The Progressive Dream : Celebrating Lack Of Accomplishment

Forget the World’s Fair, we now have a new way to celebrate human accomplishment. Instead of going to see a vision of the future, we turn off the lights and sit in the dark for an hour. Earth Hour shows how far we have come from celebrating human accomplishment to celebrating the lack of accomplishment. For all its pretentious activism, environmentalism is a movement that promotes inaction. Don’t build, don’t create and don’t do– are its commandments. Turn off the lights and feel good about how much you aren’t doing right now. Slacker morality at its best.

While we take the electric light for granted– to be able to read and write after dark by a clear light is a technological achievement that has transformed our civilization. Animals are governed by day and night cycles. Artificial light made it possible for us to work independently of the day and night cycle. There is no way to measure the increase in knowledge gained. And there is no better measure of the unthinking contempt of the environmentalist movement for that achievement than a call to turn off the lights and sit in the dark.

http://www.eurasiareview.com/