Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

I had a really interesting discussion with @matthewremski about the hazards of activism, navigating despair and keeping hope alive, while resisting the temptations offered by conspiracy theories, grandiosity and “aesthetic accelarationism”. Do listen. conspirituality.buzzsprout.com/1875696/975789…

We also explore the dark spiral of gleeful apocalypticism that led to this:

What I see in this and some previous statements by the same author is a liberating disregard for human life. If you believe the collapse of civilisation is inevitable, and our role is merely to observe it from a godlike height, you are not afflicted by certain troubling dilemmas.

You don’t need to worry about how to reconcile protecting the living world with the need to feed, house, clothe and supply energy to 8 billion people. You can denounce other greens as “reductionists” for engaging in the knotty tech and economic matters this balance this demands.

You liberate yourself from the need for difficult choices, from the need to grapple with tough technical and scientific issues, and free yourself to soar into the realms of poesy on golden wings, leaving the petty mortals to their squabbles.

You can leave the facts in the dust, and misleadingly claim, as he does in his recent essays, that the vaccines aren’t properly tested, vaccination is a failure, ivermectin has been maligned, public health measures are being used to control us, it’s like the Nazis, etc.

Such claims, though tired and familiar, remain extremely dangerous, especially when carried on such a powerful current of language. As the wards fill with the unvaccinated, I don't think it is a stretch to say that they can kill people.

Liberated from science, the words can pour out, resonant, stirring, uncompromising, unconstrained by factual accuracy or troubling counterpoints.
They excite people, but resolve nothing.
As George Crabbe asked in 1783,
“Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread”?