I often wonder how many of the unduly passionate progressives have sacrificed for their cause. Sure, they want others to sacrifice, but did they give up their job or college admittance to someone marginalized? Did they hand over the house keys, car keys, IRA password, to a historically oppressed person? Or do they just emote about it on social media, demanding that others sacrifice for a cause when they won’t. Muttering a land acknowledgement before a meeting isn’t the same as giving the land back, and if you’re unwilling to do the latter, the former is performative crap.
Then someone does something that isn’t merely sacrifice, but a sacrifice so extreme that it makes you question their sanity. During the Vietnam war, one of the iconic images was of a Buddhist monk, Thích Quảng Đức, who self-immolated in Saigon. Whether it changed anything is hard to say, but it made its point about the persecution of Buddhists by Diem’s regime.
But what of Wynne Bruce?
A Colorado man who set himself on fire in front of the Supreme Court on Friday in an apparent Earth Day protest against climate change has died, police said.
It wasn’t widely reported. Many have no idea it happened at all. Why would a 50-year-old man set himself on fire?
Kritee Kanko, a climate scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund and a Zen Buddhist priest in Boulder, said that she is a friend of Mr. Bruce and that the self-immolation was a planned act of protest.
“This act is not suicide,” Dr. Kritee wrote on Twitter early Sunday morning. “This is a deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to climate crisis.”
Accepting the premise that this was a thoughtful, deliberate act of protest, and not the an act of suicide by someone whose mental health was dubious, it fails to answer any of the questions it raises. Why? What did Bruce hope to accomplish? Why in front of the Supreme Court? What thing did he believe so critical that he was willing to sacrifice his life for it?
Mr. Bruce, who identified as Buddhist, set himself on fire in an apparent imitation of Vietnamese monks who burned themselves to death in protest during the Vietnam War. A Facebook account that Dr. Kritee identified as Mr. Bruce’s had commemorated the death of Thich Nhat Hanh, an influential Zen Buddhist master and antiwar activist who died in January.
This might make sense to Bruce and Kritee, but does it make sense to anyone outside their circle of Buddhists? And if not, then to what end was such a sacrifice? And this isn’t the first time in recent vintage someone has engaged in self-immolation as protest.
David Buckel, a prominent civil rights lawyer turned environmental advocate, also set himself on fire in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in 2018 to protest climate change and died. In a letter beforehand, Mr. Buckel alluded to the spiritual roots of self-immolation in protests, including in Tibet.
Maybe you remember Buckel’s protest. Probably not. A human being, a lawyer, lit himself on fire for a cause and nothing changed, no one was saved. Was it worth it? Did Bruce or Buckel, or any of the others who self-immolated, believe that by sacrificing their life, they would have such an impact that it would be worth it?
At the other end of the spectrum are the people fighting passionately for the most pointless nonsense by twitting furiously at all the evil people who refuse to use preferred pronouns or call Hispanics by the name they’re too stupid to realize they should prefer. There are some people who are so sincere in their belief in the cause that they are willing to go out, night after night, and take a beating or a rubber bullet if need be. Not that I agree with their cause, but at least they are willing to suffer consequences for their beliefs.
As for Bruce, it’s unclear why his self-immolation didn’t make the evening news. Maybe it’s an intentional choice so that others of questionable mental health don’t become copycats. Maybe it’s because Bruce failed to make clear why he was doing such an extreme act, so that there wasn’t really more of a story than guy lights himself on fire.
And why in front of the Supreme Court, of all places?
The court had heard arguments in late February on an important environmental case that could restrict or even eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to control pollution. The court’s conservative majority had voiced skepticism of the agency’s authority to regulate carbon emissions, suggesting that a decision by the justices could deal a sharp blow to the Biden administration’s efforts to address climate change.
This paragraph appears to be purely speculative by the New York Times, as Bruce offered no reason for choosing the Supreme Court. It’s possible that Bruce sought to influence the Court’s decision, although the issue is more about agency authority than the social value of the agency action. Even so, it’s unlikely to have any effect. Many protest in front of the Supreme Court these days, to no avail.
Jay Caspian Kang, who harbors thoughts of self-immolation, tries to explain such an act.
But self-immolation forces the witnesses, whether in person or through the news, to confront an intensity of conviction that goes well beyond what they may think is possible. In this way, self-immolators like Thich Quang Durc become almost inhuman, even holy. At the same time, the act establishes an entirely personal connection because the real question at hand isn’t really, “Why did he do that?” Rather, the self-immolator is asking you — with all the intimidation and self-righteousness a person can muster — “Why don’t you care even half as much as I do?”
Does screaming at people that they’re wrong or evil persuade anyone? It reflects the depth of one’s passion, even if it’s cost-free to the shrieker. Won’t it force the unwoken to “confront the intensity of their conviction”? Assuming Bruce’s act of sacrifice was as “holy” as Kang suggests, does the depth of his caring change the depth of your caring?
I am still horrified by self-immolation, but I also believe that we should resist the urge to write it off as the last act of the mentally ill and the desperate. Nor should we simply frame each incidence with some made-up measure of how much effect it has had on the world. The discomfort we feel over this practice and our sincere desire to see it end should not preclude us from taking it seriously as an act of protest. We should hope this practice ends, but we also shouldn’t just look away.
If a protest fails to serve any end, then it’s pointless. This isn’t some “made-up measure,” but the entire point. If you’re willing to sacrifice for your cause, then consider whether the sacrifice truly serves the cause, and whether the cause is truly worth your sacrifice. And if you’re not willing to sacrifice for your cause, then you’re just putting on a show for your pals on social media and deserve to be ignored.
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I see a link to a Doors song coming…
Yes, the Billy Joel song just isn’t quite as appropriate
Do either of these comments contribute anything?
Guys, I’m the kind of person that asks for help if I really need it.
Better to post your link (if you know how) and kindly ask for an exception to the rule, which you might not have noticed, is not uncommon.
I strongly suspect that I am not the only person who wonders what the level of risk posed by climate change is, to whom or what that risk is posed, and how that risk balances against the plethora of other interests involved in the various remedies proposed. When trying to understand this dynamic, one of the considerations is whether those who shout and scream about the risks posed understand something lots of other people don’t, or whether they are simply being performative or histrionic. Someone publicly killing himself by self-immolation doesn’t help to convince me (and again, I suspect others as well) that he is not simply being performative or histrionic, especially when that performative death doesn’t appear to serve any practical purpose.
That is to say, it may well be worse than pointless.
What a terrible thing to sacrifice the gift of life for.
I’m not a climate expert, but I am an earth scientist with a lot of experience with mathematical modeling of complex systems. Yes the climate has been warming for the last 50 years give or take after a period of cooling that occurred during a time of great industrial activity.
Is it a problem? Yes. Is it a crisis? I don’t think so. The crisis scenario is based on selecting the most pessimistic of a set of four scenarios run on one of the models a few years back. It is extremely unlikely to happen. The United States has been one of the leaders in reducing its carbon footprint, primarily through replacing coal with natural gas in electricity generation. Yes, evil fracking has been good for the environment. We should keep doing what we’re doing, keep adding renewables in where possible, and add nuclear. This is nowhere near good enough for the crazies though.
Germany and France are a good example to look at. Germany basically tried to do our so called Green New Deal and it was a disaster – an unreliable grid with extremely increased power prices. They’re now going back to coal and buying natural gas from Putin. France went in on nuclear and they’ve got stable affordable power.
I’m not going to attribute motive to people I don’t know, but it’s hard to understand what the climate alarmists think they are accomplishing. Mr Bruce and people like him are not being well served by those people. He was basically driven to suicide by political hyperbole, which is heartbreaking. And as you point out, it’s a waste because it’ll have zero impact on anything.
This post has nothing to do with climate change, and I am not going to let the comments get hijacked because you felt the compulsion to comment about climate change.
Sorry. I didn’t mean to hijack. Just making a case as to why the suicide was such a waste. Has anyone engaged the argument I wasn’t going to bite back.
I know, but if I don’t stop it, this joint can spiral out of control in a flash.
At some level, excessive ardor seems “crazy”–I am thinking about shirtless fans at an artic February Superbowl celebration–but maybe passion, not mental health, is the correct lens through which we should examine Mr Bruce’s actions. That is, it is not that he was insane, or for that matter, wanted to persuade anyone with his martyrdom, necessarily; he simply wanted to literally ‘give it his all’ to the cause.
The poem, “the lesson of the moth”, by Don Marquis presents this beautifully. In it, Archy, a cockroach, describes watching a moth, passionately attracted to brightness, fly close to, and then get fatally scorched by, a cigar lighter. He ends by saying that he disagreed with this approach “but at the same time i wish there was something i wanted as badly as he wanted to fry himself”.
ps The guild of psychiatry has itself in knots over the question whether suicide is per-se evidence of mental illness. They want it to be so, such that suicide-prevention justifies, well, everything (especially a seat at the table of Medicine). On the other hand, there are too many examples of ostensibly sane people checking out (eg, Prof Carolyn Heilbrun, to say nothing of the terminally ill seeking a graceful exit) for that to be a universal rule
Is there anything remotely coherent in there? Is there anything remotely on topic?
I thought you posed this question in terms of what somebody was trying to accomplish, and/or that the martyr was being manipulated. You also alluded to mental health. I’m suggesting is that there are other axes on which to judge this
for whatever reason,Mr. Bruce became very passionate, and once you accept that there are some causes are worth dying for —the supremacy of maple bacon ice cream; the inferiority of Harvard engineering, etc—then, to paraphrase Shaw, all we are doing is talking price
No, the decision to indulge in self-immolation is not the same as picking maple bacon ice cream over vanilla. And if it is, then he’s insane, because that’s insane, because there is no “lens” of “too passionate because reasons” that explains suicide. Even the terminally ill, which is an entirely different matter, can explain why in rational terms. Too passionate is not rational, and if you take your life for irrational reasons, that’s crazy.
Doing crazy shit because someone is “very passionate” isn’t a different axes. That’s just plain vanilla crazy, Doc.
I couldn’t help it. The theme from Mash popped into my mind as I was reading the post.
Does that make me a bad person?
That would have been my choice, too.
I thought of that too, but I couldn’t make the connection between “Suicide is Painless” and burning to death work in my head. Anyway,
It’s understandable why the unduly passionate would want to destroy the lives of others as a substitute for engaging in truly positive action, but it’s just weird when they do it to themselves.
It’s a very practical demonstration. Build yourself a fire, and you’re warm for a few hours, but set yourself afire, and you’re warm for the rest of your life.
Still, I don’t see this catching on, and most people will dismiss Mr. Wynn as misguided.
Kang’s assertion that viewers will be moved by an act of self immolation assumes those viewers share Kang’s values. I think the majority of people in the US respond to self immolation with “that’s crazy” and are more likely to reflect on the insanity of the act rather than the immolator’s dedication to a cause. In a majority Buddhist society the act of self immolation as protest probably carries more significance.
Kang was trying to simultaneously argue that self-immolation was a terrible thing to do while obviously admiring the guy for doing it and trying not to appear to be obsessed with it.
You wrote that Bruce’s act of self-immolation “might make sense to Bruce and Kritee, but does it make sense to anyone outside their circle of Buddhists?”
But considering the religious nature of self-immolation in the form of Buddhism to which Bruce subscribed, I don’t assume it mattered to him whether it made sense to anyone outside their circle of Buddhists. Does a fundamentalist Christian who places crosses and conduct prayer circles outside an abortion clinic care that people who don’t share his religious worldview don’t find those tactics persuasive?
The fundamentalist Christian is talking to God. Bruce was talking to the Supreme Court. They may believe they’re gods, but they’re not.
Well played sir!
I remember in the melee of summer 2020 a young woman protester being hit and killed by a car. You wrote about it on a SJ piece.
I responded then and I haven’t changed my thinking that it’s sad very sad. I suppose there was no real reason to respond now but nothing will convince me that the result of this and anyone losing/ taking their life for some transitory cause just leaves a feeling of sadness
I give great respect to Bruce for believing that what he did will result in the change he was looking for. I just can’t get over the irony of protesting climate change by setting yourself on fire. But if it works it works.
Shame. There’s a list, staggeringly long, of actions Bruce could have taken that would have been more effective at achieving his goals than immolating himself was. But, now I guess it’s up to us to do those things. I’m busy, maybe later.