Smash the Patrimony
Another week, another climate alarmist hissy fit.
UK-based climate groups Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil have hit the headlines several times in their short existences, disrupting commuters on trains and highways and bridges. The general tactic is to maximize the news coverage, in a bid to get Western nations to give up on fossil fuel.
There are a few steps in between the civil disobedience and saving the world that don’t seem clear, but climate activists have reasons which reason knows nothing of.. Preventing regular folks from getting to work on time may not have any predictable sway on the policy makers in the halls of power or the overseers of industry. I’m not the only one who wonders how effective these protests can be. Some of the stunts have been so ridiculous and annoying, one blog suggested JSO activists are the fossil fuel industry’s useful idiots.
This is especially true of the vandalism and criminal damage. You remember? The Trevi Fountain filled with blackened water, the Mona Lisa and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers covered in soup. Two elderly ladies (one claims to be a reverend) even attempted to smash the glass cabinet where one of four remaining copies of the Magna Carta is displayed at the British Library. It’s hard to see how climate alarmists aim to get the public onside when they are trashing national treasures and making it more likely that heightened security will hamper access to such in the future.
Writing at The Spectator, Stephen Daisley warns that not reining in protestor shenanigans is breaking down public trust. “Every time Just Stop Oil pulls one of these stunts, it increases the likelihood that museums, galleries and heritage sites will put more distance between their wares and the general public. Places and objects that, at present, any ordinary member of the public can view up close and perhaps even interact with will eventually become sights to be peered at from a distance, behind protective screens or over the shoulders of burly security guards.”
Perhaps they know and don’t care.
But the recent defacing of Stonehenge has a few more Britons willing to say (very politely) that this has gone on long enough. Just Stop Oil activists sprayed several of the ancient upright stones with orange cornstarch, taking advantage of the site’s lax admission policies during summer solstice festivities. Tourists apprehended the pair after telling them to stop vandalising the monument which has stood for thousands of years.
But that’s not how JSO see it. One activist couldn’t quite grasp what the big deal was – it was just spraying dust on a rock. In his mind, Stonehenge can handle it and any potential damage was worth it. JSO can take a victory lap for forcing Westminster into discussing oil and gas drilling leases, he said.
Psychoanalyzing climate protestors may be like looking for meaning in a Jim Carrey movie – it’s not really that complex. Just all existential terror and outrage all the time, as far as I can see. But their choice of these treasures as targets hints at an underlying driver – hatred of patrimony. Or more specifically, fathers. Stonehenge, great works of art, literature and feats of history, are “humanity’s patrimony” as one commentator expressed it, heritage passed down from our fathers.
Morgoth’s Review had some really insightful things to say about the “it’s just a pile of rocks” crowd. He writes of how the mysterious builders of Stonehenge’s pillars were “infinitely more grounded in reality than the death cult of the modern liberal”. The ancient pagans and Eastern mind religions revered the sun as the source of life, but climate activists see it as a source of death. The sun, “usually a life-giving symbol of masculinity making the Earth Mother fertile, becomes a symbolic representation of death, fear, and dread instead.”
Somehow that makes perfect sense, in an age where masculinity is seen as the root of all sorts of evil, Gaia, worship of Mother Earth is an easy default. She would swallow the stain of human civilization, returning things to how they should be, if she could only throw off the man-made shackles of asphalt and concrete. Sometimes she is a helpless waif in need of protection, sometimes she is softly-spoken prophetess with wisdom to be unearthed, sometimes she is a devouring mother, threatening to consume everyone unless she is tended to as she demands. But what she is not is a beautiful inheritance bestowed by a loving Father, requiring wisdom and care to steward for future sons.
It may seem disingenuous to accuse climate change devotees of not really loving the planet, but the Omnicause has annexed every other progressive cause, because they were never about the good of humanity nor creation. As Mary Harrington writes, the structure is a recognizably religious one, with a godless Puritan impulse, breaking down everything in search of the purer experience. It is a self-justification project.
The end is a disenchanted nihilism, as Morgoth notes: “The sun is naught but a gas ball, the moon barren, and the earth about to burn up, erasing life. The great pretence and lie is that life, as seen entirely through late-stage scientism and liberalism, has delivered a world more rational and less supernatural than a mythology wherein Merlin used magic to construct Stonehenge.” Corrupted science is used to negate history, he write, while they wage war upon the source of life itself - revolting against it even while tethered to it.
Rejecting the goodness of the Heavenly Father and the disdain for earthly patriarchs is a simple enough connection to make. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning, as St James tells us. Whether left by our forebears or made by the Creator himself, some can’t accept the gift, because they have rejected the giver.