A Recipe for Greta Thunberg

T he cause Greta Thunberg most believes in, I suspect, is causes. Those of us subjected to her for a decade now have seen her graduate through every Current Thing from climate change to Palestinian liberation, and now she has turned up in France to support students (allegedly) protesting dilapidated school buildings. It’s easy to see in this a kind of popular-front leftism whose target is the Western project writ large. Favoring everything that could be over everything that is, in the only civilization in the world that rewards that sort of thing.

But while I certainly believe that ideas have consequences, I’m increasingly interested in the way those ideas interact with biography to create incentives. And Thunberg’s biography certainly supports her remarkable ideological versatility.

At age eleven, Thunberg by all accounts descended into a severe depression, stopped eating, mostly stopped speaking (“selective muteness”), and generally withdrew from ordinary childhood activities. She also experienced bullying and social ostracism. Eventually, she was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (which, research suggests and common sense confirms, made her all the more susceptible to the foregoing), along with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Her younger sister had significant developmental and psychological difficulties of her own. The family’s domestic life became largely organized around accommodating both children — rather than, and this is the critical bit I think, acclimating them to the world.

Thunberg’s mother’s account of this period is revealing. Greta became preoccupied with environmental catastrophe and was seemingly unable to understand how anyone could behave normally in the face of the impending apocalypse. It started with her watching a documentary about plastic pollution in grade school, after which most of her peers presumably turned their attention to the cafeteria menu. But Greta could not let it go.

Her parents’ response was determinative. Rather than help their daughter cope with her distress, they reorganized their lives around the convictions causing it. Her mother, an internationally famed opera singer, abandoned flying and effectively ended her career. The family changed its diet and consumption habits. In their memoir, her parents describe Greta’s environmental preoccupations not as the fixation of an underdeveloped cortex but as an unusually penetrating moral insight. The familiarly disastrous assignment of arcane wisdom to tweens.

And in doing this, what did they teach her? A distressed child discovered that acting out could reorder the behavior of adults, including that of her own parents. More important, as she began acting on those convictions, she felt better. (I’ll only note here the familiar echo of other extreme measures taken by a desperate generation of progressive parents to authenticate their children’s self-destructive monomanias).

Then came the school “strike.” In August 2018, at age 15, Thunberg began skipping classes to sit outside the Swedish parliament with a handmade sign demanding action on climate change. She stayed there during school hours for three weeks, then subsequently continued her protest on Fridays. After initial reluctance, her parents came to support the idea. And almost overnight, a socially isolated teenager found herself internationally celebrated for cutting school.

I’m not suggesting that Thunberg’s beliefs are insincere per se (though I think the human mind, whether neurotypical or neurodivergent, is such that she wouldn’t be the most reliable witness on this question). But if the climate apocalypse were really so nigh when she was 15, it’s only nigher now. The relevant difference appears to be that she now finds it less stimulating than she once did. The way she might be over Taylor Swift and on to Olivia Rodrigo. This is not the nature of civilization-threatening catastrophes. But it is the nature of youth.

Like a lot of dads of young children, I’ve read a lot about the correlates of good and bad childhood outcomes. The gist seems to be that most of it is genetics, a good deal of it is social and cultural milieu, and a surprisingly small amount is the daily grind of parenting. But when dysfunctional incentives in all three of those realms interact in vicious ways, you end up with one of the most annoying young women on the planet.