MASCOTS OF THE ANOINTED: The problem with Greta Thunberg’s sea crossings.
The accusations of hypocrisy have also rolled in thick and fast, criticizing everything from the plastic water bottles used by the crew, to the long-haul flights taken by the sailors responsible for returning the yacht to Europe.
Thunberg has discovered the perils of pursuing such an ideologically pure cause: if you preach an uncompromising message, your audience will judge you on similarly uncompromising terms, even as you attempt to live out your ideals. Those with religious leanings have known this for centuries: if you don’t practice what you preach then your message quickly falters. Indeed, sometimes I wonder whether the appeal of climate change activism comes from its ability to fill the ideological void left by the decline of religion in the post-Christian West.
I don’t. While Nietzsche assured the Jurassic “woke” class of the late 19th century that “God is dead,” most of the branches of the “Progressivism” that followed are forms of a substitute religion to fill the void, including both radical environmentalism, for which Thunberg serves as a “mascot of the anointed,” (to borrow Thomas Sowell’s classic phrase), and even socialist health care. As the late Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.” (That line was written with early ‘70s radical chic in mind, but reverberates quite nicely today, given Antifa’s similar love of paramilitary cosplay.)
