Cream o' Nihilism Soup
on the cognitive dissonance of soup-throwing environmentalists
The 2020s have seen a surge in attacks on famous artworks worldwide by environmental activists. Protestors have glued themselves to, hammered away at, and thrown soup and other concoctions on the works of legendary artists such as Van Gogh, Klimt, Goya, Vermeer, Botticelli, Picasso, and others.
Most recently, on January 28th, protestors threw soup at the Mona Lisa.
These gestures have proven futile. Most of the artworks under siege (including the Mona Lisa) were protected by glass casings. And public opinion about the environment remained about as unaffected after these stunts as did the paintings. Still, it is difficult to ignore this bizarre phenomenon.
Activists, worried about climate change and a contaminated food supply, ask: What is the point of art if our very existence is doomed? A fair question. But we must also ask: What is the point of existence if art is doomed?
The fact that art has been the primary target in the demonstrations of Just Stop Oil, The Last Generation, and other environmentalist organizations is a telling sign of how far the movement has fallen.
Environmentalism arose in the early 19th century in response to the Industrial Revolution, which transformed large swathes of the West into an overcrowded, steaming dump heap. At its outset, environmentalism was wholly intertwined with the artistic movement of Romanticism, and took issue with industrialization for mostly aesthetic reasons.
As the 19th century continued, the environmentalist movement began to set and achieve tangible goals, such as restricting pollution levels and establishing national parks. Even amidst the turn away from art and toward practical politics, environmentalism still had not lost its Romantic streak. Yellowstone National Park was chosen as America’s first national park because of its beauty, above all else.
Environmental degradation was seen as a threat to both the human body and the human soul, and these two threats were inseparable.
The mid-20th century saw environmentalism’s most well-known and successful iteration. In 1970, Earth Day was established, the EPA was created, and law after law was passed to protect wildlife and curb pollution. But the changes brought about by Washington and polite society were largely spurred by a hippie vanguard.
On the cultural side, the 1960s and 70s counterculture was establishing rural communes, making pseudo-pagan invocations of Mother Nature, and churning out folk, rock, and soul environmental anthems like Joni Mitchell’s 1970 “Big Yellow Taxi” and Marvin Gaye’s 1971 “Mercy Mercy Me.”
The psychedelic craze — though funnily centered around a laboratory-produced, synthetic drug (LSD) rather than natural hallucinogens — inspired a more emotionally-visceral, amorphous, nature-seeking, and transcendent vision of the world than the standard bourgeois, rationalist vision. It is no wonder why so many youths of the time would “turn on, tune in, and drop out.”
The hippies of the mid-20th century, with their communes and great music, were vague and impractical in their environmentalist aspirations, but at the very least compelling and sympathetic. They spoke to an impulse that had been lacking in society. Politicians, on other hand, were boring but practical. Nixon, the most square and bourgeois politician imaginable in the eyes of the hippies, is the one we can credit today for the EPA and critical environmental legislation.
Another half-century later, the current crop of environmentalists are neither sympathetic nor practical. They have neither the willingness to practically negotiate like mid-century politicians nor the capacity to appreciate beauty and yearn for transcendence like mid-century hippies.
Since the 21st century, the environmental movement has become thoroughly integrated into the contemporary NGO complex.
Far from being seen as a hippie movement, climate activists today are seen by their opponents as the World Economic Forum’s enforcers, who want to use “climate emergency” as a pretext to strip the masses of freedom and property, put us in pods, and make us eat bugs.
To the general public, though, the loudest climate activists (the kinds who would throw soup at the Mona Lisa) are simply seen as unbearably cringe and lame. I am inclined to agree–especially because they can’t even produce any good songs or art in the vein of Joni Mitchell.
In his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch draws attention to the rising trend of ineffective and self-serving political demonstrations. Lasch writes that certain factions of the mid-20th century left had become “imprisoned… in a politics of theater, of dramatic gestures, of style without substance,” not as a personal sacrifice in service of their political ideals, but in service of their narcissistic delusions. The Mona Lisa soup throwers and their ilk may exemplify Lasch’s diagnosis of narcissism even better than Lasch’s original targets.
Without an enchanted worldview, or even just one with a substantial aesthetic dimension, the tantrums of climate activists are exposed as acts of ressentiment against business titans for having the power to shape the world according to their will.
In general, including when it comes to environmentalism, I trust those who claim to be motivated by an aesthetic vision over a purely moral vision. Moralistic posturing is too often a mask for power-seeking, virtue signaling, and the desire to Las(c)h Out.
Even putting aside the psychology of the soup throwers and the futility of their forms of demonstration, their actions bring into question the entire point of environmentalism in a secular paradigm.
Art is the outpouring of human creativity. If art lacks substantive meaning (as is suggested by climate activists’ use of it as a mere backdrop for political theater), then human existence lacks substantive meaning. And if human existence lacks meaning, then why live at all? If humans aren’t special, then why do we have any sort of responsibility to other species, to the floating rock in space we call Earth, or to other humans?
The morally-charged concept of responsibility implies a cosmic order — an order in which things have meaning, and paintings are not merely splatterings on a canvas, sacred in one moment and suitable for desecration the next when it’s politically-expedient.*1
Art, by conveying that beauty is real and can be distilled in time and space, is the main counterpoint to a rationalist, disenchanted vision of the world as mere raw material from which we extract goods to feed mouths and stimulate neurons. Stewardship of the Earth is connected to the artistic impulse; it means treating the Earth as our canvas. Throwing soup on the Mona Lisa symbolically dismisses the possibility that there actually exist compelling reasons to combat Big Oil, Big Agriculture, etc.
When incentivizing the public toward a certain behavior, movements often use the “carrot and stick” method. The problem with the soup throwers is that they bring out the stick (annoying political theater) but offer the people no carrot (the possibility of transcendence). In fact, they use the stick to beat the carrot.
Do we want to live in a world where we do everything in our power to extend life, but have no horizons beyond mere existence?
Personally, I don’t want mere existence. I would rather be taken out in an Exxon-sponsored blaze of glory than endure a gracelessly-overextended life in a Sustainable Green Regime devoid of art.
Environmentalism should be rooted in Eros—an erotic love of the Earth and of life. We are alive for the purpose of the appreciation of beauty.
The reason why the world is worth living in is because it produces art such as the Mona Lisa.
The erotic impulse toward art and life continues to live on in unexpected ways.
“Earth Porn” continues to proliferate on social media. TikTok is filled with nature videos set to saccharine looping song clips. The fact that humans still desire to share Earth’s beauty is promising, even if this desire is channeled in tacky ways.
Even more promising is the political horseshoe unfolding before our eyes, which may have the potential to yield a new environmentalist coalition. On the issue of food safety, granola Green New Dealers and the raw egg slonkers and seed oil disrespecters of the new “New Right” all stand against excessive pesticide use and food processing. On the issue of deforestation and oil drilling, leftists wish to protect vulnerable impacted groups from exploitation, while right-wing nationalists wish to see the landscapes of their respective nations preserved as the embodiment of their national character.
In a different way, the soup throwers themselves are also not without hope. Clearly, they have a knack for performance art. Perhaps they can join theater troupes where they’ll have a more effective creative outlet, and they can leave the real work of environmentalism to more charismatic personalities, who actually love humanity in all of its complexity, including human art. The Earth may be better off in their hands.
You can also check out AJ’s review of the Clash of the Female Titans, and his essay on Italians and assimilation. Subscribe to his Substack here.
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photo courtesy of David Cantiniaux/Getty Images, edited on GlitchStudio
*Not that the Mona Lisa is sacred. Frankly, I find it overrated. But at this point, through sheer reproduction, the Mona Lisa has come to represent art itself and is no longer just an Italian noblewoman’s portrait.
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