There’s lots else I intended to write about today (including the heart-breaking ignorance of the VERY basic facts of climate change among university-educated people – 1.)
But instead I am going to riff on why people hate Just Stop Oil so much and what that ‘means’. It’s inspired by a recent unfortunate interaction on Twitter. I had screenshotted the end of a Stewart Lee column and quoted from it. It has had 10k impressions (about 9900 more than a normal post of mine gets) and lots of retweets, which I usually take to mean “agree.” Then someone popped up with the standard ‘they get booed, nobody likes them, what are they achieving‘ thing. I replied with the usual stuff – a) not a member/fan b) everything else that’s been tried hasn’t worked (which, is true) and ‘what do you suggest/what have you done?’. Then it got dreary…
BUT, to back up. Has anyone done a typology of how protest groups get ‘thought of’, and why? Probably, surely, but I don’t know where and am not minded to go googlescholar it.. But JSO is as good a place as any to start with my own personal spitballing and cod-psychoanalysing.
Let’s start with the “I hate those disruptive smug eco-freaks who should get a job” line.
Obviously there is a non-trivial subset of people who actively deny climate change, but that number is tending to shrink, as those who formed their opinions of this back when it became ‘an issue’ die off, and new generations come along (mind you,see first paragraph here – the ignorance is outstanding).
So, most people will concede there is “a problem” – though say either ‘it’s natural’ or “China should go first” or whatever.
I think part of what’s going on here is people are horrified that other people, in their own society, are saying that we, here, now, have to take action. Some are afraid that it’s all a big “watermelon” thing – green on the outside, red on the inside, a way of re-importing the Failed Socialist Experiment Of The Twentieth Century. “You can prise my holiday home and my Beamer from my cold dead hands.”
What’s more interesting (to me) is the attacks on JSO (and to be clear – I am not a fan, and have written very critically of them – see here) from people who self-identify as environmentalists and who are proud of their own little activities, that they feel are undermined by the noisy and unruly folks.
To be clear again – JSO and its daddy, XR, have not that much time for the established NGO. XR people famously hectored Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace for being complicit and inadequate to the scale of the challenge, symbolically ‘occupying’ their offices back in whenever it was (2019, iirc).
And what I think is going on here is that JSO people, through their clear willingness to do more risky stuff, and face the consequences of that, raise an implicit rebuke about how much people are actually willing to risk to ‘save the planet’. And so environmentalists, dealing with that challenge, have a couple of options.
One is to denounce them as smug, hungry for headlines, too immature to “work within the system”.
Another is to blame them for the response of the state (ever more draconian protest laws).
Ultimately, these critiques of JSO – from people booing at the Test match to comments on Twitter come down to the same underlying belief, what the academics call the “Just World” theory.
In a nutshell, this is the belief that the world is run by competent people who know what they are doing and that “bad things” don’t happen to “good people.” There can’t be any paradoxes (like coal helped us have nicer lives while, long-term, dooming us all to hell).
Anyone who is challenging the running of the Just World must be mad, bad or dangerous to know, “maladjusted” as the expression goes.
CRUCIALLY (gosh, it took me ages to get there), people raised in Just World ideologies need to believe that they are one of the good guys. So, “good” environmentalism is about writing to your MP, engaging in consultative processes etc. And noisy, disruptive stuff makes that seem inadequate. And nobody wants to feel inadequate….
[None of this is new, of course. To go back to Martin Luther King – he wrote a whole book “Where do we go from here? Chaos or Community” about the ways that ‘sober’ ‘reformist’ groups were upset that he was making their ‘inside the system’ lobbying more difficult. See also his essay ‘Why We Can’t Wait’]
Tellingly, there was in my Twitter interaction an absolute refusal to engage with either Stewart Lee’s point about what future generations will think, or my point about how Martin Luther King was hated by white people while alive but retrospectively (once safely dead) became a saint There is precisely zero historical awareness, or willingness to even to try to take an historical perspective. What matters is how I FEEL RIGHT NOW. Not how history will judge me (spoiler, history will judge us all the same, basically, as people who knew what was coming but were unwilling and/or unable to do anything meaningful to even slow the acceleration of the juggernaut).
But those feelings of inadequacy, of futility, of not being a Good Person, man they are tough. And if you don’t have other things going on in your lives, they can be too much, and you just want to lash out at the JSO types, because they create a deeply unsettling witches brew in your gut, and you don’t know what to do with it.
So, really, I should have more compassion (how many billions of times has that sentence been true of me??) about people who claim to be on the side of the angels who don’t like JSO. I mean, hell, I don’t like JSO particularly – to repeat the link, here’s why).
Ultimately, we are atomised, lonely, scared as fuck. Afraid of being judged and found wanting (many many tickle upskirting). We are scared that what we do, who we are is not sufficient to the scale and speed of the challenge we face. And we’re right to be scared, because what we do, either as individuals or in groups, is not enough. We don’t have the functioning groups we need (here’s a post on that), and I don’t see how we will get them.
So, when you are scared, and lonely, and frustrated, the easiest people to lash out at are those who are, in Yeats’ words ‘full of passionate intensity’. It may be that the best of us don’t lack all conviction, but in fact have lots of convictions.
See also the Hypocrite Zealot Trap.
Two images, the second a cartoon by the brilliant Marc Roberts
and
Footnotes.
- Yeah, despite everything I still romanticise ‘university’ as a place where you will get smarter. Blah blah cultural capital blah blah capital accumulation blah blah the needs of ‘The System’ (‘man’).
marchudson.net 
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