💥 Flying from now on is violence
In my 20s I spent a few months travelling around the US. I stayed with a family in West Virginia who ran a farm veg delivery operation. The husband was a rugged individualist type of guy. He told me one day, as I was helping him with the cropping, that having one or two slaves was okay; that In the nineteenth century they were a big help to small struggling rural households.
Maybe some people used to think what he was saying was fair enough, but the fact is taking away black people's fundamental freedoms is absolutely immoral. It was wrong.
And so today we hear people say that they know flying is "bad" but life is hard and they need to fly off to take that holiday break, they need to fly for work. It's just more convenient, a big help.
But as we move into 2025 it is now clear we have reached 1.5C of global warming and unless there is a massive decrease in emissions by the relatively rich of the world then hundreds of millions of mainly black people will lose their fundamental freedoms; their livelihoods and their lives.
To fly then, like slavery, has to be absolutely immoral. It is wrong. Of course people will say that flying is different. Buying a slave was a direct act of violence while when you fly the harm is indirect and the violence is not real. Slave owners used to have a similar argument. They said violence only applies to action by whites on whites, and so violence to blacks did not count.
But how people see morality changes. People came to see that violence is violence, regardless of the colour of the skin of the victim. And so now today, we have to realise that violence is violence regardless of whether it is direct or indirect. When a terrorist sprays bullets into the crowd he does not know precisely who he will kill, but he knows his action will result in killing. No one is pretending there is no violence.
People don't know exactly who they will destroy, but they do know their action of emitting carbon will destroy innocent lives. This change in what we see as immoral is our next civilizational challenge. Just as in the past people had to understand that all people have basic rights, so we today have to understand that indirect harm violates those basics rights.
There are differences of course. Buying and owning a slave is a single act. Flying is a multiple action. And, as such, no doubt, in some circumstances there are exceptions - for instance, when a relative is dying. But the exceptions prove the rule. Given the level of violence that we are now inflicting by creating carbon emissions, 99% of the time, flying has to be seen as being as unacceptable as owning a slave. To think otherwise is to hide behind your privilege, just as slave owners did, to avoid accepting that what you are doing is obscene.
And there is a another difference. Once slavery was made illegal then effectively it stopped. If we don't stop carbon emissions very soon, we will not be able to stop the harm because of tipping points being triggered in the Earth's system. Our violence is far worse because it will be felt for hundreds of generations. The "slavery" will not stop.
Flying from now on is a violence, qualitatively worse than any violence of the past. It is a violence that violates fundamental rights, not just today but for ever more. In 2025 then we are moving well beyond the quaint idea of New Year's resolutions - that we give up flying, meat, or some other consumerist "entitlement" in order to help the "environment", in the same way as, in the past, rich people gave to charities to help the poor "natives". There is now only one world and it includes both us and "the environment".
We have entered a new metaphysical reality where we are all the same. It is now an objective physical fact that everyone faces destruction from global climate breakdown. We need then to challenge not just the patronising story of "us" giving up stuff for "them", we need to challenge the whole era-long-story that giving up stuff is, in fact, "a cost". Consumerism, the whole material status idea, is just a passing cultural thing. We can understand, as most past cultures understood, that those working in logistics and admin for the concentration camps were obviously still complicit in the Holocaust, even though they did not "directly" kill anyone.
If a country puts poisonous gas over another country, because it is "convenient" for them to do so, no one can think that it is anything other than disgusting. And so when millions of people from wealthy countries fly, they do not know whose lives derive benefit from stopping doing certain things.
It can become the right thing to do, the new fashion, the new way to live. We can celebrate having more by having less. It's a choice. We can change our metaphysical outlook, just as we can change our morality. In fact, we will have to change how we see the world, in order to see some things, like slavery, and now flying, for what they truly are - obscene. And doing so is now a matter of life or death. Not just for those black lives. But for all our lives.
