Increasingly absurd climate protests show how society has failed younger generation

Climate agitators seem a lot more agitated as of late. They have been smashing bottles of expensive milk over the floors of department stores; gluing themselves to the ground, to paintings, to shopfronts; dumping human excrement on the statue of a dead veteran; defacing the Mona Lisa with cake and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers with Heinz Tomato Soup.

The protests are increasingly absurd, detached from reality and adrift from the stated cause. That the Mona Lisa was painted several hundred years before the invention of the oil rig is an irrelevance to them.

Why? Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil — three among the high-profile eco-disturbance groups — explain that they can exert greater moral pressure on governments to address the climate crisis with publicity generating stunts. It is necessary, so the argument goes, to cause any manner of disruption to draw attention to the urgency of their movement.

Placards at marches warn of apocalypse, death and biblical destruction. There is something uniquely religious in the tenor of the message. It comes wearing the language of fire and brimstone.

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They prophesy about doomsday as though it is a foregone conclusion. Our house is on fire, Greta Thunberg says. And we deserve it, her acolytes might as well be shouting back.

This self-flagellation is almost Christian. It should not surprise us, then, that the eco-protesters respond to it with literal iconoclasm.

It is easy to see where this has all come from. Young people feel hapless, with no control over their lives. They feel politically disenfranchised and spiritually at sea. The future is uncertain, there is little guarantee that they will be better off than their parents. The social contract feels not quite broken but positively shattered.

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We have created the perfect conditions for the unmooring of young people’s lives. Marriage rates are declining, the centrality of the nuclear family to society is waning, organised religion is collapsing too. In its place we argue that more autonomy, more individual freedom, and fewer tethers to community make us happier.

It is not exactly clear why any of us should believe that is true. Without the grounding forces of community from where do we derive meaning? Without the anchors that have long governed human existence is it not obvious that an instinct for chaos fills that void?

As the climate disaster ravages the planet, young agitators react by fomenting more chaos and more disarray, in lieu of any other recourse. Protesters in Harrods department store — where a group of young people smashed milk bottles on the floor — might have claimed they were casting light on the horrors of the dairy industry. In reality, it had little to do with the virtues of oat milk and everything to do with this nihilistic anxiety.

In many ways, these protesters are admirable. The willingness to prioritise their cause over their comfort, and to subvert social norms at the expense of something greater than themselves, is brave and rare. But they are just a symptom of a much bigger problem. The political climate has stripped them of the grounding forces of family and community. And instead it encourages misdirected destruction. Without any of the promises of a fair society, why not smash some bottles?

In the past few months protesters have also targeted Botticelli’s Primavera at the Uffizi in Florence, the statue of Laocoön in the Vatican and Van Gogh’s Peach Trees in Blossom at the Courtauld Gallery in London. “Art or life,” one pair of protesters asked, “which is worth more?”

The landscapes Van Gogh loved painting so much are being destroyed. France recorded its highest ever temperature — 46 degrees — just kilometres from the studio he once shared with painter Paul Gauguin. There is every possibility the rolling fields and arable dreamscapes of Provence, now rendered in oil paint, will be made unrecognisable by the climate crisis. What art would there be if Van Gogh only had arid fields to inspire him?

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Of course the question — art or life — is perfect evidence of this misdirection. And it shines a light on the hollowness and absurdity of their entire project. The demonstrators say their defacement is symbolic, they do not intend to harm the actual work, instead targeting the frames, the glass coverings, the surrounding walls. They say it is a problem of balancing sensibilities. And that it is okay, to an extent, to deface one thing to draw attention to another.

The pair who doused Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in soup shouted: “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting, or the protection of our planet and people?”

It does not matter. In fact, the question is rather meaningless. Fighting to protect human life — and the future of the species — must also include a reverence for the beautiful things humans have created before them. Only a society that had failed young people so deeply would have generated a whole cadre of anxious eco-protesters who do not realise that.