Writers signing a letter calling on book festival sponsor Baillie Gifford to divest from fossil fuels exhibit a lazy habit of mind that has no place in literature, says Alys Denby
The arts should always be anti-establishment. Only an autocracy would demand that all its creative output mindlessly cohered to the values of the regime. But there is something tiresome about the reflexive anti-capitalism that bedevils so much cultural discourse today. Artists should also be curious, open, distinctive and not boring. Calls for writers to boycott book festivals unless their sponsor Baillie Gifford ‘divests’ from the fossil fuel industry and Israel are the opposite of these things.
More than 200 authors including Sally Rooney, Grace Blakeley and George Monbiot have signed a letter from Fossil Free Books threatening to disrupt and withdraw from events like Hay Festival and the Edinburgh Book Festival unless their demands are met. A curious person might ask what the connection is between climate change and a conflict with antecedents that go back thousands of years, besides the kinds of people who care deeply about both things. The letter cites Norway’s sovereign wealth fund as an example of an institutional investor leading the way to a fossil fuel-free world when it is entirely dependent on that country’s oil. Confusingly, it also calls on Baillie Gifford to withdraw its holdings in Equinor – the company from which Norway’s sovereign wealth fund gets its dividends.
But these did not stop the undersigned from reaching for their pens. Who needs logic when your ultimatum is impossible to meet anyway? As Baillie Gifford’s spokesperson explained in a statement so patient you can almost hear the teeth grinding, they are “managers of other people’s money, not our own” and it is not up to them to make ethical decisions on behalf of their clients. While two per cent of Baillie Gifford’s clients’ money is invested in fossil fuel companies, that’s dwarfed by the 25 per cent that is invested in a way that explicitly supports the net zero transition. As for Israel, the letter complains of the complicity of companies like Amazon, Nvidia and Alphabet. If they’re responsible for the war in the Middle East then so is every consumer in the developed world.
But perhaps that’s the point. If you believe environmental degradation is linked to historic injustice then perhaps you don’t just want to arrest climate change, you want to dismantle the world order you believe created it. Never mind that free markets have brought comfort and prosperity to millions of people across the globe, big business is polluting and therefore must be stopped.
That’s what ‘divesting’ from fossil fuels really means. There is no credible path to net zero that doesn’t involve gas to keep the lights on for at least the next 20-30 years. We have already seen the enormous hardship energy shortages have caused, with prices in the first quarter of this year 59 per cent higher than they were before the escalation of the war in Ukraine. Immediately withdrawing all investment from fossil fuels or ‘just stopping oil’ would plunge the Earth into a Hobbesian nightmare of darkness, poverty and chaos. There wouldn’t be much space in such a world for art.
You might expect people involved in the writing and production of books to have thought this through. Literature is a medium for nuance and inquiry – it should have no place for the lazy habit of mind that picks pre-packaged views off the shelf. Statements like that of Fossil Free Books are not just expressions of blandly progressive sentiments, they have seriously malign intentions – writers should interrogate that. And above all they shouldn’t be so tediously conformist.
There’s a sad irony in Baillie Gifford being punished in this way for supporting an industry that couldn’t survive without its generosity. The director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival has made clear that the event would not be possible without corporate sponsorship. This lack of demand for writing has affected the quality of supply. The less dependent on actually selling books writers become, the greater their temptations towards self-indulgence. This mechanism led Kingsley Amis to conclude that the only way to restore the status to the arts was to remove all funding. Quoting Roy Ruller, he wrote in An Arts Policy that, “the bestowal of money for the arts inevitably attracts the idle, the dotty, the minimally talented, the self-promoters.” I wouldn’t go that far. But like any market, culture responds to signals. So maybe the best thing we can all do to elevate the discourse is to buy a book.
Alys Denby is opinion and features editor of City A.M.