I haven’t been following Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old climate change activist, very much. Not at all, really. But I haven’t been able to avoid seeing photographs of her. They’re everywhere. And they almost always show her with an angry expression on her face, delivering an impassioned oration to a group of either rapt adult admirers or uncomfortable adult government officials constrained to act deferentially toward her.
I don’t like it.
It seems to me pure exploitation. (I won’t even mention the fact that she suffers from Asperger syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and something called “selective mutism,” which seems to me to make exploiting her even more objectionable.) I heartily dislike pressing children into service for controversial political causes and especially dislike making little people with unformed minds and no experience into public spokespersons on complex topics or for strident ideologies.
“Don’t Listen to Greta Thunberg: She is a pawn being used by adults for their own interests.”
“Greta Thunberg Cannot Be Both a Shield and a Sword”
“The ‘Climate Kids’ and the Pursuit of the Millennium”
Just generally speaking, I dislike reducing policy questions to bumper sticker slogans, signboard propaganda, quasi-coercive marches, and simplistic moralizing. I resist turning them into Manichaean struggles between the sons of light and the sons of darkness, between pure evil and pure unalloyed good. I don’t believe that children have the mental or psychological wherewithal to contribute much on such matters; that’s, after all, why we don’t permit them to vote.
Quite often, I suspect, adolescents enter into virtue signalling on complicated matters as much to feel important or, in the case of adolescents, to impress the opposite sex as because they really know what should be done. In many cases, I suspect that the moral indignation is even feigned, at least to some degree or another.
As for climate change, it seems that there may be ways of dealing with it that won’t involve vast government takeovers of the economy and private life. Here, for example, is something that I could very easily get behind:
“In New “Mind-Blowing” Study, Planting Trees Reduces Carbon Better Than Carbon Taxes”
Assuming that the scientific argument is correct, I still wonder whether this proposed solution will gain much support. After all, it would furnish very little opportunity for increasing government control of the economy, multiplying regulations, and growing the administrative state.
Posted from Helsinki, Finland
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