The rise of the neo-Luddites

Yesterday, a pair of Just Stop Oil protesters glued themselves to a John Constable painting in the National Gallery, covering The Hay Wain with a printout of an alternative vision of England. The cart crossing the River Stour in Suffolk is perhaps Constable’s most famous painting. But instead of a bucolic, biscuit tin Albion, Just Stop Oil’s version shows the Stour tarmacked over, a belching power plant in the distance and a commercial jet overhead. The message is clear: our modern world is sick.

I have some sympathy with these student activists, or at least I envy their certainty. Their view of the world is simple: bad things like fossil fuels, industrialisation, and consumerism can be stopped merely by taking a stand. If only they make their voices heard, those satanic mills will grind to a halt and man shall be free. We can return to Constable’s Britain if only we choose to. It seems almost comforting in its simplicity.

But I wonder whether these two Brighton students have asked themselves why we built power stations and roads in the first place. There is no scurvy in Constable’s painting, no rotting teeth nor death in childbirth. But those things certainly existed in the 1820s. Industrialisation came about not because of humanity’s innate hatred for the natural world but because of a desire for something more than subsistence living. The faint grin of Constable’s wagoner would have been wiped from his face had he returned home to discover his son dead from typhoid. You can’t have developed healthcare without development, without roads and electricity and all the paraphernalia of industry.

Just Stop Oil is only the latest group in a resurgent hippie movement – further proof, along with stagflation and a new cold war, that we’re slipping back into the 1970s. Fellow travellers Extinction Rebellion have made clear that the world they want to create means ‘we are going to have a reduction in living standards’. If we don’t make our lives worse now, the planet will do it for us and, according to one XR founder, we will be plunged into perpetual war.

What these eco-protesters represent is a new form of Luddism, a philosophy that provides salvation and ultimately a more Edenic existence by undoing the excesses of industrial capitalism. I’ll hazard a guess that these two protesters are lefties. But the funny thing about smash-the-system thinking is that it’s not exclusively left-wing. On the other side of the Atlantic and at the other end of the political spectrum sits a new breed of neo-Luddite. The more ironic American paleo-conservatives venerate Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber who carried out a two-decade-long campaign of anti-capitalist terrorism. In his manifesto, written from a cabin deep in the Montana wilderness, ‘uncle Ted’ rejected the effete loserish tendencies of leftist theory, instead embracing the destruction of an industrial world that had created socialism in the first place. You could imagine Just Stop Oil quoting from his primitivist manifesto: ‘The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race’.

For all their millenarian zeal, these neo-Luddites are onto something. Industrialisation isn’t neutral, the world it has created has its own politics. Kaczynski wasn’t wrong when he said that the industrial revolution birthed socialism, while the early 20th-century futurists and their reverence for speed and complex machinery in turn gave rise to Mussolini’s fascism. In the 1980s, the political theorist Langdon Winner argued that certain technologies imply certain political arrangements. Things like nuclear power stations are authoritarian; they require complex hierarchies and clear chains of command. Hand a nuclear power plant over to a bunch of hippies and we’ll soon find ourselves engulfed in a crematorial fireball. Similarly, you can’t run a national train network without a nation, without engineers to maintain it, police to protect it and managers to direct trains around the country. There’s something self-reinforcing about technology and politics.

Just Stop Oil seem to want to roll back these advances; they see consumerism as a product of industrialisation, a form of isolating social order that is ultimately hollow. The agrarianism of Constable, by contrast, means community. In a way, that desire to roll back industry is deeply reactionary. And like other forms of reactionary politics, it's mostly fantasy. We're not going to be able to convince the likes of China and India to give up on industrial development, so why even pretend we can go back? The only realistic response is to keep pushing through.

Look at something like solar power. There’s no way we could have created photovoltaic technology without the combustion engine and fossil fuels. And distributed renewables imply a different, less authoritarian world too. You can shove a few panels on your roof and hook them up to your electric boiler and that’s it, no need for a state superstructure. Just Stop Oil can now live without oil in a way that was impossible even 50 years ago. It sounds a little Marxist, but the techno-capitalist machine has created the means by which it can be rejected.

Perhaps the Just Stop Oil protesters should have strolled a few minutes down the National Gallery hallways and gone to look at Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway. Painted 23 years after The Hay Wain, this proto-impressionist masterpiece shows a steam engine careering across a viaduct, a great cloud of smoke and steam above this novel machine. Just in front of the train, running for its life, is a hare. Turner saw the cruelty of modernisation and yet embraced it all the same. The only way to stop oil and the destructive forces of industry is yet more industrialisation.