Greta Thunberg has criticised "fairy-tales of eternal economic growth" (Maja Hitij / Getty)
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It’s hardly surprising that people find a teenager annoying. But has any 16-year-old caused so many grown ups to throw their toys out of the pram as Greta Thunberg did this week? The young Swedish activist who started the “school strikes for climate” movement, came to the UK the other day, to speak at the Houses of Parliament and meet senior politicians. She also spoke at the Extinction Rebellion protests which have glued up much of central London over the last few days.
Because her shtick is climate change, she’s sparked a massive fight on the internet, down the usual culture-war fault lines. Mainly, a bunch of much older people spent the week telling this child that she’s wrong and awful, and, in one case, that she is “chilling and positively pre-modern” with her “monotone voice”. (Worth noting at this point that she is only 16-years-old, has Asperger syndrome, and is speaking in her second language to audiences of senior politicians.) So, that’s been edifying.
But there’s a specific criticism, or argument, that certain people have been making, which is that Thunberg is a cult leader, or that environmentalism is a religion. The argument is, presumably, that if something is a cult (or a religion: the two terms get used interchangeably), then we can ignore it.
Some grown-up people with newspaper columns have all made this claim, including Brendan O’Neill, Iain Martin, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Andrew Lilico. Spiked, which O’Neill edits, also used the formulation about Extinction Rebellion: “the new millenarian cult”.
This argument gets trotted out quite often – I used to see it all the time in the comments when I worked at the Telegraph, people talking about the “green religion” and the “eco-cultists”. It actually also came up in another context, when I was writing my book (The AI Does Not Hate You: Superintelligence, Rationality and the Race to Save the World!). A group of people are worried that, when superintelligent AI is built, it will go wrong, not by breaking its programming or “going rogue” or anything, but simply by doing exactly what we asked it, in ways that we don’t want. That group of people, who are usually known as the Rationalist community, are often described as a “cult” because they believe in an apocalypse, they want money to help stop it – and they do some weird things, like polyamory and group sex.
Of course, it’s easy to call anything a religion (or a cult), because the words are so fuzzily defined that almost anything can fall into them. But let’s imagine that they’re right. Imagine there’s some stable psychological role that religion plays, to do with authority and community and morality, and that green activism plays the same role; or that the fear of ecological disaster, or AI apocalypse, triggers the exact same pattern of neurons to fire that fired in the brains of the Branch Davidians or the Heaven’s Gate lot.
Imagine that what goes on in George Monbiot’s brain, when he warns that we need to wean ourselves off economic growth if we want to avoid disaster, is precisely what goes on in the brain of an imam who says we need to stop having gay sex if we want to stop all these earthquakes.
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SubscribeUmmm. Because we don’t want to eat meal worms as our main staple. We want to be able to drive our cars cheaply. We want to be able to warm our homes when it is cold. How are all those wind mills working out in Texas right now?