Levels of Concern

Although Extinction Rebellion gets stick from some commentators for its supposedly narrow rent-an-activist base, the crowd at the  meeting yesterday was moderately diverse for Surrey, at least in terms of age and race which are the most obvious characteristics. They seemed to be exactly what the group says its supporters are, an agglomeration of concerned citizens of various types most of whom have never been involved in politics of any sort before, let alone anything that contemplates illegality.

The talk was the standard one XR delivers, and delivers again and again, laying out the science of climate change in an accessible way (and pretty much exactly as I've done in a leaflet about the spirituality of climate change for this coming 'Creationtide', which I did because nobody else seems to have done), and introducing its politics and approach. We finished with a call to 'go out from here and get involved'. 'And stop eating meat!' a woman called out to the support of a flurry of voices and applause. One of the spiritual aspects of the climate emergency that occurred to me is the everlasting tendency of human beings to excuse their own vices and condemn those of others: I've regularly come across misanthropy dressed up as environmental concern, for instance, and it's always a misanthropy addressed towards other people, not oneself. How could it not be? It's not what motivates me: I have a great fondness for human beings and think it would be a shame if we ended here, just as we were beginning to get somewhere as a species.

XR's commitment to non-violence is absolutely right and morally impressive, but discussions around this always miss out the way the standard examples of change driven by non-violent direct action took place within a context of violence. Gandhi and Martin Luther King were both able to point out that if the authorities they confronted did not heed their demands, others would adopt more extreme measures, and in fact in both those cases some did. At the meeting the example of the Suffragettes was raised more than once, the speakers perhaps unaware of the campaign for women's suffrage's resort to bombs and arson, acts which, while certainly not intending to hurt anyone, couldn't be guaranteed not to. But you might argue that the violence threatened if XR is not listened to is the harm which the planet will inflict on us.

Another commonly repeated theme in XR's thinking is the vanguard model of social change, that it takes, roughly, 3 1/2% of a population to effect a shift in its attitudes. I hope that's true. Today I went walking to the north of Guildford and the sheer quantity of rubbish in the verges of a quiet country road struck me more forcibly than ever. What does someone who chucks a plastic bottle out of the window of a car think is going to happen to it? There is here, surely, both an insensitivity to aesthetic ugliness combined with an unconcern with anything which isn't immediately around you, a sort of lacuna in imagination. I wonder whether anyone has ever studied it.