In Kierkegaard’s classic Either/Or, a passage is particularly haunting. Kierkegaard says that everyone must choose between an “aesthetic” life, centered on enjoyment and diversion or an “ethical” life, centered on adhering to social and moral norms. Kierkegaard argues that there is no middle ground, and due to human nature, avoiding making a decision is effectively choosing the aesthetic life over the ethical one. Kierkegaard believes that most people embrace aesthetic life in this way. They drift mindlessly from distractibility to, and die without having ever considered the pathetic, self-directed nature.
Kierkegaard considers himself the bearer of a message that is unbearable about the condition of the human being. He compares his message to that of a clown telling the audience that the building is burning only to have them laugh him off the stage.
A fire broke out in a theatre. The clown told the audience. The audience thought it was funny and applauded. He repeated it, and the laughter grew. It is through the universal laughter of wits, wags, and people who believe it’s all a joke that I imagine the world will end.
This passage came to mind when I heard about the increasingly violent and lurid climate protests that are taking place around the world. This week in London , protestors tried to influence the vote at a Shell Board meeting by rushing onto the stage . In Italy, a shirtless woman and man poured buckets of mud on their heads in protest of inaction against climate change before the Italian Senate. Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion protestors from Geneva sat in the tarmac of an airport to protest fossil fuels and wealthy people’s use private planes.
These are just three recent examples. Over the last few years, there have been many videos of protestors blocking traffic, bringing urban life a complete halt, defacing government property and disrupting regular business to bring attention to climate changes.
These protestors are like Kierkegaard’s clown, who is a bearer of an unacceptable message. They are ridiculed only because they have misunderstood the nature of the crisis.
There’s logic in their view if they are right about climate changes. If you believe that the world will end within a decade and that there is an easy solution to stop it, or at least delay its arrival, then engaging in criminal or disruptive protests might make sense.
If you are inclined to think this way, you might be able justify all kinds of horrible means if they serve the noble goal of saving the planet. A protest on the highway delayed a parolee from his court-mandated work. Shouldn’t his concern be more about having a place to live when he is released, rather than the potential jail time? Reporters asked protesters at the National Gallery of London who had glued themselves under a Van Gogh exhibition: “What’s more valuable, art or your life?” Is it more valuable than food or justice?
The protestors and their questions are absurd, as is the cause they’re promoting. A rise in global temperatures of a few degrees centigrade over the next century will not bring the widespread destruction that activists predict. What if they’re right? Is there a cause that would justify such a radical protest, even if they were right?
Take abortion. Do you ever wonder if pro-lifers truly believe that abortion is a crime? We say it, I know. But do we act like it?
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Wouldn’t we consider a more radical approach than donating money to pro-life organizations if we truly believed that more than 1,000 babies were killed each day in full compliance with the law? It doesn’t mean that a radical response would be violent, but it would certainly involve something more passionate than the business casual approach taken by some pro-lifers in response to the mass killing of unborn children.
It is possible to argue that the type of protests undertaken by climate activists are not effective from a political standpoint. The public is more likely to be turned off by disruptive forms of protest. It’s unlikely that you will win over many people by sitting down in the middle a busy road, smearing paint on famous pieces of art or storming the football field.
Shouldn’t we be a little more zealous about politics in general, or even about matters of life and demise? The climate activists may have some lessons to share with us, if only in terms of their passion.
