The problem with Greta Thunberg

Like Agatha Christie’s “rescuer from the sea,” Greta Thunberg swept upon Gaza to save the starving, the homeless, the bombed – and the bombing – from destruction at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces, only to be intercepted by one of the IDF’s boats and offered a bottle of water and a sandwich wrapped in plastic (which looked not at all like an item from a Jewish delicatessen). La Thunberg later characterized the incident as a kidnapping. Following that, she was presumably (as promised by the Israeli Defense Minister) compelled to view footage of the events of October 7, 2023, before being loaded on to a CO₂-dispersing passenger jet and flown to France, en route to her native Sweden. She explained that to remain longer in Israel would have been to discredit her cause.

Little Greta’s career, which started seven years ago when she was 15 years old, has been instructive in any number of ways, but mostly for the light it has shone on the nature and significance of liberal morality in the progressive 21st century. In the scheme of the Christian version, as in that of virtually every civilized religion known to history, morality begins as a system of interior disposition, one of private thought, prayer and behavior, and expands from there to manifest itself in good deeds and public works while persevering with all the private, unremarked, hidden-under-a-bushel stuff known only to the perpetrator and to his God.

This (from the strictly human point of view) rather unsatisfactory understanding was superseded a couple of decades ago by what The Spectator was the first to call “virtue-signaling,” widely regarded as an improvement by all do-gooders of an essentially worldly disposition – which is to say, the vast majority.

But since the invention of virtue-signaling, the moral economy has entered a newer and still brighter era with the discovery that, in order to be virtuous, to lead an upright and moral life and perhaps actually get to Heaven (assuming you believe any such retrograde thing exists), you needn’t actually be virtuous, or even perform one or more acts of virtue.

All you need to do, really, is to decide what virtuous behavior ought to be, demand that other people practice it – and follow up with the local and the national police, Interpol and the judiciary at every level to ensure that all of these numerous bodies, bureaucracies, NGOs and the like compel them to do so.

Much easier (and cheaper) than lighting a candle in church or placing a teddy bear at the scene of a local tragedy. Best of all, there’s no local Jesus hanging around, stroking his beard and glowering while he lectures you on the text that the right hand should never know what the left hand is doing – never mind that your neighbor shouldn’t either, let alone the evening news and after that the entire world.

John Lukacs, the late Hungarian-American historian, used to say that democracy is inherently inflationary in respect of politics, society, culture and general thought, as well as economics. John might have included morality here as well. Inflation means getting everything on the cheap. “Bad money drives out good” was a common saying in 19th-century Britain. And certainly it is true that cheap morality drives out the real thing – owing partly to relative volume, but also to the fact that the fake version makes the real deal increasingly difficult to recognize and therefore to honor.

I was never a Boy Scout (my strenuous summer camp having been the family farm in southern Vermont) but I believe “no pain, no gain,” is – or used to be – a Boy Scout motto, or something similar to it. In the same spirit, Mark Twain quotes from a hymn (apparently popular in his day, and whether in Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn I cannot recall) whose lyrics include the noble sentiment: “Shall I be carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease;/ While others fought to win the prize and sailed through bloody seas?”

All you have to do is decide what virtuous behavior ought to be and then demand other people practice it

It is an easy thing for a partisan and practitioner of the popular Offload Morality (off-loaded on to someone else, that is) for him to point out that the self-consciously pious ethos created by Transcendentalism and the narrow Protestant morality of rural America in the antebellum period ended in the bloody tragedy of the Civil War, though of course he would be sure to add (as if there were no connection between the two things) that that same national tragedy freed the slaves.

To which a 21st-century proponent of morality in its traditional form might reply that the events of the infinitely less bloody encounter between the Minneapolis Police Department and a drunk black man high on fentanyl that ended in the fellow’s death was immediately followed by months of rioting and loss of life which cost Black Lives Matter not a single life of its own, while filling the coffers of its founders and organizers with their easy gains.

It is a strange, startling and nearly unbelievable fact, but a true one. It has taken the human race a fraction over two millennia to learn the lesson that “If good deeds you feel bound to perform, get out in front and deputize them.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s August 2025 World edition.