Extinction Rebellion; a monster of our own making

Next week in London, Extinction Rebellion will be demonstrating in their usual robust style, to bring home – as they see it – the destruction of the planet by the course mankind is presently taking. The disruptive protests are the means justified by these perceived ends.  And in fact these ends seem to have been accepted by many governments, the media and influential groups, who express the same concerns about the future of the planet, frequently in the same apocalyptic terms as Extinction Rebellion.

This, like many causes, is based on a particular view of the future: it’s simply a prediction. This is much more insidious than, for example, fake news, which aided by social media has always been viewed as a hugely disruptive influence. The literal and metaphorical good news is that generally the antidote to fake news can always be gleaned from the same platforms where it arose, limiting its negative effect. However, fake futures are a completely different matter. They can’t easily be dismissed if ideas become entrenched, as in reality it can only ever be a guess or a matter of opinion, and so can only be combatted within the same limited discourse.

The trouble is that there isn’t enough genuine scientific or even political scepticism. There seems to be a herd mentality, fuelled by virtue signalling and the usual quasi-religious guilt when it comes to all things environmental. Even the scientific community has been swept along by the torrent, with august scientific societies having to declare that the earth is warming and climate is changing, never having previously felt the need to confirm, for example, the veracity of the expanding universe model or the mass of the neutrino. However, to progress, science has to be sceptical; it should always be anticipating the next big insight, the next failure of the current model and the next paradigm shift. With mainly unchallenged views about the environment, society has made space for rebellious and concerned youth to uncontrollably protest in order to force more immediate solutions to problems that just about everyone thinks we have. Under those circumstances, who can blame them?