Just Rule Everything

The crime is humanity; the punishment is soup

There are preachers of death: and the earth is full of those to whom desistance from life must be preached. Full is the earth of the superfluous; marred is life by the many-too-many.

-Friedrich Nietzsche, from Thus Spake Zarathustra

You may have heard about the recent attack by environmental activists on one of Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’. It is the latest in an increasingly deranged sequence of such acts of vandalism and attention-seeking display - others, off the top of my head, being another attempt on the same painting in 2022; the spraying of Stonehenge with orange paint earlier this year; the smashing of the glass cover of a Velasquez painting at the National Gallery in 2023; and the disruption of a snooker tournament around the same time.

We all I think know what is going on here at an emotional level. For all that the protestors who carry out these kinds of stunts might claim to be ‘[standing] up against suffering, genocide and greed’, it is transparent that what motivates their actions is something more akin to outrage at humanity itself for having had the temerity to exist - a rejection of the affront that is human civilisation as the shared repository of the hopes, dreams, talents and aspirations of other people. And it seems indeed to be nothing other than the existence of other people which these activists really seem to object to - concieved as a kind of stain or smear on creation.

Importantly, then - again, I think we all intuit this - the contemporary green activist movement has very little to do with mitigating the effects of climate change or finding constructive ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions (projects, I wish to make clear, that I would broadly endorse). It is not, meaningfully, about the environment at all. It is something more akin to a temper tantrum, born of rage at the failure of creation to accord to one’s own expectations that one should really be at the centre of everything. And like anybody engaged in a temper tantrum, the operating modality for these activists is simply a mindless lashing out at the things that symbolise the object of opprobrium - in this case the beautiful and good things that human beings have created. This is why their petty form of terrorism is so rarely connected to anything that is really to do with climate change or greenhouse emissions as such, and so frequently targeted at things that ordinary people love and enjoy - art and sport. It is because it is not climate change so much as people (other people, I should say) who are the real problem.

This brings to mind an old theme within Christian thought, concerning the sin of Pride. CS Lewis - to whom we will shortly return - described Pride as the worst of all sins. And this was for the simple reason that it is hateful. As he put it (emphasis added):

[I]t is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began. Other vices may sometimes bring people together: you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people. But Pride always means enmity—it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God…

The reason why Pride is enmity is, simply, because Pride by definition puts the individual above all other concerns - it makes the individual superior to everything and everyone. Becoming hateful is then the necessary consequence, because, of course, all Pride is false: no individual is really superior to any other. This being the case, the Prideful individual has no alternative but to be resentful against the world for failing to recognise his superiority, against God for being truly superior, and against every other human being for asserting their own right to exist and to do as they see fit. Pride comes hand-in-glove with affront, and indeed ultimately with seeing the very existence of other individual human beings as illegitimate insofar as they fail to recognise one’s own unique importance.

There is a necessary confluence, then, identified across time by wise observers of the human condition, of all faith traditions (not just Christianity, of course), between misanthropy and pride. At its most extreme this confluence becomes so strong that it can result in fantasies in the individual’s mind of nothing less than the complete annihilation of the human race and human history, so as to make The World truly one’s own - and indeed to do nothing less than unite the self and the world, so as to have the entirety of creation as one’s plaything. At a slightly more humdrum level, it manifests itself in a blithe and unthinking authoritarianism which rests on an understanding that other people are, if not deserving of death, then certainly not deserving of independent existences of their own: mere pawns in an almost literal sense. In either sense the drive itself seems to arise from a deep desire, perhaps the deepest in the human soul: to be not a mere man or woman but a God or Goddess in one’s own right, with the power to make all afresh and rule over what follows.

I will come to one of CS Lewis’s own fictional illustrations of this mindset in a moment (I intend to write more fully about it in future posts), but the most succinct expression in the world of Christian speculative fiction I think comes in Gene Wolfe’s The Wizard Knight (2004). In this book we encounter Able, a young American boy who has been abandoned by his parents and is being looked after by his older brother. One day, having been left alone in the countryside, Able accidentally wanders into another reality, with a multilayered cosmology defined by goodness, scale and time. In Mythgarthr, the realm of humans, time flows as it does in our world, and the scale of the landscape is like that of our own. But above it lie three realms of successively more goodness and vaster scale, where time moves successively more quickly: Skai, Kleos and Elysion. Below Mythgarthr, by contrast, there are three realms of successively less goodness and smaller scale, where time moves successively more slowly: Aelfrice, Muspel and Niflheim.

Niflheim, at the bottom of everything, is the realm of The Most Low God. There goodness, scale and time have collapsed down to a point of near-infinite density - there, the only thing that exists is an eternal He:

Great sheets of ice hung like curtains from a dark sky; the ground was hard as ice, and thick with frost.

‘This cannot be Muspel,’ the Earl Marshal gasped.

A voice before, behind and all about us answered him. ‘You call this Niflheim.’ It was weary, yet resonated with [power]….

It surrounded me. I cannot write it in a way that will make it clear if you have not seen it. I was in it, and it scrutinised me from above as from below, huge and stronger than iron. Hideous in malice. I tried to close my eyes, feeling that I walked into a nightmare. It was there still.

‘Call me God, Able.’

The Most Low God considers himself to be everything, and so his realm is literally that - just an extension of ‘Him’. And it naturally follows that, as well as being a point of near-infinite density of scale and time, his realm is imbued with malice - for precisely the reasons we have rehearsed. Believing himself to be supreme, it is impossible for him to brook contradiction without rage and hatred. And since the very existence of an independent other in his realm is by definition an affront to his supremacy, his only response to that existence is to demand worship from it or else to destroy it. Nothing can be suffered to exist unless it worships him.

We find an interesting echo or companion to the Most Low God in the form of the figure of Queen Jadis, in CS Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew. Having been discovered in, and freed from, a state of suspended animation in the vast ruined city of Charn, Jadis recounts her history to her rescuers, the children Digory and Polly. She describes how she had become engaged in a war for supremacy with her sister, and how she had used the ‘Deplorable Word’ to achieve a final victory with the annihilation of literally every other living thing:

‘That was the secret of secrets,’ said Queen Jadis. ‘It had long been known to the great kings of our race that there was a word which, if spoken with the proper ceremonies, would destroy all living things except the one who spoke it. But the ancient kings were weak and soft-hearted and bound themselves and all who should come after them with great oaths never even to seek after the knowledge of that word. But I learned it in a secret place and paid a terrible price to learn it. I did not use it until she forced me to it. I fought and fought to over-come her by every other means. I poured out the blood of my armies like water…’

‘Beast!’ muttered Polly.

‘The last great battle,’ said the Queen, ‘raged for three days here in Charn itself. For three days I looked down upon it from this very spot. I did not use my power till the last of my soldiers had fallen, and the accursed woman, my sister, at the head of her rebels was half way up those great stairs that lead up from the city to the terrace. Then I waited till we were so close that we could see one another's faces. She flashed her horrible, wicked eyes upon me and said, “Victory.” “Yes,” said I, “Victory, but not yours.” Then I spoke the Deplorable Word. A moment later I was the only living thing beneath the sun.’

It is often said by commentators on the Chronicles of Narnia that this is by way of analogy to nuclear weapons. But I think it is clear that Lewis was making a subtler and more important point, which is that the end-state of Pride is nothing less than to subject all of creation to one’s will - and, if that fails, to destroy it entirely. To be truly Prideful is to seek to be a God and hence to be worshipped as such. And it follows that if one cannot achieve this, then the next best thing is simply to be the only person permitted to live. The two things are of course connected - because to be a God is to have absolute power over all of creation, and for it therefore to be perfectly logical and natural to be able to extinguish all life at the mere click of one’s fingers:

‘But the people?’ gasped Digory.

‘What people, boy?’ asked the Queen.

‘All the ordinary people,’ said Polly, ‘who'd never done you any harm. And the women, and the children, and the animals.’

‘Don't you understand?’ said the Queen… ‘I was the Queen. They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will.’

‘It was rather hard luck on them, all the same,’ said he.

It is instructive that, for Lewis, Queen Jadis is the originator of evil in his fictional world. Those who are familiar with the books will recall that Narnia itself is created in The Magician’s Nephew, and it is Queen Jadis herself who brings evil to it in the first place. This, of course, accords with Lewis’s own stated opinions about Pride as the root of evil as such - it is no accident at all that the Queen, who was willing to kill every living thing on her own world in order to rule it, is the source of all of the mischief that follows throughout the series. Pride, and its relationship to enmity, is at the heart of the matter - it is no exaggeration to say that it is the main corrupting force in creation.

From this, we gain an understanding, then, that what is really happening in contemporary extremist green activism is the working out of a strand of narcissism that is imbued with rage - not rage at injustice in general but at perceived injustice in a specific form: the failure of the world to accord with the self. And, when matters are seen in this way, ‘climate change’ is revealed just to be the vehicle through which this rage finds expression. It might just as well be something else; what matters in the end is the conclusion that the rest of humanity itself is the problem - however that conclusion is reached.

This I think helps to explain some other features of contemporary environmental activism in general. The first is the strangely Janus-faced, which is to say incoherent, way in which this movement seems to conceptualise ‘the wild’ as such. On the one hand, we read a lot about how wonderful it would be for the world to be ‘rewilded’, with what is meant by a ‘rewilded’ landscape appearing to be one which has no human beings in it.

But on the other, the movement seems to have absolutely no interest in conservation of wild spaces in practical terms, and even seems perfectly willing to sacrifice ‘the wild’ in the interests of the building of wind turbines, dams, pylons and solar farms across wild landscapes. A small example of this is Ed Miliband, the UK’s Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, who over the last few weeks has been breezily announcing billions of pounds in funding for building a range of dams across remote mountain lakes in the Scottish Highlands, while also insisting that it is important to plaster the English countryside with electricity pylons so as to channel power from wind farms throughout the country. On the face of it, these contradictory impulses - to preserve the wild and yet to cover nature in ugly and destructive eyesores - are difficult to reconcile, until it is recalled that the underlying motivation is not really respect for the natural environment as such, but rather governing it - and, most importantly, ideally being the one, the only one, who gets to do so.

The second is the relationship between environmental and hard-left activism. That relationship is, again, on the face of it, a strange one. Conserving the environment (the clue is in the word) is, intuitively, a conservative goal. And environmentalism really originates in a conservative tradition - the Romantic movement of the 19th century and the broad, grumpy, anti-industrial tendencies in the West that are probably best represented by JRR Tolkien. Why then do so many contemporary extremist green activists also insist that political revolution of a Marxian stripe is necessary?

The answer here is that, in a certain aspect, Marxism and modern extremist environmentalism have a shared psychology. Marx, famously, loved a particular lined from Goethe’s Faust, when the demon Mephistopheles reveals himself and describes his character and aims; often this is translated into English as ‘Everything that exists deserves to perish’ (though the translation I have has, ‘All that is created deserves to be annihilated’). And the fact that this was Marx’s favourite quotation is obviously highly instructive with respect to his character: this was a man for whom the purpose of revolution was really revolution itself, not the utopian abolition of scarcity that would come afterwards. Ultimately, the fact that there was a world out there which had an independent existence and insisted on maintaining it was considered by him to be a sheer affront - and he delighted therefore in fantasies of its destruction. Marxism and environmentalism of a certain stripe thus go hand-in-hand together as two sides of the same ‘spirit of negation’, as Mephistopheles described himself: an insistence that, since nobody is going to allow one to be in charge, then nobody really has the right to go on existing at all.

That the infantile vandalism of Just Stop Oil and organisations like it is in the end so petty and futile, and that its perpetrators are often so evidently ineffectual people, is of course also an important piece of the puzzle. Pride is at its most resentful, its most hateful, its most angry, when it is wounded - when one’s own weakness and insignificance is so starkly out of accord with one’s sense of one’s own importance. These people (who are often thoroughly pampered and bourgeois) lack the courage of their convictions - they couldn’t overthrow a tea party, let alone the capitalist system - and this is actually an important feature of the emotional dynamic at work.

But, in closing, it is worth remarking on the fact that, for all of Marx’s own personal failings - he was a feckless, filthy layabout who was incapable of running a household, let alone holding public office - his ideas were nonetheless picked up in the end by people who very much had the courage of their convictions, and who were capable of taking over and running entire nations, to vastly consequential effect. It is probably only a matter of time, then, before extremist environmentalism becomes more serious and more capable - and I think it likely at that point that the evident hatred for humanity that animates so many of its disciples will reveal itself more clearly. That will have much more serious consequences than some damaged masterpieces in galleries: another thing to look forward to as our public life becomes increasingly demented.