Why Are So Many Adults So Frightened Of Greta Thunberg?

There is a grand division in the discourse about Greta Thunberg, the internationally-prominent Swedish teenager and climate-change activist who recently docked in Gotham. Because of her age and her self-description as having Asperger’s Syndrome, with experience of prolonged depression and mutism, she is regarded both as seer and victim.

Thunberg has been propelled into heroism by admirers, children and adults alike, who are inspired by her beliefs, charisma, and determination. Her name is so encrusted with meaning that it is implausible for us to write about her as if we knew her, unlike most of those whose fingertips hover over keyboards and jaws jut all-too-certainly towards microphones. But we think something useful can be said about the division around her in terms of childhood, neurological diversity, and climate change.

Greta’s name has already been invoked on this site to discuss the importance of neurological diversity. But she has been ridiculed and demeaned in some mainstream media for her disability/neurological diversity. Toby Young, a major conservative figure in the UK, accuses ‘Saint Greta,' as he refers to her, of being a source of “fake news” about the environment. Young has spent years attacking disabled people and their struggle for civil rights and is in favor of eugenics. He has been supported in numerous activities by the Conservative British government.

Elsewhere, one of Rupert Murdoch’s Australian employees called Thunberg the “deeply disturbed messiah of the global warming movement” in a column that read, "Cynical adults are taking advantage of Greta Thunberg’s fragile state to spread fear” and was headlined by Murdoch’s sub-editors, “We must doubt disturbed teen’s climate dogma.” Other right-wing Australians with mainstream media mouthpieces argue that she is being manipulated by her parents. Murdoch’s British journalists refer to her “cold, hard eyes” and wonders whether she may be “a schoolgirl puppet controlled by more sinister forces.”

The Washington Examiner, which only features right-wing writers, published an article headlined, “This Greta Thunberg Thing is Child Abuse," claiming that her mother “pimps their kid out.”

Other, similarly perturbed anti-scientists take her status and neurological differences as signs that environmentalism is a “millenarian cult,” deriding her as “pre-modern” and likening her actions to those of people accusing others of witchcraft in the 17th century. The parents and teachers of children like her are criticised; they have supposedly “pumped her—and millions of other children—with the politics of fear.”

Full disclosure: the magazine referenced above described one of us as part of an academic “cancer,” for reasons unconnected to the environment.

None of these critics seriously engage climate science or the forces operating on public policy against the mitigation of climate change. They cannot afford to do so; they have no credible scientific arguments to make. Instead, their attention is drawn to activists and educators and the fear that such people may draw popular concern towards the real state of scholarly knowledge.

Thunberg has replied to such commentators that what disturbs her is the denial and failure to act on climate science “just because we children communicate and act on the science. Where are the adults?” She educated her parents about climate change, not the other way around.

And as she put it, “When haters go after your looks and differences, it means they have nowhere left to go. And then you know you’re winning! I have Aspergers and that means I’m sometimes a bit different from the norm. And—given the right circumstances—being different is a superpower." When those on the autism spectrum speak out, they refer to Thunberg as an inspiration.

What is the background to adult anxiety in the face of Thunberg’s prominence, apart from the denial of climate science? Many on the right deride the notion of children’s rights even as they argue on behalf of childhood. Their version of childhood is of a strong nuclear family where parents dominate their offspring’s everyday lives and visions of the future.

So when claims are made about protecting children from politics or science, these are also reassertions of parental control. It is particularly galling for such critics when they cannot blame the beliefs of the young on colleges, those supposed hotbeds of leftist mind control and intolerance. In addition to attacking school teachers, they therefore bring parents to the bar for a damn good whacking if their progeny decide to protest collectively for the future of the planet. For example, one Swedish journalist proclaims that the school-pupil strike “constitutes a form of self-harm, undertaken to attract adult attention. And the global school strike for climate is led by a girl with a long and tragic history of self-harm to her own body.”

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Thunberg’s story is certainly complex. She has suffered from severe depression and silence, and she comes from a prominent family; her mother is a renowned mezzo-soprano, Malena Ernman. Both elements—neurological diversity and famous parentage—were part of her of her rise to national prominence, which in turn enabled her growing global appeal. But so, too, has her determination to urge politicians and the public to listen to science. She claims no special insight—only a doggedness that experts, not bloviating mavens, be listened to.

Thunberg may well be burnt out by her efforts, return to her mutism, or suffer ultimately for what she believes. And it may be that she is given the status of seer by people desperate for principled leadership in a world where many politicians are driven by the same coin-operated think tanks as the conservative writers so perturbed by children in the public domain.

None of those things should blind us to the environmental realities she points to, her single-minded self, and the fears she touches off about children’s rights.