Liberate our institutions from the religious zeal of woke politics

Innes Fitzgerald, a promising young runner, won’t go to Australia to compete in an international race because of the carbon emissions associated with flying. She cannot, she said, add to the ongoing “climate breakdown” by going.

Is she to be applauded or institutionalised? She is, at least, trying to live by her principles and avoid excessive hypocrisy. Not for Ms Fitzgerald the Meghan-style, jetfuelled fixture hopping while preaching that “we can all do better”. She has grounded herself.

As it goes, that’s fine. The problem occurs when this sort of personal religious fervour starts to infect institutions, turning them away from their actual purpose and making them into vehicles for other things, like “climate action”. The Royal Opera House, for example, this week announced it had followed various other major arts organisations in ending its funding deal with BP after a long campaign by climate activists.

There is an epidemic of this sort of thing about. Take the Anne Frank Trust UK, a charity founded in honour of the murdered Jewish schoolgirl to educate people about the Holocaust. Recently, The Jewish Chronicle reported that the charity is shaking up its board after the paper found that it had been promoting material from poets or authors who deny the Holocaust or say things like “death to you Zionist scum”.

How could this possibly occur? It happened because the charity’s young and mostly gentile staff members seem to have been gripped by the fervour of modern anti-racism campaigns like the Black Lives Matter movement and allowed them to eclipse the charity’s original purpose.

Likewise for many a business, public service and educational establishment. Instead of being about the thing they are actually there to do – sell a product or teach times tables – these organisations become subverted into being about something else. It is a phenomenon an old writing teacher of mine used to call “aboutness”: when a piece of writing stops being a device primarily used to tell a story and instead becomes about making a point, usually a political one, like “aren’t men evil?” or “the Chinese government is bad!”. As soon as a story succumbs to “aboutness”, it goes off track.

The same is true of political activism infecting everything. Sometimes, yes, we need to review whether a donation or a working practice is subverting or corrupting an organisation. But by and large, most people simply ought to get on with whatever their jobs are, rather than mixing up their job with their own personal quasi-religious mission. And if they do choose to do so, the worst thing an organisation can do is follow them down the rabbit-hole.

Electric Ferraris will be too quiet for the “driving pleasure” of their owners, according to the car firm, and must be sexed up. To address this, Ferrari has created a fake engine sound derived from the electric motor that will get louder as it revs and wants to pipe the noise through speakers.

For pity’s sake, can they just stop? For a century, humans have had to put up with the ever-encroaching blight of engine noise in our neighbourhoods and across swathes of countryside. The sound of cars constantly in motion is one of the great sicknesses of modernity. Now, finally, an opportunity is arising to put this plague behind us and car companies are investing time and money in prolonging it. They must be stopped.

If electric cars are really so quiet as to be dangerous, then perhaps we could allow some more benign sound to be added to alert pedestrians. After all, why would anyone unnecessarily fill the streets with the vroom of an engine, when we could instead be heralded by the sound of wind chimes, say, or the friendly beeps of R2D2? Or, I don’t know, they could try whale noises, the clip-clop of horse hooves, popping champagne corks, clinking ice or crackling fires – anything, anything except the depressing drone of cars going past.

Instead of being about the thing they are actually there to do – sell a product or teach times tables – these organisations become subverted into being about something else