ALWAYS
LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE….OF DEATH!
Saturday’s
Daily Telegraph Book Review featured The
Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, editor of New York magazine,
who shows through many facts and statistics that it is already too late to do
anything about massive and ultimately fatal climate change. ‘Since 1992, we
have done more damage to the planet than in all the millennia before…’ We are,
in fact, doomed, and there’s nothing we can do about it. But the message here,
according to reviewer Simon Ings, is: ‘the
human spirit persists.
‘Wallace-Wells
thinks as much. When he thinks of his own children’s future, denizens of a
world plunging ever deeper into its sixth major extinction event, he admits
that despair melts and his heart fills instead with excitement. Humans will
cling pluckily to live on this ever-less habitable earth for as long as they
can. Quite right, too.’
Thus we already
have the configurations of the ultimate bourgeois response to the spectacle of
capitalism having in effect destroyed the world: look upon this as bringing
forth the ultimate sublimity of human heroism.
So we have gone
from climate-change denial to the embrace of extinction. (‘Thanks for pulling
up the ladder behind you, Dad,' the children of this author might have said.)
Forget about saving the world and concentrate on saving your own soul. Thus the
result of several dozens of decades of exposure to Christian theology (as well
as some Eastern teachings to the same effect) maintaining the fundamental
reality only of the individual human soul, or – in capitalism – ‘rugged
individualism’. Just as the response of many to what once seemed the likelihood
of mass nuclear destruction was to plan one’s own family bunker with all mod
cons and the necessary machine-guns for repelling stragglers. A far better bet
than marching on the streets with CND. Thus the eternal dogma of the primacy of
the individual as expressed by the ME generation, amongst other ideological
manifestations, represented today by the ME’s of the great capitalist and
corporate world, who have incidentally
brought about most of the carnage of nature, even simply through share
ownership, whether in mining, drilling, motorcar manufacture, intensive
agricultural monocultures, chemical companies or energy-hungry electronics. And
in the ceaseless search for the cheapest labour on the planet. Anyhow, don’t
think anger, or guilt, or fear: think personal beatification through sacrifice
of life, like the Christian martyrs of old – and it helps too if you believe in
the ‘life’ to come, so that death doesn’t really matter.
And nor does it
matter if societies collapse. Did not our dear departed Margaret Thatcher once
inform the world that ‘there’s no such thing as society’?
Children are
growing in number who have a somewhat different take on all this. Protests have
erupted from children in over 60 cities in the past week, demanding Change Now!
And ‘Hey ho, fossil fuels have got to go.’ This movement appears to be gaining
momentum.
Only kids, of
course. The Daily Mail has been quick to point out that ‘the Left’ has
‘hi-jacked’ the movement. So patronise but don’t blame the kids themselves: blame
their manipulators, who see this as the chance to bring in socialism. That
includes all adults who want to use their own power and knowledge and
experience to give strength to the children’s movement, which obviously can’t
see all this through on its own. Centuries ago, the Children’s crusade came to
early grief trying on its own to save Jerusalem from the Muslims.
Meanwhile our
own Prime Minister Theresa May and her education secretary Damian Hinds have
deplored the children bunking off school and not attending to their studies
even if many children are saying that they will make up for lost school hours. Nonsense!
They should be on the education factory floor at all times if production is to remain profitable. At least May and
Hinds have the honesty to blame the children themselves.
Ridicule and
smear are also in order: as written by Ron Liddle in this week’s Sunday Times: ‘Those
kids on the march had no idea of the issues surrounding global warming. If they
did, they’d have told Mummy not to pick them up in the 4 x 4 once the march had
ended.’ What reputable journalist smears children en masse?
The Labour
Party, typically in potentially divisive social situations, sought to adopt a more
Guardian approach. As commented by the shadow education secretary Angela Rayner
(who didn’t seek to be beastly to the children): she’s ‘inspired’ by the young
people taking action, ‘But I hope it can evolve so we can build on its success
without the loss of time in the classroom.’ (Morning Star, February 16th-17th.)
Never mind the loss of time in saving the earth. In other words, stop
demonstrating (that is, since it is useless and ineffective if it’s only done
on Saturdays or Sundays or in half-term). Feel the passion but don’t act on it
in a manner which is in any way disruptive. Where would women like Angela
Rayner be today without the Pankhursts?
Thus we run the
gamut of strategies – uncannily like all the invective against any workers’
strike action since time immemorial – for undermining the resolve of children
who are perfectly aware of the facts and have a childish wish to live.
Thank goodness
relatively few children read the newspapers, though a fortunate few may have
read the Morning Star, the only paper that supports them in full. But they’re
all Lefties over there whose ulterior motive in working to save the planet lies
in expropriating those who have largely caused its premature decay.
Which might,
with action now, be ameliorated or slowed. Given
half a chance, Nature can show astonishing resilience. Look at Chernobyl
today. Kids, take a crack at it. Alternatively, look forward to your mass
deaths in good time with ecstatic delight.
