This week has seen globally co-ordinated protests by self-absorbed members of the privileged middle class, who have been by gluing themselves to pavements, trains, planes and automobiles when not splashing public buildings with faux blood, dangling from bridges and making general pests of themselves under the banner of Extinction Rebellion and its mendacious claims of imminent planetary doom. That’s the public face of this latest apocalyptic movement, of which over the centuries there have been many. Perhaps more interesting is the underlying inability of the protesters’ rational selves to examine and critique their emotive selves, to see in their collective antics what amounts to a mass escape from the prison of reason. With such a societal pathology now rampant, it is both timely and instructive to revisit one of the pioneers, and the casualties, of the naïve neo-romanticism whose disruptive rejection of modern life, its power sources and convenience, is the flame burning bright in so many preening hearts.
Long before Greta Thunberg denounced growth, modernity and the pursuit of wealth, there was Christopher Johnston McCandless, whose tragedy plumbs a central human struggle as visceral as it is cerebral. Captured in the considerate and compelling account by mountaineer and author Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild (1996) and the extraordinary film adaption of the same name by Sean Penn (2007), McCandless’s short life may be witnessed as an allegory for a quintessential malaise affecting the contemporary Western world. The book is now taught widely across US secondary schools, although his life and demise is likely to be approached through a romanticised prism that echoes Krakauer’s account and McCandless’s own personality.
Briefly, for those unfamiliar with the story, McCandless abandoned his car, burnt his money, rejected society and made his way by hitchhiker’s thumb and boxcar to the wilds of Alaska, where he died slowly and painfully. Encompassed within the sweeping trajectory of McCandless’s twenty-four years is the human story of a young, disaffected Anglo-America and introverted ideologue. It is within this narrative that we encounter him as the unwitting flag-bearer for much of contemporary progressives’ — more accurately regressives — war on the very cradle of their nurtured existence.
