Greta Thunberg’s outrage speaks louder than leaders

THE American President has said that Greta Thunberg should take an anger management course. It is just as well that he didn’t ask her to take a conscience management course. Her recent mission to take medical and food aid to Gaza on a small ship was an act of conscience. In an interview she gave from the ship, she said it was a symbolic act. She knew it would not succeed, but success was not the point of her effort. It was to express two things: one, solidarity with people who are being killed trying to get food; and two, to say that one can’t be a silent spectator when something basic is at stake. What is at stake? There’s no need to ask or wonder. It is one’s conscience and the empathy it creates, no matter how feebly.

We have known Greta Thunberg since the time she was a schoolgirl only a few years back. She became known as a ‘climate activist’. I don’t like the word ‘activist’, but that is how people like her are labelled, to distinguish them from the rest of us. She was diagnosed as a case of Asperger’s syndrome — a mild form of autism, characterised by difficulties of social interaction. She turned it into a serious intellectual stance against the state of the environment.

Her parents supported her stance. Her mother thought that it was better for her to do something she cared for than to sit at home unhappy. As a child who doesn’t mince words, she became an icon when she addressed the UN General Assembly. Her speech reversed the usual concern that adults express about future generations. She personified the future as she told the assembled leaders what they were not doing.

She represents a whole new generation born in the 21st century. She reminds us that the children of this generation have every reason to feel resentful about the state of the world. Anger management will not help them because their protest has a deeper source — their conscience.

Her question is simple: if we are truly worried about the environment and climate change, why don’t we do something about the crisis?

Exactly what that crisis is demands a complex reply. Depending on the perspective you use, it looks so nebulous and abstract that you give up in frustration. At times, you wonder why no expert or specialist has been able to explain the climate crisis in all its dimensions.

I recently started reading a new book titled ‘Why Geography Matters‘ by Nicholas Crane. He has been a teacher of geography all his life, so he manages to boil it down to a handful of accessible details. These include high temperature, floods, dangerous levels of pollution and unpredictability of everything. He ends the book with the list of sustainable development goals (SDGs) that the UN has set for protecting the world from its impending doom. There are 17 goals in all.

Each one of them looks perfectly sensible, but very difficult to achieve or even imagine within the deadline of 2030.

The second one, ‘Zero Hunger‘, sounds a bit hollow, considering the use of hunger as a weapon of war in Gaza. Nicholas Crane asks us to view each one of the 17 SDGs in terms of people, where they live and what they can do in order to maintain a balance between human activities and nature.

Prevention of war, one might expect, would be an important — if not the most important — goal for promoting sustainability. Ironically, war finds no mention in the list of SDGs, except indirectly in Goal 16, which refers to ‘Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions’.

Wars are also a great source of pollution and, therefore, contribute to climate change.

This is the context of Greta’s latest act of protest. In the interview she gave from her ship, she spoke about the world’s indifference towards the people of Gaza.

Her view has found resonance in the statement made by Mirjana Spoljaric, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In an interview to the BBC, she said that the situation of Gaza was worse than hell: “We are watching a people entirely stripped of its human dignity."

SDG 16 mentions ‘strong institutions’, but even the UN has failed to stop the use of hunger as a weapon. In a recent editorial, the Economic and Political Weekly has described it as ‘medieval warfare’.

Greta Thunberg and her fellow protesters were aware that their campaign had little practical value. They were hopeful that it would arouse the world’s conscience and concern. Like several previous occasions when a much younger Greta spoke against the state of the world, this time, too, she became a symbol of human conscience.

Her statement was as transparent as her struggle. I found in it an unmistakable resonance of Gandhi’s philosophy and methods. No one expects these methods to bear fruit in the present-day world, but that does not diminish their inspirational value.

This, however, may offer little solace today when the normative order on which the modern world was based is floundering and the institutions that were supposed to hold violent aggression in check are proving weak and ineffective.

No wonder, there is widespread cynicism in the younger generation today. Greta Thunberg has become an icon because she is an exception.

Traditional pedagogic strategies were dependent on the common acceptance of moral values and ideals. These discourses don’t impress our children anymore. Youngsters born over the last two decades have witnessed a world that cares little for a normative order based on basic values. Also, they have seen little interest in consensus-building in any field. In fact, they have witnessed polarity and conflict as normal aspects of the new age of communication.

The so-called social media that youngsters actively use shrinks the possibility of consensus. It tends to sharpen impulsive aggression and collective identities. Teachers and parents find themselves helpless in countering the cultural effects of social media.

Krishna Kumar is former Director of NCERT and the author of ‘Thank You, Gandhi’.

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