Discrimination Act was passed, seven years after contraception became available on the NHS, and eleven years after the first Women’s Liberation Movement conference in Oxford. Social expectations that women would do the housework and childcare, and defer to men, were still strong.

Some of the women also felt that non-violent direct action would be easier without men around, as situations were less likely to escalate. “Some of the squaddies wouldn’t want to hit a woman so they were more careful about violence,” said Fenja Hill. “It was probably less violent because there were no men.”

As the camp grew, though, its existence as a women’s peace camp became more important. Josetta Malcolm, who has since identified as non-binary, described their experience of a women-only camp as being “like therapy, it was like a political awakening…. to just see how things linked up about patriarchy, and nuclear arms, and war. Actually to be in a women-only space and then have your voice heard as a woman is so empowering.”

We can see in this a shift of emphasis from a shared external aim — getting nuclear weapons off the site — to more nebulous goals based on what we would today call identity. Certainly, it was an early example of who you are being as important as what you want to change. But in fact, the focus of the camp was never solely on a shared political aim. There was no plan, no organisation, no strategy and no leaders. These were seen as virtues, not failings.

The method of Non-Violent Direct Action, NVDA, rests heavily on each person taking personal responsibility for what they decide to do. There is no top-down discipline, just “affinity groups” that decide together what action to take. That makes it hard to predict, control or counter. Actions like blockading gates when the mobile cruise missile launchers were trying to leave the base, or cutting through the fence to dance on top of missile silos, disrupted military operations and in some cases embarrassed the government.

Without elected leaders, nobody is accountable to anybody else, except directly and informally. This was seen as in itself revolutionary, modelling an alternative form of society, one without hierarchies. Even the different camps at different gates were not identified by military names or numbers, but by non-hierarchical colours. Each camp developed its own character. Green Gate was spiritual, healing, close to nature. Turquoise Gate was vegan and Violet a refuge for carnivores. Orange Gate was home to families and had the best cake. “Main Gate” became Yellow Gate.

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This diversity of the different camps was also seen as symbolic of a wider cause. Feminism was supposed to have room for all sorts of women, who might disagree politically or tactically, but nevertheless be united by the fact of being women. Shared life experiences bound them together, but it was assumed that simply being a woman was enough to outweigh differences.

Even deciding who was, or was not, a Greenham Woman was seen as needlessly divisive. “A Greenham woman is any damn woman who wishes to call herself a Greenham woman,” said Lorna Richardson. “I think it’s antithetical to both the spirit and the practicality of Greenham to divide women into camp women who lived there, and visitors who did not.”

The absence of structure and organisation came with limitations, however. Penny Gulliver recalled occasions when Blue Gate was asked to create a diversion for a big action planned by Yellow Gate. After she and her Blue Gate companions broke into the base and got arrested, “then you’d find out they’d had a row at Yellow Gate about who was going to take the pictures and then they called it off, but nobody came and told Blue Gate!”

Visual and symbolic protests were important. The Greenham veterans talk about reclaiming myths and symbols, witches and spiders’ webs, Moon Goddesses and the hand symbol, forefingers and thumb tips touching, that portrays the vulva. This idea of protest as performance or work of art today typifies a new kind of politics, less concerned with taking power and more with provoking an emotional response, both in those witnessing and in those taking part.

“I think Greenham gave me the confidence to be a woman — to be who I was.” said Sue Say, “and recognise that’s not always going to be the same as someone else.”

It’s not new for individuals to gain a sense of their own capabilities, their independence and agency, through taking part in political action. What is relatively new, though, is seeing such internal change as an end in itself. Asked about the lasting impact of Greenham Women’s Peace Camp, many of those involved talk about changes in themselves. Some of them became therapists, including Sue Bolton, for whom “it was about going right back into yourself and realising the whole thing starts from you… And then you change the whole world, just by being yourself and finding out who you are.”

Slogans like “Greenham Women Everywhere” and “Carry Greenham Home” evoke a sense of the camp, not as a tactical campaign to change UK defence policy, but as a state of mind. The mantra “The Personal Is Political” comes up again and again.

That phrase was first used by 1970s feminists, drawing attention to the fact that their home lives, who raised their children and even their intimate relationships were connected with the public world of politics. Laws governing access to abortion and contraception, or the legality of sexual relationships, had a direct effect on private lives. Many women went on from Greenham to work in women’s refuges, in social work or feminist campaigns.

Suggested reading

Why are women becoming witches?

By Suzannah Lipscomb

But while women at Greenham were discussing what they should eat, how to share out the domestic work and what it meant to sleep with women instead of men, the meaning of the phrase evolved. Instead of somebody’s personal life reflecting political changes that needed to be made in the public realm, that personal life could itself embody change. Egalitarian cooking arrangements, lesbian sex or cutting off your long hair could be political acts in themselves.

Some aspects of life as a Greenham Woman are familiar from more recent political campaigns. A loose, non-hierarchical structure with no clear goals or strategies was adopted by the Occupy movements. Self-organisation on the basis of an identity, or shared lived experience, rather than around an external political goal, is now a permanent state of affairs. The Extinction Rebellion protests use aspects of Non-Violent Direct Action, though the movement does have leaders and centralised planning.

What has become a central feature of extra-Parliamentary politics, though, is the focus on self-expression. “I want my name on the list of people that says, ‘I do not think nuclear weapons is the right way to go,’” said Margaret McNeill. “It’s putting my name to this invisible charter that says ‘I was there, I witnessed this’.’” Today, the motto “Not In My Name’ has become a familiar sight on demonstrations; it is usually less of a threat to remove from power an elected government, more a disavowal of some policy or action that will go ahead anyway.

The struggle between the National Union of Mineworkers and Thatcher’s Conservative government was not about coal. It was about who had power in the country. The Greenham Women wanted to erode, if not the physical power of guns and missiles, the legitimacy of holding that power. They wanted to change the policies of those in government, but not to take that power for themselves. They explicitly rejected systems that centralised power, but they wanted to be visible, and to render visible aspects of themselves and their lives that they felt had been ignored or devalued.

Thousands of women spent time at Greenham, from a few hours to several years, and later said it changed their sense of themselves and what they could achieve. But did the camp succeed?

The last cruise missiles were removed from Greenham Common in 1991 — but most would say that the end of the Cold War did more to bring that about than the constant presence of women at the camp. Some of the women stayed on until the land was finally returned to being a Common in 2000, after almost 60 years of military use. It is now home to arts and business projects, nature reserves and open space.

You could interpret these two changes as victories for decentralised, women-led, non-violent campaigning. Or you could say that change happened when those inside the fence, those with the political, legal and military power, laid down their arms, took down the fence and crept away. But whichever you think is true, Greenham still became a prototype for the shape of political protest today.

It was a sobering affair. We discussed the public health measures with which we are all now familiar; the treatment of patients on intensive care; and the cold storage, burial and cremation of the bodies of the many dead.

It was a weird moment, for — as a parliamentary candidate before my first election, holed up in a cottage in Suffolk — I had written a history of the Black Death in the British Isles. I reflected then that however carefully scientists, doctors and officials planned for this event, historical experience suggested that the human reaction to pandemic disease is not always what utilitarians might expect.

Now the rehearsal has become real. We must contend with the greatest pandemic threat the world has seen for a century.

Suggested reading

Will the pandemic kill off libertarianism?

By James Kirkup

Our first reaction is precisely that of our fourteenth century forebears — to assemble the basic facts: it came from the East; it travelled at terrifying speed, so fast it would strike a village or town almost as soon as news arrived that the pestilence was near; it killed rich and poor alike; and the Grim Reaper felled the young at the same rate as he did the old. By the time it departed, it would leave on average half the population dead.

Medieval men and women also knew perfectly well how the disease spread, even if modern historians choose to ignore them and impose their own epidemiology on events.

In an attempt to look afresh at the vector of this deadly pathogen, I worked with world-leading mathematical modellers of epidemics, using a super-computer to turn the varied information that did exist into a model that would best describe how the Black Death spread. (The same algorithms were subsequently used by the Chinese authorities to plan where they placed emergency medical supplies across China, in the event that bird flu reappeared.)

That model demonstrated that the Black Death was spread between people, most likely by touch and by breath, and not — as we have latterly been told — by rats jumping on and off ships. No other explanation can account for the terrifying speed with which it covered ground, from the Near East to the Mediterranean and western Europe, before making landfall on our own south coast. 3000 miles in just 18 months, in the age of the sailing ship, horse and cart.

Suggested reading

Will coronavirus change the world?

By Ed West

Explanations of the pandemic’s cause were more speculative. Country people noticed the wildly erratic weather, an unexplained mass mortality of livestock, and the birth of both children and animals terribly deformed; university astrologers looked to a malign conjunction of the stars.

These observations were all essentially pointing to the same thing: a dangerous imbalance in nature, a corruption that reflected the sinfulness of men and women. The only means by which every part of the world — the human included — could be put right was by God’s divine justice, and the purgative means was this cleansing pandemic.

We may smile at these crude attempts at explanation, products of a naïve pre-scientific age, but are we really any different? It takes seconds on social media to see people around the world linking the coincidence of Australian bushfires, global habitat destruction, climate-warming, air travel and this pandemic flu. Like the medieval stars, these are both portents and causes — evidence of a disequilibrium that neatly puts the pandemic into a comprehensible context.

And just as our fourteenth century forebears saw signs and reasons taper into one, so too can we find multiple explanations for why this has taken place: the hubristic fragility of global capitalism; “nature biting back”, as one mainstream Indian TV channel has it; or simply: “China”. Whether you are a member of the global metropolitan elite or a credulous boomer rube, there is a meta-explanation for this pandemic to suit your taste.

Despite our modernity, we still want to make sense of this pandemic by believing that it will somehow bend us back from our refractory ways. How many times have you heard that in our enforced isolation we will find pleasure in the simpler things in life, learn once again to value our families and rediscover a proper respect for the elderly and infirm? Has it not been divined that the newly clean air above Wuhan and Milan is the first step to the cleaner world we must now create? Just ‘imagine’ how this moment may be the opportunity to recast our economy and save the world.

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Is this what a Green world would look like?

By Stephen Pollard

For those with a more apocalyptic cast of mind — and they are a constant proportion of us in any age — all this is further proof that we are entering an end time, where we fry in an earthly hell of our own creation. The most militant make public displays of their warnings, willing on the economic apocalypse: XR fanatics at the entrance of Downing Street are simply post-religious flagellants in not dissimilar dress.

Are things any different behind those famous gates? Modern government may be far more complex but the response is familiar. In 1349 the economy rapidly collapsed: workers who were not dead stayed at home for fear of infection, crops rotted in the fields and those willing to work would only do so at an extortionate rate.

Edward III — fabled in popular history, but a less appealing man the closer one inspects — was fortunate to be served by an extraordinarily capable treasurer, William Edington. In his hands, the Exchequer’s response was breathtaking in its innovation and scope. A royal ordinance was sent out fixing a maximum rate at which people could work, and infractions were prosecuted in special courts.

The receipts of the fines from these sessions were set against recent tax assessments, in recognition of the challenges that farms and businesses faced. The cost of manufactured goods was controlled by limiting the rates that craftsmen could charge, and to support prices — which had fallen — Edington undertook a massive recoinage, medieval quantitative easing on an industrial scale.

The precise target of these interventions may have been different from today’s Exchequer’s actions, but it had the same purpose: to maintain some sort of functioning economy through the disruption wrought by death after death after death.

Suggested reading

Why this could be worse than the Spanish flu

By Gerard Degroot

Some communities worked out what they had to do to limit the mortality. When the disease entered Milan, the authorities closed the gates and bricked the sick up in their own homes. It was brutal but it worked.

The English made half-hearted attempts in the same direction. The burghers of Gloucester, close to the first urban hotspot of Bristol, closed the city gates “believing that the breath of those who had lived among the dying would be infectious”. Only here it was too late. In London, the Corporation had to take action within weeks to control profiteering out of the run on gloves.

Without a remedy, villagers could rely only on the care of the church, which had a solemn responsibility to provide the last rites that would ease the journey of the soul from this world to the next. More even than modern-day medics, the efforts of so many medieval clergy were heroic, as they knew that their work gave them an odds-on chance of death. The dedication of so many priests to their crucial tasks meant that many parishes went through two, three and more clerics in a matter of months, each dead priest replaced in a matter of days so that the cure of souls would not be held back.

What was left was desolation. Villages half-emptied of peasants; weeds in the fields where a new crop should have stood. Already, however, rural society was reconstituting. Huge swathes of land had, through inheritance and forced sale, changed hands. People lost their families but gained a legacy.

Widowed men and women everywhere hastily remarried, desperate to maintain the security that marriage then ensured. In the near term, survivors had no option but to get back on their feet and make the best of the situation that they could. For some this meant making use of opportunities that had unexpectedly come their way, but for most the imperative was merely subsisting from one day to the next.

“Many changes,” wrote an Irish scribe a year after the pestilence, had passed. Indeed, they had — and they lasted some time. The labour market had been significantly disrupted; building projects had been put on hold; prices went down and then up; the frontier relationships within our four nations had been redefined.

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Plague and the comforts of history

By Tom Holland

But over the years these changes ceased and then unwound. Some of those workers who had known the better pay they had enjoyed immediately after the Black Death bridled at the efforts of lords, parliament, judges and the king to return to the status quo ante — a memory that fired periodic outbursts of public anger, most famously in the Peasants’ Revolt. But by and large, the great arc of history was unbent by the Great Death.

For the medieval mind, this was a far easier outcome to comprehend than for us. In a pre-liberal worldview, one’s place in the world was divinely ordained, and change outside the turn of the seasons was neither inevitable nor expected.

It is a conclusion we find almost impossible to accept now — not just popularly, but as academic students too. Historians are biographers of an age, and like any biographer, we like to think our period was an agent of change. “Millions dead: things go on as before” makes for a poor quotation on the flyleaf of a new book.

And so the Black Death found itself posthumously responsible for changing almost everything: destroying feudalism, creating the middle classes, improving the lot of women, setting in motion the Reformation, ending the Decorated style of architecture and ushering in the Perpendicular, bringing forth our modern English tongue.

However, in as much as these developments did exist (and not all of them did) they all began long before the Great Death, whose effect on each was at most to accelerate an evolution that was already taking place.

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Covid-19 won't change this narcissistic generation

By Meghan Murphy

In truth, that was not the conclusion I had expected to reach when I set out to write about the Black Death, but after spending so much time with this greatest pandemic in history, it was the only judgement I could honestly make.

And now I am back in a cottage in Suffolk, isolated, this time with a family, working my way through the effects of an epidemic. So the wheel of life turns again, almost full circle.

For Michael Gove, who sits where I once did, this thought should be a comfort, as he wrestles with the effects of a pandemic for real. For while he and his colleagues carry the awesome responsibility of helping us all get through this crisis, he should not worry about remaking the world in its wake.

We have been here before. Our response shows that our natural instincts to make sense of our own story remain intact. This pandemic will bring nothing to an end, nor create anything anew. When historians look back in seven centuries’ time, they will hopefully divine the truth of our age: that we were already embarked upon great change — coping with an ever more interconnected world, the dismemberment of traditional community, huge structural changes in the nature of work, and our existential effort to cease the wanton destruction of our planet and manmade climate change — well before pandemic flu temporarily stopped everything in its tracks.

Those accounts will tell of how, in recovery, it was the strength of the human spirit, and the families and communities that we create, that enabled us not only to pick up where we left off but to make full use of the opportunities that this hiatus offered us. It will be a reminder to another time that change is evidence of life, not the dead hand of pandemic death.

The Scouring Angel: the Black Death in the British Isles is published by Vintage.

It’s not that the science is absolutely settled. Science never is — especially on something as complex as the climate. But we can’t just sit there waiting for a perfect understanding that will never come. Given the stakes, there was always going to be a moment at which the world reached a working assumption. That moment has come.

Across the planet, governments and corporations have agreed that the climate emergency is real and that something must be done. Furthermore, that ‘something’ is becoming evermore significant. It is shifting billions — no, make that trillions — in public and private sector investment. It is disrupting entire industries and, will, one or way or another, change our way of life.

So forget the sideshow of ‘green politics’, what we do about climate change is mainstream politics now. Writing for ConservativeHome, Rachel Wolf (co-author of the 2019 Conservative manifesto) makes an excellent point:

“The Government has committed to ‘net zero’ greenhouse gas emissions because it does not want the side effects of the energy sources we have used for centuries to destroy the planet. At the same time, we do not want to return to an era where children (and their mothers) regularly died, and where the majority of people lived in what would now in the UK be considered wholly unacceptable poverty.

“This is a staggering challenge. Much, much bigger than Brexit.”

Yes, and look what happened with Brexit. Europe, though never a marginal issue, was not previously central to our politics. It didn’t define the party system, which is why the most heated arguments took place within the parties not between them. But then the push for the referendum, the campaign itself and the repercussions of the result triggered a realignment. Political parties and personalities redefined themselves around particular Brexit positions. And these dividing lines redrew the political map.

Wolf is right. Net zero is much, much bigger than Brexit. It involves more countries, in fact the whole world. It will present us with crunch decisions over a much longer period of time — the rest of this century at the very least. It will continue to transform the power industry, and much else besides: every mode of transport; how we build, warm and cool our homes; food, agriculture and land use; trade, industry, every part of the economy. Such a profound shift in the energy sources we rely upon will reorder geopolitical relations. Old conflicts will become irrelevant, but new ones could take their place — especially if we start messing around with geoengineering.

Further reading

What will survive global warming?

By Peter Franklin

So, no, this isn’t just an environmental issue. It isn’t mainly a matter of science and technology or even of economics. It is primarily and profoundly political — and it will reshape our politics around it.

Ironically, this is bad news for the ‘greens’ and ‘anti-greens’ who dominated the climate debate when no one else paid it much attention. They’ll be like the old-school Eurosceptics, who were elbowed aside by Boris Johnson et al once Brexit became the main show in town.

Climate politics — and therefore politics in general — is in the process of organising around a new set of positions. They’re not fully formed yet and don’t have widely recognised names — so, for the time being, I’m going to label them the ‘climate Left’ , the ‘climate Right’ and the ‘climate Centre’.

*

The climate Left needs little introduction. Indeed they tend to introduce themselves — loudly. Only last week some Extinction Rebellion protesters made their concern for the planet known by, er, digging up a lawn outside a government building. It was a literally laboured metaphor about the government digging itself deeper into a hole. Naturally, the Metropolitan Police let it happen: an environmental movement destroying the environment; a police force that can’t protect the Home Office.

Despite the antics of XR etc, it’s important to distinguish the climate Left from the radical green movement that once had this space to itself. Traditional Green parties, while generally Left-leaning, weren’t necessarily socialist, let alone Marxist in their outlook. Seizing the means of production isn’t really the main thing when you believe that the means of production are destroying the planet. However, as the mainstream Left and centre-Left has de-industrialised itself — abandoning its traditional working-class support base in favour of young metropolitan, college educated voters — the gulf between red and green has narrowed. In a few countries, like Germany, we’ve seen Green parties emerge as the biggest parties on the Left; in others, like America and Britain, we’ve seen the mainstream Left co-opt environmental issues as part of their radicalisation and their pivot to metropolitan electorates.

Further reading

Just how mad is the Green New Deal?

By Peter Franklin

Indeed the concept of a ‘Green New Deal’ as championed by up-and-coming metro-Left politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has become the central plank of an avowedly anti-capitalist, yet trendy, political programme.

Though governments around the world are signing up to net zero by 2050, the climate Left says this isn’t enough. We have to be carbon neutral by 2030 they say — if not sooner. Just how we’re to achieve that they’re not keen to spell out. XR for instance, refers the specifics to a citizens’ assembly.

This would involve a specially selected group of citizens making decisions under the guidance of a specially selected group of experts. This, apparently, is superior to voting and parliaments and that. I, for one, am absolutely sure we can trust whoever’s in charge of the process not to manipulate it in any way whatsoever. So, who needs regular democracy — fatally compromised as it by giving everyone a say at the ballot box?

Once the Citizens’ Assembly has deliberated, who would implement the resulting Green New Deal? It could only be a greatly expanded state. Completely decarbonising the economy in the space of one decade would amount to a wartime economy, in which basically all production would be centrally-directed by politicians. But with stellar talents like Ocasio-Cortez in charge, inspired by the wisdom of that famed economist Milton Keynes, what could possibly go wrong?

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Liberal individualism is killing the planet

By James Bloodworth

This is not fringe politics. In the US, the Democratic frontrunner Bernie Sanders supports a Green New Deal, so does Elizabeth Warren. In the UK, the main opposition party voted for one last year at its annual conference.

Also, don’t forget that XR supporters include several of our leading actors — whose level-headed good judgement we can trust completely

*

On that reassuring note, let’s move on to the climate Right. This lot are distinct from (though not entirely unrelated to) the climate change deniers of old. They define themselves not in opposition to mainstream scientific opinion, but to the climate Left — which presents a much softer target.

At its best, the climate Right asks searching questions of all those who commit to ambitious decarbonisation targets: Net zero, you say? By when, exactly? How much will it cost? Who’s going to pay? What happens if we do our bit, but our competitors don’t?

When it comes to net zero by 2030 (or even 2025 as XR demands) it doesn’t take too long to expose the utter insanity of any of the Green New Deals proposed by the climate Left. Even with more moderate policies, its good to have the climate Right around to stress-test badly-designed policies before they blow up like Emmanuel Macron’s eco-tax on fuel.

As Rachel Wolf warns, climate policies that are seen to impose excessive costs — especially on hand-pressed parts of the population who feel they’ve been unfairly singled out — could provoke a populist backlash:

“Unless we get this right – and develop solutions that can mitigate the cost – the situation is ripe for a new UKIP-style party to whip up hostility (as the gilets jaunes in France show).”

However, there are other elements of the climate Right for whom a climate culture war is something to be welcomed not warned about. Whatever it takes to stop the climate Left. That’s not in itself an unreasonable objective. The radicals must not be allowed to use the climate emergency to seize control of the economy or to bypass representative democracy. Nevertheless, the climate emergency is real — to ignore it or deny it only polarises the issue to the benefit of extremists at either end.

Further reading

Why the Iron Lady is an icon for our times

By Ian Birrell

At its worst, the climate Right exists as a tool of corporations and countries who profit from the permission to pollute. That doesn’t mean that every climate right-winger is a bought-and-paid-for lobbyist — but there’s no denying the significant sums of money that have made their way from fossil fuel companies into the think tanks, campaign groups, publications and prominent politicians that populate the ‘conservative movement’ (in America and beyond).

Just because the old climate wars (against the science itself and the case for action) have been lost, it doesn’t mean that the lobbyists have given up. If they can’t stop the great green shift they will at least attempt to influence its direction. But to what end?

Whenever you see an apparently constructive proposal coming from the climate Right, it’s always worth asking: who benefits? A particular word to watch out for is ‘breakthrough’ i.e. code for some kind of game-changing technology on which all hopes for the future supposedly depend.

If on closer examination this turns-out to be a pipe-dream about carbon capture and storage (CCS), a new kind of nuclear power station or a geoengineering scheme then it’s time to count the spoons. What all these technologies have in common is that (a) they don’t exist yet in any commercially competitive form and (b) they’d allow the dirty dinosaur energy industries of 20th century to stagger on.

As I say, the climate Right isn’t just a lobbying operation, but until it shows some contrition for its denialist past and greater transparency about its continuing sources of funding, then it doesn’t deserve the benefit of our doubt.

*

So, if the climate Left is mad and the climate Right is bad, then we desperately need an alternative to both. This is provided by the climate Centre.

Climate centrism takes the science seriously — enough not to indulge in scare tactics or to pretend that business-as-usual is a responsible option. It rejects the accelerated timelines demanded by green new dealers, not because action isn’t required, but because haste makes waste. Achieving net zero in the space of a single decade would divert scarce resources into the creation of a command state, when what we need is more of what’s been achieved so far through competitive markets supported by smart government.

It suits both the climate Left and the climate Right to ignore the massive and rapid progress made on renewable power, batteries, electric vehicles, energy efficient lighting and other low carbon technologies. The climate Right would have us believe that we can’t do without old, polluting industries; the climate Left that we’re doomed without eco-socialism — but both are demonstrably wrong.

Further reading

Test article

By Peter Franklin

Given the right policy incentives — including government support for foundational research and shared infrastructure — private enterprise can, and has, delivered sustained improvement in the performance and cost of clean technology. We certainly need more of it and across a wider range of sectors, but the way to do that is to learn the lessons from actual examples of success and failure.

Climate centrism, however, is not solely about sound science and economics. Achieving a net zero world is also about what we choose to value most as a society. Even with continued technological progress we still need think about and change the way we live our lives. Do we prioritise growth, mobility and convenience at any cost? Or are there things that we’ve sacrificed — beauty, calm and community life — that we ought to reclaim? Is choice and freedom something limited to the individual, consumerist realm? Or do we want to consciously rethink our relationship with technology and its impact on the common good?

These are deep, complex questions. Too deep to be settled by the market alone; too complex to be micro-managed by the central government. Rather, we need to devolve as many decisions as possible to a community level — understanding that what might work for a traffic-choked city won’t be the right thing for the car-dependent countryside. So, climate centrism needs to localist — putting people, and the places they live, first; and deferring upward to government and big business only where necessary.

*

So, there you have it: three paths for the future — Left, Right and Centre. I’ve massively over-simplified the choices, of course — but that doesn’t mean that big decisions won’t have to be made.

One way or another, they will be. And what we choose (or what gets chosen for us) will make all the difference in the world.

Further reading

What would 'living with less' actually look like?

By Peter Franklin

But the apocalyptic vibe in Texas, home to both David Koresh and a very big plant for assembling nuclear weapons, felt like a more condensed version of a zeitgeist that was abroad in the culture more generally. Anxieties about jihadi terror, global warming and the decline of the West were widespread, and zombie plague movies were just starting to take off. Society, it seemed, was in a state of apocalyptic arousal, and I detected a weird undercurrent of yearning, as if some people liked it. But why?

I started taking the bus to the Austin public library to read whatever they had about the end of the world. This being Texas, they had rather a lot, and I have fond memories of sitting among the homeless people and the hippy burnouts, leafing through the Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements, absorbing endless factoids about strange religious movements, cults and prophets.

The theme would follow me home; on the way back to the bus I would always pick up a free street newspaper that informed me that the Maitreya, a messianic figure from Buddhism, was already among us. (He still is, apparently, although his prophet has since died, alas.)

I soon realised why some people seemed to crave the end of the world; they want this terrible world of suffering to pass away and be replaced by a new world (and some people really want to see the wicked punished). I also discovered that belief in an earthly heaven on earth — Millennialism — had inspired some extraordinary behaviour over the centuries. Why had nobody ever taught me about the naked Adamites of Bohemia, or Sabattai Zevi, the mysterious messiah who aroused the hopes of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire only to convert to Islam, or the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the enormous devastation it wrought in the dying days of the Qing dynasty.

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Communism's war on Christianity and Islam

By Daniel Kalder

Come to think of it, why was it not better known that Isaac Newton and James Napier were profoundly apocalyptic thinkers? The neat line between their scientific-mathematical studies and their religious obsessions was an anachronism imposed by revisionist historians. Then there were the obvious millennial aspects to the French Revolution, and communism, as well as Nazism; throw in the messianic-apocalyptic aspects of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam and it seemed as though maybe this whole end of the world thing was one of the most important ideas going…

It was as if I had discovered an alternate history of humanity, where the dream of a happy apocalypse had inspired prophets, saints, scientists, madmen and martyrs to repeatedly attempt to birth new, better worlds out of the flawed ones they lived in. I liked how strange, and wild it was, and how ambiguous it was in its legacy. There was a whiff of the disrespectable about it, which appealed to me; but that in turn meant that many “serious” writers ignored the theme, or quarantined it in the “mad cult” category.

Maybe digging into this stuff wasn’t good for your academic career. And as for those who did write about it, well they talked about Protestant Europe and the USA a lot. Even Russia, with profoundly deep millennial tradition, barely got a look in. Clearly somebody needed to write a book that would tie all these strange events and threads together, clearly articulating why the End was so important, and why.

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Who are you calling a dictator?

By Daniel Kalder

Then, in 2011, that book appeared: Heaven and Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience, written by Richard Landes, the editor of Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements. Landes is a mediaevalist and he could easily have turned out a book focusing on the likes of Joachim of Fiore and Rodulfus Glaber but instead he took inspiration from Georges Perec’s novel A Void which omits the letter “e” entirely, and wrote a book about the millennialism that didn’t include Jewish or Christian case studies. This radical exclusion enabled him to more clearly highlight just how much the phenomenon cuts across time, space and culture.

Thus Landes highlights the tale of Nongqawuse the Xhosa prophetess in southern Africa, who told her followers to slaughter their cattle that the dead might arise and drive out the British; the Taiping Heavenly kingdom, cargo cults, the French and Russian Revolutions, UFO cults and the Pharaoh Akhenaten.

We see millenniums pursued from the top down as well as from the bottom up, and Landes explores how an accelerated sense of “apocalyptic time” acts upon those who welcome the advent of an earthly paradise and those who resist it. We read of great and terrible deeds, and of course, the repeated experience of failure, disappointment and what follows it.

After reading the book, I was left with an unshakeable sense that apocalyptic and millennial undercurrents are always running through our societies, but that it is practically impossible to tell when they will erupt to the surface. Yet when they do, hitherto rejected and bizarre ideas can move to the centre rapidly, turning everything upside down. Thus Heaven and Earth powerfully underscores the importance of ancient dreams, phantoms and prophecies as motivating factors in human affairs.

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Why Corbynistas can never admit they're wrong

By Tom Chivers

That, no doubt, is why Landes wrote a very long introduction in which he defended himself against anticipated criticisms from his academic peers. Having taken such a bold stance, he clearly expected strong pushback. Instead the book shared the same fate as so many others: it entered the world, got some reviews, but not too many, and that was that. Not many people were outraged; not many people were paying attention. If they did pay too much attention they would see how deep these currents run even in themselves, and that might prove a difficult pill to swallow.

But Landes’s book does deserve a wider audience, and to be read, and debated. He provides powerful tools for thinking about the allure of the apocalypse and the millennium, and enables us to detect patterns, categorise types and recognise symptoms. I don’t think that the world has become less apocalyptic since I started getting into the end back in 2006; with the sudden rise of Extinction Rebellion we see a movement that is living in accelerated apocalyptic time, albeit without much hope of anything nice happening on the other end, unless you like wearing hair shirts.

But who knows how it will mutate, or what other ideas will emerge to surprise, disappoint or perhaps transform us. From reading Heaven on Earth it is clear that such ideas will emerge, though — as example after example in the book proves — we should hope it doesn’t happen in our lifetimes.

What is uncivil society? First, let’s define its more familiar cousin, civil society. If business is about buying and selling things, and government is about setting rules and distributing the resources we hold in common, civil society is all the ways people organise outside these two structures. Churches, charities, clubs, societies, ad hoc groups — civil society incorporates any social organisation driven by ethical or community objectives.

Uncivil society is angrier and more militant than churches and clubs. It emerges when a significant grassroots group comes together to campaign for ethical or social aims that the mainstream views as foolish, wicked or simply unattainable.

This was the year we saw the emergence of Extinction Rebellion, the mass mobilisation of the Brexit pressure group Leave Means Leave (which morphed, in 2019, into the Brexit Party) and an increasingly organised feminist resistance to transgender activism. All these are, in different ways, social organisations driven by ethical and community objectives. But all have been largely excluded from institutional support — effectively excluded from civil society — by a process called ‘policy laundering’.

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Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates

By Mary Harrington

In its most blatant form, policy laundering looks like government departments using taxpayer money to pay lobbyists to influence government. Back in 2012, the IEA released a report outlining all the ways taxpayer funding was being used in just this way, for example on food or alcohol regulations.

In response, in 2015 the then Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Eric Pickles tightened up charity funding guidelines with the aim of clamping down on this practice. His changes banned the use of government funding to support any activity that aimed to influence Parliament, government or political parties.

But this is easier said than done. Let us consider an example: the Scottish Trans Alliance. This is a project funded by the Scottish Government Equality Unit and delivered by the Equality Network, which is largely funded by the Scottish government as well as by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (funded by UK government).

The project delivers research, advisory, and training, including to government-funded bodies, who in turn repeat the ideas received via reports, training and consultancy back toward policymakers. Thus, a nested series of public sector grants has enabled government to conjure into existence a body that shapes public sector policy. Meanwhile, the pronouncements and statistics produced by this arms-length government body are treated by the (government funded) BBC as though emanating from independent civil society voices.

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Why Boris should be more 2012

By Polly Mackenzie

The whole cycle amounts to a process of laundering, by semi-independent bodies, a series of policies the government already wanted to adopt so they look as though they come spontaneously from the society upon which they will in due course be visited.

The result looks like a thriving voice for civil society in the national debate. But in reality it is more like the government having a conversation with itself, via a series of proxies. Meanwhile, that part of civil society without insider status sits scratching its head trying to work out which form to fill in to get a seat at the table.

Under those circumstances, you might expect differences to emerge between the official conversation and what people actually think and feel on the ground. Taking our example of transgender activism: in 2018 then-Equalities Minister Maria Millar launched a consultation on changes to the Gender Recognition Act. The proposed changes would effectively have turned legal recognition as the opposite sex from a bureaucratic years-long procedure involving medical testimony into a simple matter of form-filling.

The initial proposal was developed in consultation with government funded LGBT charities, but included little input from women. Opposition to the GRA reforms first gained traction on the parenting messageboard Mumsnet and over 2018 morphed into the campaigning organisation Fair Play For Women (government funding: nil) and swelled the ranks of Transgender Trend (government funding: nil).

These groups, aided by a coalition of social conservatives, radical feminists, transsexuals, ordinary concerned women and the occasional man, challenged the GRA reform campaign led by Stonewall (2018 UK government grant funding: £233,000, Scottish government funding £90,000, earnings from delivering paid-for training courses to the public sector: higher still). The activism of this uncivil society movement drove so large a response to the consultation that at the time of writing, over a year after the consultation closed in October 2018, the consultation’s official web page still just says ‘We are analysing your feedback’.

This resistance was not received kindly. Women speaking up on the topic have been harassed, threatened and even sacked. But their uncivil society campaigning was effective and unmistakeably grassroots.

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What if you regret transitioning?

By Julie Bindel

Elsewhere, 2018 saw a polite ecosystem of climate change lobbying to government disrupted by the October 2018 launch of Extinction Rebellion, whose (today) approximately £2.5m war chest comprises crowdfunding and donations from private individuals and charities — but no government funding. With its colourful stunts and ability to annoy free-traders and eco-incrementalists alike, Extinction Rebellion is both grassroots and unmistakably a product of uncivil society.

A tour of 2018’s newly-militant uncivil society would not be complete without the Brexiters. Ordinary Leave voters displayed a touching faith in the political process, and largely stopped campaigning following the 2016 EU referendum in the expectation that their vote would simply be implemented.

But by 2018, concerted resistance by most of official civil society to the prospect of leaving the EU prompted a groundswell of astonished popular anger that drove the rapid growth of Leave Means Leave (government funding: nil). This movement morphed in 2019 into the Brexit Party, which then became the primary vehicle for Leavers to express their outrage, which they duly did by sending 29 Brexit Party MEPs to Brussels. This result, and the obvious passion of its raucous, well-attended rallies, arguably helped end May’s premiership.

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Why the Greens should stop playing God

By John Gray

The Brexiters are the only one of 2018’s largest uncivil society movements to receive any kind of official acceptance so far. The quiet fury of Leave voters, mobilised by the Brexit Party, found recognition in Boris Johnson’s election slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’, and landed Boris Johnson an 80-seat Conservative majority.

What other widely held views are still obscured by a too-narrow ideological consensus in ‘official’ civil society? Will other uncivil society movements be heard as well? Boris Johnson’s freshly-minted electoral majority may give us cautious ground for hope. But while the ecosystem of policy laundering remains largely unchallenged, we still have a long way to go.

What father of a son would disagree? And it’s not just fathers and sons. Most people want their children to develop the same sort of loyalties, beliefs and attachments that they themselves consider important. Of course, life doesn’t always turn out that way. One thing I have realised as I get older, and have ever more experience of a wider range of people, is that my contented, relaxed upbringing in a cheerful home overseen by happily-married parents was quite a bit rarer than I had once imagined. I have always felt that I owe my parents a great debt of gratitude.

What exactly do we owe our families? It’s a thorny question, not least at this time of year when many people are visiting family, and girding their loins for a big row about Brexit, or Boris, or Extinction Rebellion. Recent years have seen the emergence of a genre of article that encourages people to pick fights with their families at the dinner table (in the US, at Thanksgiving as well as Christmas).

One widely circulated tweet this year contained a picture of a T-shirt that a woman was planning to wear to Thanksgiving dinner, declaring her support for abortion rights, transgender rights, gay marriage and the rest of the progressive sacraments. Presumably the plan was to throw these beliefs in the faces of her backward, bigoted relatives, and storm away from the table basking in the warm glow of self-righteous satisfaction. Another was from an academic who quite openly scorned and mocked the idea that he should feel any kind of affinity or attachment to his relations just because they shared some DNA.

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It's time to reverse the Beeching Axe

By Niall Gooch

I have no idea whether this social media fad means anything in the real world. Are thousands of angry students and young people really heading home for the holidays determined to harangue their families for their insufficiently progressive political views? It’s anyone’s guess. Anecdotally, it seems fairly common for young people who are well-educated, or who have at least been through university-level education (not quite the same thing these days), to have a kind of performative disdain for their parents’ views, especially if those parents are from the dreaded suburbia.

It’s hard to deny that the dominant stories in our culture encourage dissatisfaction with, and suspicion of, home and community. From sex education to pop music to children’s TV and cinema, the message is clear: to find happiness and contentment, you must break away from the world into which you were born, and from the people who raised you, and seek your “real self”.

The foundation to this way of thinking is a form of hard liberalism, wherein the only attachments and obligations by which we are truly bound are those which we freely, and continually, choose for ourselves. If we don’t see eye to eye with our parents, if they’re not providing us with the requisite affirmation of all our choices or the appropriate number of hedonic units, then we should shut them out of our lives in favour of people whose company and politics we find more congenial.

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Eight ways to unite the nation

By Polly Mackenzie

If your interest in your wife has waned now that you have a bright and bubbly young secretary, don’t you have a right — a responsibility, even! — to pursue your own happiness, regardless of all those boring old vows you made twenty years ago? This hard liberalism is also increasingly applied to the concept of the nation-state: patriotism both as source of pride and as source of obligation is simply unintelligible where all moral and political choices are assessed through the prism of the individual and his currently existing desires and preferences.

There is, of course, another extreme, an over-emphasis on family loyalty to the exclusion of all else. Some years ago I read a fascinating short book arguing that one reason why the creation of stable modern states in the Arab world has been so difficult is that the traditional culture in that part of the world retains a strong focus on the clan or tribe, rather than any broader grouping. You cannot build a liberal democracy with the rule of law if people do not feel a strong primary loyalty to the nation, and feel able to trust outsiders. A world with an absolute and unqualified duty of loyalty and deference to your family would be unbearable.

Nevertheless, it is worth resisting the assumptions embedded in the view that it is generally praiseworthy or admirable to adopt a stance of disdain and superiority towards one’s family and community.

For one thing, the family should be a shelter from the political. The non-political way of life includes associations and interactions that are maintained not from above but by voluntary co-operation. It’s about maintaining customs, traditions and institutions — such as the family — whose normal operation is in a fundamental way beyond the reach of organised compulsion by the state. It’s about organisations that are ends in themselves rather than vehicles for some other goal, i.e. the point of a chess club is for people who like chess to get together to play chess, not to promote equality or capitalism or membership of the European Union.

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By Giles Fraser

The non-ideological view of life is an essentially humanist one, because it sees people and their situations as standing alone to be considered on their own terms, rather than being slotted into a neat pre-existing box. It is the basis of authentic pluralism, because it enables us to carve out room for minorities and dissenters. In some ways the family is the archetypal non-political institution, and to only value your family insofar as they are politically congenial to you is to miss the point.

To cultivate a positive stance towards your family also helps to develop two of the great virtues: humility and gratitude. A key part of humility is entertaining the possibility that you have something to learn — perhaps a great deal — from most people you meet, even perhaps your dreadful conservative dad. Gratitude is about taking seriously the things which other people have done for you; the sacrifices they have made, the security they have created, the help they have given. Both humility and gratitude are ways of breaking free of resentment, which is one of the most corrosive poisons in human affairs, whether at the level of individuals or in politics.

I don’t want to idealise family. I wouldn’t deny for one moment that many people are quite justified in their anger at, or suspicion of, theirs. Families are, after all, made of human beings, those strange, fallible, infuriating creatures.

But I suspect that many more people have poor relationships with their families because they have disordered priorities, or a mistaken idea of the relative importance of politics. Many seem to have swallowed whole our culture’s obsession with self-actualisation and its hostility to what you might call bourgeois normality; that is to say, the widespread view — often expressed indirectly — that there is something pitiable and inadequate about living quietly and honestly in a small-scale way and attending to the particular and the local.

This is, of course, quite false and damaging. But I fear that many people only realise its falsehood when the opportunity to repair the damage is long past. Cherish your family over this Christmas period; sometimes you don’t appreciate good things until they’ve gone, and it’s too late.

While the protests in Tunisia received some international attention in 2010, they made global headlines in the early days of 2011. On January 2, the activist hacker collective known as Anonymous launched cyberattacks against the Tunisian government in solidarity with the protestors. By the end of the month, major protests were occurring in half a dozen countries in the Middle East and North Africa, and the Arab Spring engulfed the region.

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By Evan Fowler

Though protests have, of course, been a continuous part of politics around the world (2010, for example, saw a number of anti-austerity demonstrations across Europe), 2011 changed things in several important ways.

The Arab Spring challenged the stability of long-standing dictatorships that many scholars and pundits saw as unassailable — either because the dictators had apparently mastered the political techniques of authoritarianism, or because they simply enjoyed the luxury of living in a region that did not value democratic principles. When Francis Fukuyama asked in 1989 whether humanity had reached “the end of history” with the universal acceptance of liberal democracy, cultural relativists offered the so-called incompatibility between Islam and democratic values as a rebuttal to his argument. But even though dictatorship mostly endured in the region (although specific rulers like Muammar Gaddafi and Hosni Mubarak fell), the tens of millions of people who came out into the streets showed that authoritarianism was contrary to the will of the people. In the words of the late Jamal Khashoggi:

“The debate about the relationship between Islam and democracy conclusively ended with the coming of the Arab Spring, when the people of the Arab world — especially the youth, and even the Islamists, including some Salafis, who were always critical of democracy — supported the protests for democratic and political change.”

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The Arab Spring is still unfurling

By Ian Birrell

The Arab Spring’s demonstration of widespread support for democracy also highlighted the role of youth in the movement. The Middle East is experiencing a youth bulge, and these young people are technologically savvy and significantly more educated than their parents. But they are also frustrated by mass unemployment and the lack of the political freedoms they are able to observe in other parts of the world. Using both old-fashioned mobilisation techniques and social media, these young people drove the push for democracy and freedom in their countries. More recent protests in countries like Lebanon and Iraq show that this desire for change has not abated.

Even if the Arab Spring had been the only major protest movement of 2011, it would have made a strong case for that year being the most important of the decade. But the uprisings that swept across the Middle East and North Africa at the beginning of the year inspired another movement.

In September, thousands of protestors marched, disrupted traffic and in many cases camped out in downtown Manhattan, demonstrating against growing inequality and the seeming lack of consequences paid by the individuals and institutions responsible for the 2008 financial crisis. Occupy Wall Street, as the group was dubbed, was directly inspired by the millions who had come out in places like Tahrir Square. “We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends,” the group declared.

Just as the Tunisian protests of the beginning of the year soon sparked an international phenomenon, Occupy Wall Street quickly spawned imitators across America and throughout the western world. Like the Arab Spring, the globalised Occupy movement mobilised citizens from many countries around a common theme of resistance to oppression — this time economic rather than political. This latter internationalised movement reached its apotheosis on 15 October 2011, with protests in dozens of countries organised around the hashtagged slogan, “United for #GlobalChange.”

The movement was largely leaderless and amorphous, and as such it was no more successful than the Arab Spring at achieving specific policy goals. But it did manage to significantly shift the conversations about wealth and inequality, especially in the United States — just watch any of the Democratic debates or see the mainstreaming of Democratic Socialism, something that 10 years ago was considered a fringe leftist idea within US politics. Similarly, Jeremy Corbyn’s ascension to Labour leader owes much to the leftward shift triggered by the Occupy movement.

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Beyond their effects on mainstream politics, both the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement shaped the nature of protests that have proliferated across the world in the last decade. The Arab Spring successfully merged 21^st century, youth-led social media activism with old-fashioned, ‘to the streets’ protests. Whereas ‘hashtag activism’ threatened to undermine more substantive forms of mass political action — why carry a sign and perhaps risk arrest when you could simply forward a tweet? — the Arab Spring used various media, social and otherwise, as tools to complement and magnify the crowds that gathered in the streets and public squares to demand change.

This unique marriage of youth-led organising, virtual propaganda and physical mobilisation has been replicated by individuals and movements such as Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion, or the Parkland school shooting survivors and the American gun control movement.

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Meanwhile, Occupy’s lack of clear platform and its emphasis on protests over concrete policy goals represents the movement’s true legacy. Look at the very name: ‘Occupy Wall Street’, not ‘Change Wall Street’. The focus is not on the outcome, but on the protest itself. This model of expressive protest differentiated Occupy from earlier movements, and set the stage for many of the later movements to emerge in its wake.

Black Lives Matter, which has drawn considerable attention to police killings and violence against African Americans, has achieved some successes (the prosecution of a handful of individual police officers, and the mainstreaming of body camera technology as a way to keep officers accountable), but it has often been criticised for emphasising demonstration over specific policy goals. Likewise, the Women’s March, emulating Occupy Wall Street, is largely organised around a specific action (like Occupy, it highlights its tactics, rather than its goals, in its very name). The Right-wing also picked up these tactics, with formerly fringe groups emerging in events like the ill-fated Unite the Right rally.

In short, the forces unleashed in Tunisia and Manhattan in 2011 ensured that the subsequent decade was one in which tens of millions of people around the world found common cause to pour onto their respective streets. Some were demanding change, but many more were simply expressing their displeasure with the status quo.

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In 2010, David Cameron first fooled the country

By James Bloodworth

As we enter 2020, the legacy of 2011 has morphed into seemingly countless movements around the world. But as in any uprising, counter-revolutions have also materialised. The backlash has taken the form of governments and powerful conservative forces responding to the outpouring of often young, often leftist or radical protestors. The outpouring of progressive anger has created a conservative backlash — not just with fringe Right-wing populist groups, but within mainstream politics as well. Although Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren ascended to the top of their respective opposition parties, they remain far from number 10 or the Oval Office.

It can be argued that the Right, having watched Occupy fizzle out with few policy victories, has essentially adopted a strategy of accepting public displays of progressive anger as long as actual power remains in conservative hands. Impeachment, an expression of liberal anger in addition to a response to presidential misuse of power, seems destined to die a quick death in the US Senate. By contrast, Brexit, perhaps the ultimate expression of conservative resurgence, is steaming ahead.

Meanwhile, authoritarians around the world seem determined to prevent a new Arab Spring. Protestors in the nondemocratic world are seeing their internet-coordinated outrage met with increasingly tech-savvy forms of repression, ranging from government-engineered internet blackouts to increasingly sophisticated surveillance technologies. After a decade, neither liberals nor conservatives, young radicals nor older conservatives, seem ready to back down. The battle lines drawn in 2011 have solidified and the years ahead are poised to be as contentious and tumultuous as the outgoing decade has been.

That’s right, of all the teenagers on the planet, ours are among the least likely to agree with the idea that “my life has clear meaning or purpose”.

And yet, this unsettling news was pretty much ignored. The focus in the media was on the survey’s news about ‘modest improvements’ in reading and maths. The meaning of life stuff was left well alone.

The same survey suggested that the UK’s young people, while being in the middle of the pack in terms of happiness, also rank near the very bottom in terms of life satisfaction. Of all the countries surveyed, only the children of Turkey and the Macao region of China rate their life less highly than the British do.

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By Freddie Sayers

It seems that what the researchers themselves refer to as eudaimonia, the philosophical concept of human flourishing that the ancient Greeks considered to be the highest and most worthy, is in short supply among British young people. This feels like it might be worth thinking about.

Perhaps the commentariat ignored the research because these big philosophical questions don’t make easy news stories. The whole question of meaning is now considered entirely private — it’s almost rude to mention in public.

It is also interwoven with religion, which makes it an even less appetising subject for liberal-minded debate. The top of the OECD rankings are filled with more religious countries, and the UK is now one of the most secular countries in the world. Many people would no doubt think that a dose of existential lostness in your teens is a price worth paying for being liberated from arbitrary superstition. Where would you rather bring up your children, after all: Catholic Panama and Muslim Albania, at the top of the ‘meaning in life’ index, or secular Sweden and the Netherlands, towards the bottom?

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Others might argue that the real reasons for juvenile emptiness might be related to practical concerns about what the future holds for them: difficulties of getting on the housing ladder, surviving in the gig economy and anxiety about Brexit.

But while all these may be contributing factors, it is hard to avoid the sense that there is a wider crisis of meaning in our late modern society, and that the UK is particularly exposed. Already since the Brexit vote, hard-to-pin-down abstract nouns like identity, culture, community and belonging have forced their way into the political debate. If this report is right, ‘meaning in life’ could be next.

There are already energetic movements such as Extinction Rebellion which advocate thinking radically differently about how to organise our society, with less focus on economic growth and a greater attention on the Common Good and overall human flourishing.

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By John Gray

Even to refer to the Good in this way is still considered edgy. A central premise of Aristotle’s ethics was that eudaimonia is the highest good, the end point that needs no secondary justification. But it’s telling that the OECD report’s authors felt they had justify this area of questioning with reference to secondary effects: kids who have a greater sense of meaning in life are apparently less likely to play truant and more likely to succeed in reading and maths. As if they were the more important goals.

I think there’s a similar leap that has yet to be made in our politics. Part of the reason that the response to the Brexit vote has been so woeful is that politicians lacked the understanding or vocabulary to respond to the deeper, more inchoate aspects of people’s motivation. It takes a rare kind of leader who has the vision, and moral authority, to address these questions convincingly — clearly, none of our current crop of politicians are interested.

To give them their due, both Labour and the Conservatives have at least understood the need to bolster regional and local culture and empowerment in the UK, which is a good start. Looking down the ‘meaning in life’ rankings, once you get past the predominantly Catholic and Muslim-majority countries at the top of the list, you soon arrive at Switzerland and Austria. These are both European countries comparable to ours, which are only slightly more religious, and yet 71% of their 15-year-olds say they have discovered a satisfactory meaning in life, compared with just 52% of ours. It seems fair to speculate that their famously strong national, regional and local cultures play a part in giving their children a strong sense of place as they grow into adulthood.

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If only we could be more like Bavaria

By David Goodhart

Strong culture doesn’t necessarily mean homogenous — Austria has a higher level of immigration than the UK, but rather like neighbouring Bavaria, its prominent local customs can make it easier rather than harder to assimilate newcomers. The OECD report actually singles out the UK as a country in which “students with an immigrant background were much more likely to report a greater sense of meaning in life than their native-born counterparts”. A combination of greater religiosity and stronger immigrant cultures seems a likely explanation.

Beyond religion and culture, there are other, equally controversial, areas that we should look at if we think this is a problem worth addressing: the damaging impact of technology and the internet, how values are taught in our schools, and how to better support families. Labour have now actively signalled their opposition to pro-family policies, and Boris Johnson steers well clear of family values, for his own delicate reasons. But absent religious faith or a stronger wider culture, the family is still the primary provider of meaning in life, and Britain has a high level of family breakdown: 28.5% of British 12-17 year olds live with only one parent, the third highest in Europe and nearly twice that of Switzerland.

Aristotle thought that eudaimonia was intimately connected to arete, or virtue — another word I don’t think we’ve heard once in this election campaign. Don’t hold your breath. Whoever wins on Thursday, the small matter of the meaning of life looks set, for now, to remain off limits.

It is taken for granted that civilisation is on the precipice of disaster. Optimistic voices can still be found, if one searches judiciously for them, but these are typically drowned out by jeremiahs and their terrifying predictions of impending doom.

We are living through another Morbid Age, as the historian Richard Overy named his 2009 book about the fear and paranoia that gripped British intellectual life in the years between the wars. The difference today is that fears of war, eugenics and psychoanalysis have given way to fears around climate catastrophe, immigration and the collapse of capitalism.

Referencing a quote by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who, while studying at Cambridge wondered whether very soon he and his contemporaries might be dead, Overy’s book asks why so many in the 1930s were ready to contemplate “the death of civilisation in a country whose political and social system has proved almost impervious to the savage violence and upheavals that scarred the history of the rest of Europe”.

Hobsbawm’s fear of imminent catastrophe was more understandable, perhaps, in 1939 when Adolf Hitler had recently annexed Czechoslovakia. But many similar sentiments appear in the media today. Moreover, they are often espoused with undisguised relish. A period of supposedly relentless advance — in this case the Nineties — has given way to a prevailing paradigm of decline and collapse.

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By D.J. Taylor

Trump has provided the lightning rod for much of the recent catastrophism. “People aren’t wrong to point out that Trump certainly appears similar to Hitler in some ways,” wrote the former deputy editor of the Guardian opinion pages, Kira Goldberg, shortly prior to Trump’s election.

Once Trump was elected, the hysteria was dialled up a notch. The new President was about to replace democracy with a fascist dictatorship. The Observer ran a special edition of its New Review supplement comparing our own era to that of the 1930s, based on Trump’s apparent similarities with the Führer. Newspaper columnists encouraged readers to pick up a copy of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (which they did in droves, despite Airstrip One having little in common with 21st century America) together with books by Philip Roth and Sinclair Lewis about fascist takeovers of the government.

Three years on from the election of Trump, who has been an embarrassingly incompetent President but who has not, as yet, ushered in the Fourth Reich, it is now climate change that is about to bring the curtain down on civilisation. The Guardian announced in 2018 that: “We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN.” This year, Extinction Rebellion have taken to disrupting commuters while the eco-celebrity Greta Thunberg has received plaudits from the great and the good for telling us that we have “stolen” her “dreams” and her “childhood”.

Indeed, predictions of the imminent demise of not just capitalism, but civilisation itself, have gone mainstream. “Without us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era,” wrote Paul Mason in the Guardian in 2015. As in the Thirties, many in the political centre are fretting about the end of capitalism too. “Capitalism is in crisis — and business leaders know it,” reads the headline of a recent article by CNBC Editor-at-Large John Harwood.

A further delve into some of the articles prophesising the end of capitalism reveals a circularity to much of the reasoning. If capitalism is killing the planet, then, ergo, “Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism,” as a recent headline in another opinion piece for The Guardian read. Each catastrophic event (or the potential for a catastrophic event) is conveniently marshalled as evidence for the correctness of everything one already thought about the world.

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Apocalyptic anti-immigration tomes are also popular. Such books usually attach themselves to the notion that ‘the West’ is facing catastrophic decline unless it curbs the number of foreigners settling within its borders. Again, crisis is evoked to drive home a particular political argument. The supposedly terminal “crisis of late capitalism” is music to the ears of the activists who wish to see capitalism replaced by socialism, whereas the impending “death of Europe” has an obvious appeal to those who wish to fortify Britain’s borders.

Solipsism probably plays a role in some of the recent doom-mongering. We all want to live in epochal times because we all want to feel we have a consequential historical role. Or at least the average political activist does. The Nineties cult film Fight Club captured well the mood of anomie when such historical purpose is lacking. The film’s protagonist, Tyler Durden, laments the spiritual emptiness characteristic of consumer capitalism at the supposed ‘End of History’. “We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression.”

For many intellectuals, journalists and activists, locating this purpose seems to be synonymous with existential crisis. Thus when the planes crashed into the twin towers on 11 September 2001, the polemicist Christopher Hitchens wrote of a feeling of “exhilaration”. The subsequent ‘War on Terror’ invoked a renewed struggle for civilisation against barbarous Jihadists. Moreover, the defence of ‘our way of life’ functioned as a convenient rallying cry to embark on a particular course of action — in the case remodelling the Middle East — that those who evoked it were already set upon.

None of this is meant to dismiss pessimism about the future, which is not entirely without substance. There is certain kind of Pollyanna commentary, perhaps best encapsulated by professor Stephen Pinker and liberal websites such as Quillette, that is so attached to the status quo that every example of human suffering is repackaged as a mere blip in an upward tick of unstoppable progress. The transparent purpose of such material is to sooth the consciences of those who have made their peace with the status quo.

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The “culture of crisis”, as Overy put it when writing about the Twenties and Thirties, was made possible by the “freedom to express fears openly and the competition to identify its causes”. Much of this competition today manifests itself on social media where, to quote from one of my favourite books of the year, online activists “take up more radical positions to get more attention”.

Grand pronouncements about the world burning, capitalist collapse or the death of the West make others sit up and take notice. And perhaps it is this that explains why Jeremiah has once again become a best-seller. Books with titles such as The Uninhabitable Earth: A story of the Future, How Democracies Die, The Strange Death of Europe have all been best sellers in the past year. The surest way of standing out in the current social media environment is indeed to dial up one’s rhetoric and proclaim that civilisation is at a crossroads.

And, of course, those who make such pronouncements are usually on hand to supply the magical solutions which they claim will reverse the slide towards apocalypse. We should thus take all such doom-mongering with a pinch of salt. For as Overy noted, democracies are not immune from “the distortion of reality or from the dangerous power of popular fear that provokes it, either then or now”.

Everyone agreed this could only be a good thing, so towards the end of 2019 a UK television production company decided to monetise it further with a new reality TV show called I’m An Ideologue … Get Me Out of Here! In a radical experiment, the format saw 100 members of distinct political tribes marooned on one of five islands in a small Pacific archipelago. They received basic survival training before being put ashore to see how they would fare over the course of a year in the wild.

Conservatives
It’s not really the Conservative way to start a society from scratch — they being a crowd for whom, at least until the 2016 referendum, the key to happiness is gentle bottom-up tinkering with the institutions you inherit from your forebears. Nevertheless, the castaways made a fist of it. With Burkean efficiency, they organised themselves into “little platoons” — hunters, gatherers, cooks and fire-makers, builders of shelter — and agreed that the division of labour would create a rising tide that lifted all boats.

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Problems first arose when the platoon who discovered the island’s sole source of fresh water started charging exorbitant numbers of seashells — the standard unit of exchange — for access to it on that grounds that they should be entitled to profit from their entrepreneurship. There were likewise restive elements among the women — whose “traditional” role as cooks and fire-makers was expected to go uncompensated in currency. Sufficient shelters having been built a month or two in, the shelter-builders were soon largely unemployed. The monopoly water suppliers, meanwhile, amassed more and more seashells, which they lent to the lower orders at considerable rates of interest.

The experiment ended, unfortunately, before the violent revolution many were predicting came to pass.

Labour
The hope of establishing a paradise — “socialism in one country” — got off to a rocky start on the Labour island. Before they even started to forage for food, shelter and drinkable water, the 100 participants became mired in a ferocious ideological disagreement about the distribution of the island’s still hypothetical resources. A clique of younger members — alarmed by the possibility that those who caught fish or game might assert the unilateral right to eat it — demanded Fully Automated Luxury Communism and forcibly expropriated the remaining stash of Tracker bars and dried apricots. They made camp on the beach on the west of the island and declared “socialism on one beach”.

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Why the Labour Left is doomed

By David Kogan

The remaining contestants, now desperately hungry, trooped towards the island’s interior in search of sustenance. These “centrists”, smarting though they may have been about the loss of their snack bars, nevertheless made a fist of setting up a camp and within a few months, working co-operatively, were getting on pretty well. But, then, having passed a resolution that radical disruption was essential to prevent neoliberal orthodoxy taking hold, the inhabitants of the beach encampment set fire to the centrists’ jungle — which destroyed 80% of the island’s natural resources.

Liberal Democrats
The Liberal Democrat island was a peculiar one. On the face of it, they all got along rather well — and they proved remarkably hospitable to the handful of desperate refugees who swam across from the other islands. At the end of the year they had survived and even prospered, in a very modest, minding their own business sort of way, but ratings figures for Lib Dem island proved so low that their part of the show ceased being televised after six days. In fact, even the production company slightly forgot that they had six islands, so at the end of the year nobody came to rescue them.

Many hundreds of years later, anthropologists would come upon the remains of their civilisation and discover that they had built a primitive religion around the conviction that their island was going to win a reality TV show.

The Alt-right
This was the most violent of all the island experiments. A collective commitment to “free speech” was the only rule on this paradise of libertarians, but flare-ups ensued every time one freethinker called another a rude name, and got punched in the nose for it — causing a backlash when others punched him in the nose in defence of the original freethinker’s right to robust debate. Unity tended to prevail only when the groups rallied to search the jungle for “antifa”.

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By James Bloodworth

The competition for the conch became more and more intense, and the unity of the island’s various freethinkers broke down as policy divisions emerged between white nationalists, white supremacists, evolutionary psychologists, Randian rationalists and those who remained unwaveringly committed, even on this undeveloped tropical island, to promoting the cause of ethics in videogame journalism. The suggestion among some radical freethinkers on the island that women be held as a common sexual resource showed alarming signs of gaining traction and threatened to unite the warring subtribes — until it was pointed out that there were no women on the island at all.

Extinction Rebellion
A substantial crew of die-hard Thunbergites — with the under-16s and over-60s disproportionately represented — volunteered to participate in the show, citing their wish to “reject the neoliberal industrial-capitalist machine”. Within a few hours, however, a number attempted to swim away when they realised they would no longer have iPhones or be able to use Instagram or Twitter. Some of those who survived this attempt and returned to the island formed a cargo-cult. Its devotional rituals included “hashtagging” disapproving messages in the sand of the beach on the south of the island in the hopes they would be visible to passengers on overflying aircraft.

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Brexit, Thunberg and the dangers of blind hope

By Daniel Kalder

Organisation on the island was agreed to be anarcho-syndicalist, and a great deal of energy in the first year went into the debate over what anarcho-syndicalism actually was. The first monsoon season went badly after the commune decided that nobody was to light fires to keep warm and dry on the grounds that to do so would release an unconscionable amount of carbon into the atmosphere. But by sheltering under the bodies of colleagues who had glued themselves to trees, a number of the island’s inhabitants were able to make it through to the dry season.

As I emerged from Westminster tube onto Whitehall, the other morning, I came across three women dressed in the XR red-goddess outfit at the top of the steps. With faces painted chalk-white, they had linked their raised hands and were descending quasi-ceremonially. Londoners, being fairly unimpressible — like the residents of any megacity — simply wove around the trio and hurried to their next meetings. But the scene brought an awful lot of things to mind. Whatever else you might say about them, the performative weirdness of XR does make you think. Not about the environment, so much as the cultural and moral tributaries that go into making a protest of such oddity.

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Antifa's attack on the truth

By Douglas Murray

There’s the pop-cultural reference points, of course. With the echoes of films such as the appalling V for Vendetta, it feels like those involved are doing what they think people ought to be doing when protesting. The parade behind Westminster Abbey of elderly people in silver cloaks with ensigns protruding from their heads was another such moment. It all was the product of a particular type of person: affluent-seeming, elderly, well-informed and significantly mad.

The scenes on the pavements of Whitehall put me in mind of an older reference: Samuel Pepys, who had married and worshipped at the nearby church of St Margaret. At various points in his Diaries, in gaps from relating his latest amorous guilts, Pepys will note the emergence of some new oddity of the city. The emergence, for instance, of a new group of ‘fanatics’ — in one case comprising a group who begin stabbing Londoners at random for some newly discovered apocalyptic cause.

London has seen cults and sects come and go since Roman days at least. But there is something about XR that is fascinating precisely because those involved both seem to be putting themselves in that lineage and yet would resist the comparison. This time — they insist — it really is the end of the world. All the earlier fanatics were just faking it.

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Why the Greens should stop playing God

By John Gray

There were moments in their performance that were quite convincing. It was sobering walking behind Downing Street at night as that day’s activists crept from tent to tent in their St James’s Park campsite. The dimmed torches allowed you to make out the signs of the various communal spaces that had been set up: a food tent, an A&E tent.

The protestors were enjoying themselves, as people tend to do when they are permitted to break the law, but they were serious. And in the quiet, and with the low light, it did feel for a moment as though this were a prelude to what might happen if a city like London ever did run out of power. I recognised the feeling from a novel I read earlier this year, a marvellous, reissued book by RC Sherriff called The Hopkins Manuscript, in which the moon crashes into the earth and those who survive have to find ways to reorganise and bind together in the aftermath. People congregate in London and eke out their last days in the city.

There is human solidarity in such moments, at first, as there was at XR’s protests, despite the extraordinary inconvenience it caused. But though it all seemed to point to one purpose, it wasn’t the one that those involved claimed.

The claimed purpose has been put under the national microscope this week; it has been a pleasure to watch Britain doing what it does best by allowing the fanatics of XR to explain their arguments across the airwaves. Nobody could begrudge them or the broadcasters the opportunities this presents. The fanatics get to try to put across their point of view, and the broadcasters attempt to help by exposing them. There is nothing unfair about this. It is the give and take of democracy.

On Sky, two perfectly pleasant and reasonable sounding women explained their case. The presenter asked them whether they would prevent patients getting to St Thomas’s hospital and the viewing public was given a fine opportunity to see the reasonable and fanatical minds both struggling for supremacy in the same heads. On the one hand, a pre-agreed line had to be held. On the other, lives were at stake. What to do?

They did what people always do — which is to delay. The nice young lady explained that people who had medical emergencies could speak to the XR people blocking the bridge and could perhaps be let through as an exception. No particular thought had been given to the St Thomas’s question at an organisational level. So here was one of the fanatics trying to balance being extreme and being human live on air.

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By Tom Chivers

Andrew Neil, meanwhile, did what he does best and forensically exposed the most outlandish claims that the group makes. Taking serious studies and building a great pile of exaggeration and assertion on the top of them would appear to be XR’s operating mode. Turning ‘possibly’ into ‘certainly’, truncating timelines, making worst-case scenarios into certain-case scenarios and much more has this week been demonstrated — by Britain’s broadcasters — to be what XR does second best.

But what it does best — its actual purpose — is something that has got almost no attention this week even though it is visible just beneath the surface of the pantomime. In The Times on Thursday, a man called David Copus was quoted. A software engineer aged 47, Mr Copus had apparently taken unpaid leave in order to be at the protests in London. And he was clearly gaining a lot from it. “This struggle bonds you to people immensely,” he said. “I feel like I’m really doing something with such purpose. I’m going to find it very difficult going back to work after this.”

And having observed them for a week, I would say that Mr Copus’s is the authentic voice of XR. Who would want to return to their IT job when there is an apocalypse to warn about and prepare for?

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Meghan and Harry are playing a dangerous game

By Douglas Murray

The predominance of white people at the protests. The predominance of elderly people. All pointed to the great chasm which the modern democratic world sees scant need to address but which groups like XR provide. It is the ever-present gap of meaning and purpose.

In societies such as modern Britain we have means and comforts that our forebears could never have dreamed of. But having achieved them, we don’t know what to do with them, and some people are bored. Bored with their jobs, bored with the lack of struggle, bored with the lack of heroism and purpose that security brings.

So, unsure what to build next, or how else to gain purpose, a certain number of people are finding meaning in self-denial and self-blame. They’re finding ultimate meaning in the call to repent before the imminent, partly longed for, apocalypse.

XR has risen — and will fade — like similar fanatical movements before it. But aside from some happy memories for the participants, the thought it most clearly leaves behind for me is the question of why, when people in modern democracies reach out, yearning for meaning, XR answers their call.

XR does seem to have caught the sympathies of some at the smarter end of society. In September, the Financial Times held a festival at Kenwood House, where the audience — FT readers in linen jackets and floral dresses — were asked whether they supported XR’s actions. Three-quarters raised their hands.

One leader there told me about a Government minister’s aide who was on the verge of signing up. At another event, a woman told me that her husband, who holds a senior position at Goldman Sachs, wanted to quit his job to become a full-time environmental “rebel”. She suggested his chequebook might be a better way to support the cause.

It is easy to see why the guilty, reusable-cup-clutching middle-classes dance around pink boats to atone for their jet habits; but Extinction Rebellion is also aimed at attracting the working class — a somewhat trickier proposition. Why would the steelworker or shelf-stacker want to engage in eco-neurosis when they’ve got more pressing concerns?

The new green movements are patronising, Wigan Labour MP Lisa Nandy argued in an article for the Guardian last week. This middle-class movement doesn’t recognise its privileges, she wrote. How can you ask someone to give up their car when they are having to commute miles to work, because local jobs have gone and there’s no decent public transport? Or give up meat when there is so little in the cupboards and you’re using food banks.

But Roger Hallam, one of the founders of XR, has nevertheless been taking his case to them. A bearded Mancunian who presents himself as somewhere between Worzel Gummidge and William Blake’s God, he is currently in prison awaiting trial after his “Heathrow Pause” drone flying last month. But before that he spent the summer months on tour, promoting his group not just to potential new sign-ups on the festival circuit but also in working-class towns and cities such as Scunthorpe, Sunderland, Swansea, Cardigan, Penzance and Derby.

The topline message was this: climate change is going to affect everyone, and even more so those who have fewer economic choices. To sort climate change quickly – XR’s target is net zero carbon by 2025 – a radical restructuring of society is required. And to make it fair, you need to pull the decision-making process away from government and big business, back to real people, including the steelworkers and shelf-stackers, through citizens’ assemblies. They make better choices knowing their own realities.

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It doesn’t answer Nandy’s questions of how you get around without a car, but Hallam, a persuasive speaker, reports that his Scunthorpe meeting was unusually successful — better indeed than the regular XR recruitment drives. But that might be because he’s pushing a second message to them, about how Extinction Rebellion is how you take back control.

I’ve been watching the rebel leaders give their regular spiel at festivals and private events for the last few months. Attendees are shown videos about temperature hyper-loops – when global warming feeds on itself – and fed a frightening collation of well-sourced climate data that point to “the sixth great extinction”. Then it is explained that the paralysis gripping you in the face of this is grief. Once that’s understood then you can begin to take action.

The results of these talks are similar each time – the audience starts curious but cynical, but by the end they’re surprising themselves by nodding along, and a quarter admit to thinking about signing up. The emotional message works: XR is approaching a million followers across social media platforms, local groups that had five members in April now have 300, and this week’s protests are international. One event for fundraisers convinced oil heiress Aileen Getty to follow up with a donation of £500,000.

In his account of his working-class town tour, called “The Time is Now”, Hallam said he got a different response. While the metropolitan middle classes sign up to be crowd fodder, they aren’t so keen on being picked up by the police for protesting. But in Scunthorpe and Swansea, those who came to listen to the talks on climate change, grief and citizens’ assemblies were volunteering to be frontline “arrestables” at three times the rate of their middle-class counterparts.

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Trust conservatives to save the planet

By Giles Fraser

He identified a nihilistic streak in these towns. His ideal candidate, Hallam said, was a woman in her fifties whose husband has left, and whose children have grown up. When you feel like you’ve got nothing left to lose, when the sixth great extinction is coming and you’ve got no say, why not?

Others in the XR movement prefer the street carnival, but Hallam wants prison cells stuffed full of arrestees so that courts have to judge whether it is the protestors or the polluters who are guilty. He is himself relishing a crown court hearing in mid-October over his Heathrow actions.

It is also worth noting that, apart from Cardigan, those places Hallam chose to visit were Leave-voting areas. Extinction Rebellion noticeably never talks about Brexit – when asked members will just say that it doesn’t matter when the Arctic is on fire – but Hallam believes what ignited the working-class Brexit movement is convertible into environmental rebellion.

At one of his talks to the Byline Festival in Sussex – audience: radical intelligentsia – Hallam talked about the working class and how a leftish eco-movement really needs to think about “immigration controls, an end to the globalisation mantra, and also to start talking in terms of tradition, nation, honour – the things that socialists in the 20th Century talked about but have become taboo to the Left”.

He wasn’t being official XR spokesperson on that occasion but the thinking ties in with XR wanting goods and people to travel less and local economies servicing their immediate needs. And it is strikingly similar to some of the Brexit messaging: your jobs and your identity are under threat because of external things: the EU, globalisation, climate change (delete as appropriate). This is the answer.

It is quite a logical leap but that is what the guru Hallam is good at – plugging into feelings, in this case the alienation, the resentment and the lack of control felt by those who are on the wrong side of our current political settlement.

Unquestionably, Extinction Rebellion is political as well as environmental. It grew out of RisingUp, an economic justice activism group run by Gail Bradbrook, another of the original rebels. What they’ve hit on with XR is to not talk about overthrowing capitalism – it is barely mentioned in their literature – but to channel the concerns about the environment and make them the reason for social change. That’s how to get both the top and bottom ends of society to unite around a cause.

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By Tom Chivers

It is quite easy to pick apart XR. Some of its thinking folds in on itself: if you don’t set 2025 as the carbon zero target – already fairly implausible – you don’t need a social revolution, just good long-term planning. If enough people care enough to vote at the ballot box for parties with strong environmental policies, you don’t need a citizens’ assembly. And using eco-protests as a means of getting economic justice could be seen as a bit two-faced.

But Hallam and Nandy are both right in saying the current environmental movement – go vegan, take the train, buy solar panels – only works for those who have the means to make the choices. FT readers can write letters; those at the lower end of society need some ownership of the process that is going to affect them too. If the only outlet comes by pitching tents and waving colourful flags, there’s a problem.

Hallam is prone to exaggeration, so there’s a question of whether his recruitment has worked. XR has claimed to have bussed in nearly 10,000 people from across the country, a five-fold increase on April, of whom 4,500 are up for arrest. But if these are the “workers” or just the grannies won’t become clear until people are named and the arrests are made. Still, if he has succeeded in getting industrial towns to join the XR, the political temperature will rise another degree.

The argument over whether man-made climate change “caused” it is a grimly philosophical one that very quickly gets lost in the weeds of what it means to “cause” something. If I put weights in a die, so that it’s more likely to roll a six, and then I roll a six, did the weights cause the six? It might have rolled a six anyway. But what most of us will agree is that climate change is not only making the world warmer – each of the last three decades has been the hottest on record – it’s also making unusual weather more likely: droughts in some places, floods in others; higher average temperatures and more frequent extreme heatwaves. This is uncontroversial among climate scientists; it’s all from the 2018 IPCC special report.

What’s also relatively uncontroversial is that it’s going to carry on. Again referring to the IPCC report: if we literally stop producing any carbon emissions next year, then it is likely that the global mean surface temperature will continue to rise about another 0.5°C, to a total of around 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. That’s not going to happen, so we’ll probably see a rise of about 2°C, perhaps more. The warming will likely be greatest in the high northern latitudes, so the Arctic ice sheet will suffer, more than it already has. Sea levels will rise. Weather patterns will change, causing unseasonal droughts and floods, affecting ecosystems and crop growth. Again, this is all pretty uncontroversial – have a read of the IPCC special report’s summary for policymakers.

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By John Gray

The 2014 IPCC report warns that coastal areas will face greater risks of flooding and submergence. Many species and ecosystems will come under pressure as species move with the new climate. While some crop growth may be positively affected – warmer temperatures and greater carbon dioxide concentrations will help some plants – more will be negatively affected. It is likely that heat waves and fires, drought and starvation, and new disease vectors will kill many people. Migration, and wars over newly scarce resources, could kill people as well.

I’m stressing that this is all from the IPCC predictions. When people refer to “the science”, they’re usually referring to the IPCC; I don’t know if predictions of war are “science” exactly, but they’re reasonable forecasts made by respected domain experts. And it is bad; the very likely outcome is that climate change will have devastating impacts on humans.

But the question I think is worth asking is: how devastating? How many people will die? There was a ridiculous claim by Roger Hallam of Extinction Rebellion the other day that “the science” says six billion people will be killed by climate change this century. That is not something supported by mainstream forecasts.

The World Health Organisation, working off IPCC resources, suggests that between 2030 and 2050, there will be around 250,000 excess deaths per year due to climate change, caused by heat exposure among the elderly, diarrhoea, malaria, and childhood malnutrition. I think, and the WHO acknowledges, that could well be an underestimate.

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By Tom Chivers

The IPCC suggests, quoting a forecast of future crop growth, that by 2050, a world of unmitigated climate change could have up to 20% more malnourished children than in a world without climate change: around 138 million instead of 113 million. Both of those figures are smaller than the number of undernourished children around in 2000 when the forecast was made, about 148 million, but it’s a serious problem. Something like 3.1 million children die a year from causes related to malnutrition, about 2% of the total of underweight children. On a very naive analysis, having 138 million instead of 113 million underweight children means about 500,000 children dying a year from that alone.

The Climate Impact Lab, a collaboration between climate experts from various institutes including the universities of Chicago and California, forecast that climate change could cause a net 1.5 million deaths per year by 2100, if emission trends continue.

These deaths will be disproportionately focused in the developing world, where extreme heat and food shortages are already a major problem.

I think it’s worth putting into context, though. Let’s imagine that the WHO forecast is an underestimate and the Climate Lab forecast is closer to the truth, that about 1.5 million people will die per year who would not have died otherwise.

For comparison, diabetes directly causes about 1.6 million deaths a year, according to the WHO. Obesity kills about 2.8 million. Road traffic accidents kill about 1.25 million. Smoking, eight million. That’s roughly the sort of magnitude of problem that we’re dealing with.

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Our toxic pollution paranoia

By Tom Chivers

Road traffic accidents, obesity, smoking and diabetes are huge societal problems. They deserve the many billions of pounds spent every year worldwide combating them. But they’re not existential risks. We don’t tend to think that we need to drop everything, derail our economies, and stop the world getting richer to prevent them.

There are counterarguments to be made, which have genuine merit. First, deaths are just one part of the problem: climate change will also cause economic damage, food insecurity, mass migration and various other bad things. That’s absolutely true, but it’s also true (in different ways) of the other problems I mentioned: the deaths they cause are just the tip of an iceberg of suffering that they cause.

More relevantly, there is no realistic possibility that smoking will suddenly spiral out of control and become far worse than we expected, or that diabetes will enter some positive feedback loop and start affecting dozens of times more people than we thought. But the inherent uncertainty in climate prediction means that we could, in fact, be entirely wrong about what happens.

The IPCC forecast suggests that if there is very little reduction in carbon emissions that temperatures will rise by a total of around 2°C above pre-industrial levels, but the climate is the archetypal chaotic system. It could be that they’ve overestimated, or it could be that they’ve underestimated. There is a (very small) possibility that climate change leads to the sort of utterly devastating outcome that Roger Hallam of Extinction Rebellion imagines.

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By Daniel Kalder

This is absolutely true (when I was researching the existential risks bit of my book, someone pointed out that if you think climate models are wrong, you should logically believe that they’re just as likely to be underestimating as overestimating. You should be more worried about the chance of really bad outcomes than people who believe the IPCC). And it’s a good reason to treat the risks of climate change more seriously than the risks of, say, smoking. And that means reducing emissions.

But it’s also worth noting that the IPCC itself – “the science” that we all like to appeal to – thinks that even under “climate change” scenarios, global malnutrition will be less of a problem in 2050 than it is now, because of economic growth and technological improvements. It’s also clear that low-income countries are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change than are rich countries: extreme weather events in rich countries kill fewer people than equivalent ones in poor countries; poorer countries are more reliant on agriculture; rich countries are more able to adapt because they have the cash reserves and infrastructure to do so.

So reducing emissions is good, but so is helping poorer nations grow in ways that improve their ability to adapt to climate change. And climate change will slow economic growth, but, according to the IPCC, the impacts of “drivers such as changes in population, age structure, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, and governance are projected to be large relative to the impacts of climate change”.

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By Daniel Kalder

It’s also worth remembering that climate change is only one kind of environmental degradation – we could be pushing the oceans towards some sort of awful tipping point through overfishing, for instance, and plant fertilisation might be under threat from the apparent collapse in insect numbers. We seem to be going through a global mass extinction event, caused by humans. Humans are having a serious and negative impact on the environment and it’s important to acknowledge it, and to do something about it.

But we need to keep it in the correct context. “The science” seems, roughly, to say that climate change is going to be awful; that it will kill many people; that it will cause economic hardship and lost productivity and great suffering in much of the world. Roughly speaking, as much suffering and death and hardship as diabetes, or smoking. We are facing a challenge of that sort of order of magnitude. Claiming that it will kill billions, or destroy our lives utterly, is not quoting “the science” any more than it would be to say it’s a Chinese hoax.

Like all political movements, the climate protests are as much about a mood as a policy. In part thanks to the presence of all those children, taken out of school in a licensed mass derogation from the rules, the mood was strikingly hippieish. I doubt if as many as one in 10 protestors could tell you much about the official manifesto beyond “act now” and “save the planet”. Under the banner of climate change was smuggled a much broader rejection of the “system” and a semi-religious invocation of sacred values like beauty over utilitarianism and materialism — a sort of prayer to mother Earth.

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By JD Vance

I don’t mean this as a criticism. The sheer scale of these protests across the world last week is proof that these instincts are powerful and deeply felt. Expressed slightly differently, they might even hold the key to a future political realignment that could bring together the Right and Left in surprising ways.

To investigate this we need to look at another, very different, political movement — also powerful and growing, but which on first inspection seems the sworn enemy of Greta Thunberg’s climate army.

A group of American conservatives has caused waves over the past 12 months by explicitly turning against big business. It includes figures such as Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, Fox News host Tucker Carlson (who recently delivered a speech entitled “Why Big Business Hates Your Family”, and endorsed Democrat Elizabeth Warren’s economic agenda) and a number of Catholic intellectuals such as Sohrab Ahmari and Patrick Deneen.

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By Tom Chivers

These Trump-friendly Right-wingers are certainly not cheerleaders for Extinction Rebellion or Greta Thunberg; at first glance they seem the polar opposite of hippies, who originally defined themselves against the “military-industrial complex” and its evil end product, the war in Vietnam.

But yes, if you can get past the tone of voice, there is something hippie about these new Conservatives, defining themselves against boundary-less financial markets, the over-mighty power of technology and global corporations, and the creep of commercial thinking into all aspects of our lives. In a sense, they are more truly ‘counter-cultural’ than the climate protestors, who are celebrated as virtuous by almost everybody in power.

Their religious vocabulary would be anathema to our smiling families in SW1, but their animating instinct is surprisingly similar. In distinction to the establishment “centrists” of their respective parties, both groups feel that the current system of global capitalism and the values behind it are in some fundamental way misguided, unholy and inimical to human flourishing. That’s quite a major point of agreement.

Both groups hope for a simpler, more beautiful world, a reduction in scale and a rejection of pure materialism in favour of “getting back to what really matters” – and, crucially, they both want to use government to proactively make that happen.

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We’ve heard this echo before. Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons first drew attention to the symmetry between the hippie Left and religious Right way back in 2006; more recent writers such as Matthew Crawford have charted a middle course between these two poles, offering an existential critique of Liberalism that avoids the off-putting vocabulary of either side; even Roger Scruton, by no means a market fundamentalist and author of a book on “Conservatism and the Environment,” comes close to striking this note.

Take Sir Roger’s campaign for a return of beauty in architecture – what is it but a genteel version of hippie conservatism? In an essay published in the Times this weekend, Scruton called for a return to community-led building practises and local architectural materials that reflect “the indigenous life and landscape where they are deployed”. Compare the Climate Strike manifesto, which calls for “non-corporate, community-led climate solutions that recognize the traditional knowledge, practices, wisdom, and resilience of indigenous peoples and local communities”. Hippie Conservatives.

At Friday’s protest, Jeremy Corbyn was inevitably invited to speak, and the crowds chanted various versions of “Boris, Boris, Boris! Out, out out!” Clearly, this self-identifies as a protest of the Left, but the spiritual mood was a total mismatch for Corbyn’s retro brand of socialism.

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I'm sick of fighting moronic culture wars

By Lionel Shriver

Rewind a few years to the Occupy protests of 2011, before Brexit rearranged everything in its image, for a better sense of the underlying political ambiguity. This short-lived earlier movement against globalisation and capitalism contained elements of both the Climate Strike and the Brexit movements. Remember the scorn poured by the establishment media on the Occupy protesters for their inability to name their demands or alternative policies? It had much the same flavour as the cries of “unicorn!” and hoots of derision handed out to Brexit voters in the past three years.

There was even an “Occupy Thanet” movement back in 2011, in what is now one of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party strongholds. An Occupy protester told the local paper: “We are told we live in a democracy but we know that individuals alone have little say in the way their country or hometown is governed— we’re campaigning for the 99%.” Fast forward eight years, and that statement is a neat mashup of Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn’s favourite lines.

It was no accident that the Occupy movement pitched its tents on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral – like last week’s climate protests, it had a religious tinge. “Grow the real economy,” one Occupy placard read, “Love. Care. Knowledge. Experience. Wisdom.” This could almost be the motto of the new conservatives in America.

As for the patron saint of the climate protests, Greta Thunberg, the sheer volume of Greta-as-Jesus placards on display last week actively invited the comparison. Religious conservatives might find the “cult of Greta” sacrilegious, but politically they should take comfort from it as proof positive of a desire for a reassertion of something sacred over a boringly utilitarian politics.

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By Titania McGrath

Perhaps the widest gap between these Left-radicals and Right-radicals, the most challenging for my argument, is on liberalism. The religious Right in the US are calling for a “politics of limits” – a reassertion of societal boundaries on matters of sex, morality and consumption, as well as a more protectionist economics; that seems the polar opposite of the Climate protesters who mixed seamlessly with pro-LGBT and pro-marijuana activists.

But there is nothing liberal about the main Climate Strike agenda. Economically, it is the liberal world order of the past decades that they have in their sights – that is what has produced such a high degree of carbon emissions, and their plan is use the power of government to smash it down.

In terms of lifestyle, they are protesting in order to consume less, fly less often, live more wholesome lives closer to nature, even have fewer children; they may be different limits, but theirs is also a doctrine of restraint.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the radical Left and the radical Right hate each other; their vocabulary is mutually terrifying and they are diametrically opposed on certain issues. But they have more in common than they realise, and arguably more in common than the “sensible centrists” on each of their respective sides. At a time of fast-changing political alignments, it is possible to imagine a future leader or movement that could draw support from both sides – that would be a movement to be reckoned with.