By Stanley Kurtz
What
do America’s college students want? They want to be oppressed. More precisely,
a surprising number of students at America’s finest colleges and universities
wish to appear as victims — to themselves, as well as to others — without the
discomfort of actually experiencing victimization. Here is where global warming
comes in. The secret appeal of campus climate activism lies in its ability to turn
otherwise happy, healthy, and prosperous young people into an oppressed class,
at least in their own imaginings. Climate activists say to the world, “I’ll
save you.” Yet deep down they’re thinking, “Oppress me.”
In
his important new book, The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish
Human Beings, French intellectual gadfly Pascal Bruckner
does the most thorough job yet of explaining the climate movement as a secular
religion, an odd combination of deformed Christianity and reconstructed
Marxism. (You can find Bruckner’s excellent article based on the book here.) Bruckner describes a historical process
wherein “the long list of emblematic victims — Jews, blacks, slaves,
proletarians, colonized peoples — was replaced, little by little, with the
Planet.” The planet, says Bruckner, “has become the new proletariat that must
be saved from exploitation.”
But
why? Bruckner finds it odd that a “mood of catastrophe” should prevail in the
West, the most well-off part of the world. The reason, I think, is that the
only way to turn the prosperous into victims is to threaten the very existence
of a world they otherwise command.
And
why should the privileged wish to become victims? To alleviate guilt and
to appropriate the victim’s superior prestige. In the neo-Marxist dispensation
now regnant on our college campuses, after all, the advantaged are ignorant and
guilty while the oppressed are innocent and wise. The initial solution to this
problem was for the privileged to identify with “struggling groups” by wearing,
say, a Palestinian keffiyeh. Yet better than merely empathizing with the
oppressed is to be oppressed. This is the climate movement’s signal
innovation.
We
can make sense of Bruckner’s progression of victimhood from successive
minorities to the globe itself by considering the lives of modern-day climate
activists. Let’s begin with Bill McKibben, the most influential environmental
activist in the country, and leader of the campus fossil-fuel divestment movement.
In
a 1996 piece titled “Job and Matthew,” McKibben describes his arrival
at college in 1978 as a liberal-leaning student with a suburban Protestant
background. “My leftism grew more righteous in college,” he says, “but still
there was something pro forma about it.” The problem? “Being white, male,
straight, and of impeccably middle-class background, I could not realistically
claim to be a victim of anything.” At one point, in what he calls a “loony”
attempt to claim the mantle of victimhood, McKibben nearly convinced himself
that he was part Irish so he could don a black armband as Bobby Sands and
fellow members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army died in a hunger
strike. Yet even as he failed to persuade himself he was Irish, McKibben
continued to enthusiastically support every leftist-approved victim group he
could find.
Nonetheless,
something was missing. None of these causes seemed truly his own. When McKibben
almost singlehandedly turned global warming into a public issue in 1989, his
problem was solved. Now everyone could be a victim.
Wen
Stephenson, a contributing writer at The Nation and an enthusiastic
supporter of McKibben’s anti-fossil-fuel crusade, is one of the sharpest
observers of the climate movement. In March, Stephenson published a profile of some of the student climate protesters
he’d gotten to know best. Their stories look very much like McKibben’s
description of his own past.
Stephenson’s
thesis is that, despite vast differences between the upper-middle-class college
students who make up much of today’s climate movement and southern blacks
living under segregation in the 1950s, climate activists think of themselves on
the model of the early civil-rights protesters. When climate activists court
arrest through civil disobedience, they imagine themselves to be reliving the
struggles of persecuted African Americans staging lunch-counter sit-ins at risk
of their lives. Today’s climate protesters, Stephenson writes,“feel themselves
oppressed by powerful, corrupt forces beyond their control.” And they fight
“not only for people in faraway places but, increasingly, for themselves.”
One
young activist, a sophomore at Harvard, told Stephenson that she grew up
“privileged in a poor rural town.” Inspired by the civil-rights movement, her
early climate activism was undertaken “in solidarity” with Third World peoples:
“I saw climate change as this huge human rights abuse against people who are
already disadvantaged in our global society. . . . I knew theoretically there
could be impacts on the U.S. But I thought, I’m from a rich, developed country,
my parents are well-off, I know I’m going to college, and it’s not going to
make a difference to my life. But especially over this past year, I’ve learned
that climate change is a threat to me.” When one of her fellow protesters said:
“You know, I think I could die of climate change. That could be the way I go,”
the thought stuck with her. “You always learn about marginalized groups in
society, and think about how their voices don’t have as much power, and then
suddenly you’re like, ‘Wait, that’s exactly what I am, with climate change.’”
The
remaining biographical accounts in Stephenson’s piece repeat these themes.
Climate activists see themselves as privileged, are deeply influenced by
courses on climate change and on “marginalized” groups they’ve been exposed to
in high school and college, and treat the climate apocalypse as their personal
admissions pass to the sacred circle of the oppressed.
It
may be that these activists, eyes opened by fortuitous education, are merely
recognizing the reality of our impending doom. Or might this particular
apocalypse offer unacknowledged psychic rewards? These students could easily be
laid low by an economic crisis brought on by demographic decline and the
strains of baby-boomer retirement on our entitlement system. Yet marriage and
children aren’t a priority, although they could help solve the problem. Why?
Many dooms beckon. How has climate change won out?
Last
academic year, the National Association of Scholars released a widely discussed report called “What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a
Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students.” The report chronicles what
I’ve called a “reverse island” effect. Back in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, when the classic liberal-arts curriculum first came under
challenge, courses in ethnic and gender studies were like tiny islands in a sea
of traditionalism. Politicized in ways that were incompatible with liberal
education, these ideologically based “studies” programs were generally
dismissed as necessary concessions to the nascent multicultural zeitgeist.
Today
the situation is reversed. Not only have the ideologically driven “studies”
programs taken over a large share of the college curriculum, but many courses
in conventional departments reflect the underlying assumptions of the various
minority-studies concentrations. Today, classic liberal-arts courses have
themselves been turned into tiny besieged islands, while the study of alleged
oppression represents the leading approach at America’s colleges and
universities.
In
this atmosphere, students cannot help wishing to see themselves as members of a
persecuted group. Climate activism answers their existential challenges
and gives them a sense of crusading purpose in a lonely secular world. The
planet, as Bruckner would have it, is the new proletariat. Yet substitute
“upper-middle-class” for “planet,” and the progression of victimhood is
explained. Global warming allows the upper-middle-class to join the proletariat,
cloaking erstwhile oppressors in the mantle of righteous victimhood.
Insight
into the quasi-religious motivations that stand behind climate activism cannot
finally resolve the empirical controversies at stake in our debate over global
warming. Yet understanding climate activism as a cultural phenomenon does yield
insight into that debate. The religious character of the climate-change crusade
chokes off serious discussion. It stigmatizes reasonable skepticism about climate catastrophism (which is
different from questioning the fundamental physics of carbon dioxide’s effect
on the atmosphere). Climate apocalypticism drags what ought to be careful
consideration of the costs and benefits of various policy options into the
fraught world of identity politics. The wish to be oppressed turns into the
wish to be morally superior, which turns into the pleasure of silencing alleged oppressors, which turns into
its own sort of hatred and oppression.
What
do American college students want? I would like to think they are looking for
an education in the spirit of classic liberalism, an education that offers
them, not a ready-made ideology, but the tools to make an informed choice among
the fundamental alternatives in life. The people who run our universities,
unfortunately, have taught their students to want something different, and this
is what truly oppresses them.
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