Those unfortunate enough to board the Zuiderdam cruise ship departing Kiel in northern Germany on Sunday were met with a surprise: dozens of climate change activists in small boats blocking the departure port, carrying large banners that read, “Cruises kill climate.”
It took police and special forces hours to clear the demonstration and confiscate the protesters’ ships. Protesters with the Extinction Rebellion group then proceeded to jump into the water and swim in front of the cruise ship, all to fight the “catastrophic local and global consequences of cruises.”
I’m no expert on cruise ships or climate change, but this seems to go a bit far. But then again, so much of the crusade to slow climate change is about going too far.
The same is true of nearly every cause.
Climate change activists advocate for an extreme reduction in carbon emissions, pollution, and waste, knowing full well these policies — like the Green New Deal — will never see the light of day. The hope, of course, is that bringing awareness to these issues in the most extreme way possible will make incremental progress more likely.
And it works. Take the pro-life movement, for example. Walk through the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. and you’ll find thousands of pro-life individuals protesting abortion. Some hold graphic images of unborn infants in silver dishes — the result of botched abortions. Others depict the crimes of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell.
The images are bloody, gruesome, and unwelcome. But although most of the March for Life attendees disavow such tactics, there’s no doubt that the images grab attention and speak to the issue at hand: the barbarity and disregard of humanity involved in abortion.
The extremists, if put in charge, would be dangerous. But in reality they tend to serve a positive purpose, especially in a pluralist society built off of contending extremisms. This tension produces a kind of moderation that would otherwise be impossible, and even gives clarity to those seeking rational solutions.
James Madison knew this. He wrote in the Federalist Papers that a system of many contending factions is the greatest safeguard to liberty. Many factions will war against each other, and thus constrain each other. This restrains the human impulse to delve into tyrannical passions.
This is why we should resist the temptation to rid the public square of the fanatics. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, however, seem to think this is their duty. Their current crusade threatens the precarious balance our pluralist society depends on.
YouTube recently demonetized Stephen Crowder, a conservative talking head who was punished for regularly mocking a Vox journalist’s ethnicity and sexual orientation.
Twitter and Facebook have also removed users whom they’ve deemed “threats” to wholesome discourse on their platforms, such as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. And they have every right to do so — they are private companies who ought to be free to kick off anyone they want. But that doesn’t mean they should.
To be clear, the users kicked off social media platforms have largely been fanatics (so far). Alex Jones’s fear mongering, paranoid theories are abhorrent and should be disavowed at every turn.
But the paradox for a pluralist society is that extremists of any stripe must be resisted, while at the same time tolerated.
Without the radical climate change activists, it’s unlikely any government would take action to reduce its chemical mark on the earth. And because of Alex Jones, conservatives know to arm themselves with reason, not paranoia.
As Charles Krauthammer once wrote, “An extremist is the last person to whom you want to give power, but the first to whom you might want give the floor.” By denying the fanatics the power of petition and contention, big tech companies are declaring themselves the moderators rather than allowing society to moderate itself.
It just so happens that the fanatics among us are often better than any Twitter or Facebook analyst at keeping the rest of us honest.
So bring on the climate change fanatics, the conspiracy theorists, the activists of any shape and form. Adopting their ideas is a terrible idea, but that’s exactly why they matter: Without the extremes, it’s hard to know what’s in the middle.
