December 12, 2019 5.44pm EST
She came from obscurity and
ignited a global movement. Beginning
with a small but persistent act of protest outside the Swedish parliament,
she inspired millions to join her. Her fiery speech to the United Nations in
September 2019 warned
of the end of the world. Her unfailing determination and passion makes her
appear otherworldly, even uncanny, an affect largely
attributed to her diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome.
So it’s no surprise that many
people – along with media outlets like The
Irish Times, The
Telegraph and The
Washington Times – have cast Greta Thunberg as a prophet.
When Time announced her as “Person
of the Year,” it continued the trope, using an evocative photograph of
Thunberg standing on a rocky shoreline, staring at the heavens, for the cover.
.@GretaThunberg is TIME's 2019
Person of the Year #TIMEPOY
https://ti.me/2sZRidd
As a researcher on the history
of childhood, I’ve been disturbed to see Thunberg described and depicted as a
prophet. To me, it risks distorting her message. And it can easily be exploited
by climate deniers seeking to counter the appeal of her activism.
Is a climate messiah even
necessary?
To some, Thunberg
resembles Joan of Arc, the teenage visionary who led the French army into
battle in the 15th century and was later canonized as a saint.
To others, Thunberg
exemplifies the Judeo-Christian tradition of prophets who speak truth to power;
according to one Christian blogger, she offers “a
prophetic voice to shake us out of our complacency.”
Yet presenting Thunberg as a
prophet is deeply misleading. Classically, prophets
are messengers who communicate the voice of God. They convey divine
revelation that was previously unknown or misunderstood. Ezekiel predicted
the destruction and restoration of Jerusalem. Moses received the Ten
Commandments. Muhammad revealed the Quran. Prophets, in other words, see truths
that others cannot. They bring us messages that often defy human comprehension.
Thunberg, on the other hand,
is simply telling us what we already know. Within the scientific
community, there
is an overwhelming consensus – going back decades – that humans are
causing global warming.
Framing her as a prophet has
opened the floodgates to all sorts of messianic theories. This recently took a
bizarre turn when a 120-year-old photo with a girl resembling Thunberg
surfaced. Now conspiracy theorists are calling Thunberg “a
time traveler sent to save us.”
Depictions like this are
fodder for her opponents who dismiss what they call her “doomsday
activism.” To them, she is a false prophet, and they can portray the people
inspired by her as brainwashed
cult followers. David
Koresh, the leader of the Branch Davidians who died alongside his followers
in Waco, Texas in 1993, after all, called himself a prophet. So did Jim
Jones, the founder of the Peoples Temple and orchestrator of the 1978
Jonestown Massacre.
To Thurnberg’s credit, even
she recoils at the idea that she should be viewed as some sort of savior.
“I don’t want you to listen to
me,” she
told Congress in September. “I want you to listen to the scientists.”
Being a kid carries enough
weight
I would argue that the best
way to think of Thunberg is to simply think of her as a child.
This is not demeaning. Far
from it. In recent years, young people have offered numerous examples of their
ability to exercise independent thought, visionary thinking and
leadership. Melati
and Isabel Wijsen were 10 and 12 when they began a successful campaign
to ban single-use plastics in their native Bali. Malala
Yousafzai was 11 when she began to advocate against the Taliban for
girls’ right to education. The list goes on: Jazz Jennings, Xiuhtezcatl
Martinez, the
Parkland activists. Like Thunberg, they challenge our culture’s view of
children as powerless and dependent.
Thunberg memorably began her
September 2019 UN
speech with the words, “This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I
should be back in school on the other side of the ocean.” As Thunberg well
knows, the fact that a child needs to scold grown-ups to act on an issue that
threatens all of humanity is a powerful example of a political system gone
horribly wrong.
Even more critically, focusing
on Thunberg’s youth highlights a central tenet of her message: fairness. As any
parent can tell you, children tend to view the world in terms of moral
absolutes – good and bad, right and wrong, fair and unfair. Indeed, researchers
have recently shown that expectations of fairness are deeply ingrained
in children, appearing in infants as young as 12 months old.
Ideas of fairness underlie
many aspects of Thunberg’s message, from her emphasis on how climate change
will affect the poor and marginalized, to her comments about how unjust it is
to expect young people to fix a catastrophe caused by generations of political
inertia. Her forceful call – “How dare you!” – is not
the enraged cry of a petulant child. It is the determined statement of a girl
who has not yet developed the moral flexibility that is so often the refuge of
adult inaction.
Thunberg is not unraveling the
mysteries of our era, or a time traveler sent to stop climate change. Rather,
she is a child admonishing selfishness and pleading for fairness.
That’s not prophetic. It’s
common sense.
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