An Unconvincing Defense of Just Stop Oil
Also: Roman London, medieval homes, a history of pasta, and more.
Peter Singer offers a defense of kids throwing tomato soup on the protective glass of a Vincent Van Gogh painting, and it isn’t particularly convincing.
Suffragettes and Martin Luther King, Jr. broke the law to “advance a good cause,” he writes, and we now see them as heroes. So, why don’t we see kids throwing tomato soup on paintings to save the planet as equally heroic? After all, aren’t these kids doing something very much like the suffragettes? Women slashed paintings to obtain the right to vote. Just Stop Oil protestors throw stuff on painting to defend the right to vote of the unborn—because, you know, if there’s no planet, there’s no voting:
In seeking a conviction against the people who glued their hands to the frame of The Hay Wain, the prosecutor sought to distinguish the actions of the suffragettes from those of the activists on trial by saying that the former “had no democratic means by which they could further their cause,” whereas today “We have an established democracy.”
Yet activists for climate change have a powerful response to this argument. Today, it seems self-evident that democracy requires allowing women to vote, but not much more than a century ago, conservatives argued that women had no need to vote because their interests were already protected by their husbands or fathers. We laugh at that argument now, but we may be equally blind to serious flaws in our own democracies.
Ask yourself who will suffer the most if we fail to prevent catastrophic climate change. The answer is the young and those yet to be born – both categories unrepresented in our political systems.
I don’t think anyone has claimed that Just Stop Oil protestors shouldn’t have the freedom to break the law to protest climate change or whatever. Of course, they have the freedom to do so, and the state should prosecute them for breaking the law.
The critique is that the protestors aren’t serious. They are playing a game. If they were serious, they would destroy the paintings, like the suffragists did in the 19th century, and be willing to suffer for a great cause. But they aren’t willing to suffer—at least not much—which makes one wonder how much of what they are doing is for the cause or for themselves.
The protestors may believe they are defending the right of the unborn to vote, but that doesn’t mean we have to believe that this is what they are doing. One might reasonably object to the idea that unless we reduce carbon emissions drastically the world will end in flames within a generation or two. One might ask if the protestors are defending the unborn’s right to vote in other situations, like abortion, where it is more immediately at risk, and if not, why not? Peter Singer himself has said that while a fetus at six weeks is a human being, it nevertheless does not have the right to life because it is not yet rational or self-aware. So if it is ethical to kill a human being in the womb—because the unborn are not self-aware and therefore don’t have rights—what right exactly, Mr. Singer, are the Just Stop Oil protestors defending when they pretend to destroy paintings and post pictures of themselves on online?
In other news, Kit Wilson defends reading for pleasure and pleasure alone: “Do you know what you’ll be reading on May 17th this year? Certainly I’ve no idea what I’ll have on my bedside table. A lot depends, naturally, on what I discover between now and then — and what, at each juncture, I’m inspired to move on to next. But Fridman has determined, already, that in the third week of May he’ll be reading Siddhartha. And then, the following week, Dune. And the week after that, Frankenstein. This all betrays a very modern, functionalist understanding of literature. It doesn’t seem to matter, to Fridman, in which order he reads his books — nor does it occur to him that he might come across something along the way that entices him down a completely different literary path (he does hint that the list might change a little, but seemingly only on the basis of new recommendations). Instead, books appear to be, to him, just isolated, self-contained ‘chunks’ of knowledge — boxes to be ticked, in no meaningful order.”
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