They came for science but found spiritualism instead

The world can be a confusing and sometimes wonderfully naïve place. With huge challenges across the globe, it’s almost touching to see people humbled by the task ahead of them. And like many people before them who were humbled by Nature, they fall into predictable patterns of behaviour. Even advocates of science will find themselves seeking something in the charismatic and avuncular, turning for answers to a sixteen-year-old Swedish advocate of mass truancy and Ukraine’s answer to Peter Capaldi…

It is not immediately apparent why Greta Thunberg would be more convincing on the matter of the environment than, say, the evidence of an eviscerated whale whose innards have been contaminated by plastics, the melting sea ice, or the ongoing record of atmospheric CO2. Nor, for that matter, does it explain why a gift for comedy means that Volodymyr Zelenskiy might be the answer to the democratic problems faced by Ukraine. Yet both, in their way, find themselves as the conduits of people’s hopes.

There’s much in this that’s laudable but it also worth taking a moment to point out that not much about this makes sense. In the very moment that we hope that science and democracy are ascendant, we somewhat predictably find forms of populism waiting to drag us back into the murky realm of feelings and good intentions. The sentiment is hardly new. It’s what Walt Whitman described when he wrote of scientists, “Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling”. In other words, we might crave the clarity of science, but facts can alienate us from our reality. The result: we can become easy victims of what is simplistic and sentimental.

The sad irony, of course, is that we’ve been here before. When America tried the same, elevating a third-rate businessman who just happened to have his own reality TV show, the result was mocked, fairly and predictably, especially by those with a more liberal outlook. Trump was sentimental about a vanished America. He was populism’s raving ego and “Fake News” was the accusation he levelled at any reporter who dared to quote facts at him. Fast forward three years: the Mueller Report is in and Donald Trump is apparently as bad a president as he was a businessman; a micromanaging grifter who recognises that success is only as big as you’re able to spin it.

Yet Trump abides because his opponents have yet to prove themselves any better. They indulge our appetite for easy answers, cults of personality, and the shallow promises of celebrity. Thunberg and Zelenskiy are but two facets of the same phenomenon that sees Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rise on the back of undeliverable solutions to old problems.

“That’s not legislation. It’s a list of aspirations,” said Nancy Pelosi, accurately summing up the split in the Democratic Party between those that seek pragmatic ways forward and those that weave fantastic narratives with catchy media friendly titles such as the “Green New Deal”.

When the experts have failed to explain issues that are inherently difficult, people routinely turn away from difficulty and give a chance to the reductive and naïve. Where facts have failed to convince, they give feelings a chance. Where science offers no easy solutions, might celebrity be any better? Why read the work of, say, Professor Philip Alston, the UN’s expert on poverty, when you can listen to Professor Green who isn’t by any stretch of the imagination a professor? It doesn’t seem to matter that his title is self-appointed so long as he makes BBC documentaries about poverty that feel right.

It would be easy to get angry about our failure to embrace real science, rational thinking, and empirical research but we should at least recognise this enthusiasm for quasi-supernatural idolatry for what it is. That’s not to say that Thunberg, Zelenskiy, AOC, or Green, might not have some answers (they certainly ask good questions) about climate change, how democracies interface with Russia, overcoming right-wing populism, or poverty in the UK. Yet it’s all very thin soup we’re sipping.

Just focussing on the former: Thunberg commands audiences who hang on her every word but it’s hard to see what it is about this everyday ordinary daughter of a Swedish opera superstar that would make her such a prodigy. “There’s no bullshit with Greta Thunberg,” wrote Pauline Bock in The New Statesman back in February. Suzanne Moore in The Guardian today speaks in equally unequivocal terms:

“I have watched Greta Thunberg and wondered where her extraordinary power comes from, before realising it is in her total refusal to reassure us that everything is going to be all right. It’s a very feminine thing, an infantile thing, to want to please, and yet here is a 16-year-old girl telling grownups that it is not fine. That we have destroyed her hopes and dreams and must act.”

You might be forgiven for thinking that “extraordinary power” which Moore describes is indistinguishable from the nervous energy of a 16-year-old speaking to a crowd. Thunberg’s faltering delivery (she admirably struggles with Asperger’s Syndrome) overlays an innocent call-to-arms onto a message that has been heard many times before. Speaking at the London Extinction Rebellion, she said that “we are now facing an existential crisis, the climate crisis and ecological crisis which have never been treated as crises before, they have been ignored for decades.”

To which one might ask, in the tone of Basil Fawlty: have they? Have they really? “Can’t we get you on Mastermind, Sybil? Next contestant Sybil Fawlty from Torquay, specialist subject the bleeding obvious.” Because a scolding from a 16-year-old would resonate more (and sound a good deal less presumptuous) if it differed in any substantial way from Trump’s habitual formula of “nobody has seen anything like this before” or “people tell me this is the first time that…”

Those of us who have endured more than sixteen years on this complicated planet might have noticed that the Climate Debate has occupied quite a bit of our time since the 1960s when the rise in CO2 first began to trigger fears of “global warming” (a terrible phrase that still haunts bad thinking around the science to this day). Simply calling it a “crisis” (again) does nothing to alter the politics, economics, or, more fundamentally, human nature that we’ve been struggling to figure out for much of our lives. It does even less to halt the (for the moment) exponential nature of the population curve, the product of the most basic of human compulsions. It certainly doesn’t address the wars, immigration, and famine that will happen when resources (including fresh water) begin to run out. Nor does it address the problem of pollution caused by emerging economies or the practical politics of turning even technologically advanced nations green.

She certainly offered no advice to Emmanuel Macron, to whom she appealed earlier this year with the warning “you need to take action now, not just talking about taking action”. She certainly didn’t help him solve his problems with the gilets jaunes who, it should be remembered, took to the streets after he tried to impose a greener fuel tax. Indeed, Macron is key to much of this; a politician who has tried to push his nation towards a green future but discovering what all nations will ultimately discover — that green politics are hard to deliver when people can use the ballot box to seek their own selfish ends.

Simply demanding that a problem be fixed does not make a problem fixable, any more than Volodymyr Zelenskiy speaking of Ukraine’s future membership of the EU and NATO make it possible to negate Russia’s fierce opposition to a powerful foe approaching its western border.

Admirable though Thunberg’s intentions may be, marching for the environment does nothing unless it begins to change human nature in a profound way. Rather than speaking to governments that are ultimately the vehicles of people’s beliefs, it’s the people themselves she needs to address. If she can figure out how to change people and make us amenable to the sacrifices that a properly green economy would entail, then she will be worthy of the plaudits she has already earned.