THE FACT OF THE MATTER
BY PAUL HOPKINS
When some years back the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg came to prominence with her stance – and visible outrage – on our lack of care for climate, few of us, bar her young, fellow travellers, took notice. Climate change seemed far off back then.
When Thunberg recently took on the plight of the people of Gaza, the world sat up and followed the sailing of her ship to the Palestinian lands. The 22-year-old was one of a dozen aboard the British yacht Madleen which set sail on a mission to break up Israel’s blockade to Gaza. Israel intervened illegally and the yacht was forced to turn back.
Some see her as a manipulated Instagramist and point nastily to her mild autism but for most Greta Thunberg has captured our imagination. The world always holds out for a hero. Why?
We come into the world confronted by what philosopher William James famously called “a blooming buzzing confusion” and we must somehow organise such chaos into a reasonably stable personal world. And, as Carl Jung so well understood, our Self must deal not only with external challenges but also the challenges that come “from inside us” – something which Thunberg has alluded to.
Some argue we are born heroic or weak. I don’t hold with that. I believe we are all born with the tremendous capacity to be anything – cue, young Greta – but we get shaped by our circumstances — by the family or the culture or the time in which we grow up, whether in a war zone or peaceful times, in poverty rather than prosperity.
Born in Stockholm, Thunberg’s climate activism began when she persuaded her parents to adopt lifestyle choices that would reduce carbon footprint. In August 2018, aged 15, she began skipping school, vowing to remain out of classes until after a Swedish election – an attempt to influence the outcome. After the election, Thunberg spoke in front of supporters, telling them to use phones to film her. She would continue school striking every Friday until Sweden complied with the Paris Climate Agreement.
Thunberg’s youth and blunt speaking manner fuelled her rise to the status of, arguably, a global icon.
To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, every reasonable man and woman is a potential hero or potentially the opposite. Such depends upon nurture and character – and Greta has a good CV on that – while what he or she does and what we think of what they do depends on circumstance.
We humans are intrinsically tough and resilient. The unique evolutionary path we have taken relies predominantly on learning, openness, flexibility, and adaptability. We survive, thrive even, in every conceivable environment. We have created a bewildering variety of social and cultural realities, where we endlessly experiment and reinvent ourselves. That creates individual character; which sets Greta Thunberg and her ilk apart. Not everyone has it in them to be a hero.
Human resilience comes to the fore when we are faced with extreme situations. Thunberg came through triumphantly when the Israelis bombarded her ‘mission’ ship, with the voyagers’ gestures symbolic and practical, their spirits unbroken. “No mission is more dangerous than the entire silence of the world,” she said.
Compassion, like Greta Thunberg’s, is natural and no gender differences have emerged across numerous studies. But that doesn’t mean that men and women experience or express compassion in the same way — and that’s where the science gets interesting. We might just be conditioned to seeing compassion through a feminine lens, and so miss the ways in which men try to alleviate suffering, the debilitating attempts of such we are seeing in Gaza and elsewhere.
In a study of human kindness by psychologist Dacher Keltner, published in the New York Times, participants were asked to communicate different emotions by touching another participant’s hand. They were also asked to guess what emotion was being communicated when their partner touched their hand. The participants could not see each but guessed each other’s emotion simply through a touch of the hand. When both partners were men, the odds of them guessing that the emotion being communicated was sympathy was no greater than mere chance.
When at least one of the participants was a woman, however, participants were more accurate. Since sympathy is seen as a more “feminine” trait more acceptable for women to express, women may have learned to both communicate and recognise it more easily.
You can see that in the carefully considered comments and the body language of Greta Thunberg.
We may well have a hero for our time…
