Weakness as weapon

In my previous post, I noted that one of the guiding principles behind "chivalry" was that the strong should protect the weak.  With the selection of Greta Thunberg as Time's "Person of the Year", I am again reminded of a very anti-chivalric principle, which is that it is effective to use the weak to attack the decent.

Greta Thunberg clearly adds nothing substantial to the climate change discussion; she is too young to have any expertise worth listening to, and nothing she is saying is new anyway.  She is--quite clearly--simply a tool: a rhetorical device used by her enablers as a strategy to influence opinion.  Sincere and motivated youth inspire sympathy in adults, and since they are students and not experts, we count their effort and enthusiasm a lot more than we count their results or their actual wisdom.  And we are naturally and unreflectively protective of children; we hate people who pick on them.

And this is the whole point of the bizarre concept of the "moral authority of the victim": that if you choose someone whom it is not decent to attack to make your argument for you, then your argument will become unassailable.  It's an odd tactic: a sort of reverse implied "ad hominem".  This is not a strategy for actual reasoned argument, of course--it's a strategy for shutting down your opponent by making it indecent for him to fight back. 

The natural counterpoint to this strategy is therefore to abandon decency.  It is only to be expected that people should begin to rhetorically attack Greta in public despite the fact that she is just a child, precisely because she is being used as a tactical shield to forestall criticism.  And are we going to let people get away with this sort of a tactic?  Well, not in today's coarse internet culture, no!  And you can blame internet culture for its crudeness and its abandonment of social niceties if you like, but we have to recognize that the blame starts with people who choose to use weakness as a weapon in the first place.

So while Greta is being promoted as some sort of hero, in reality she is being used.  Her selection by Time magazine as "Person of the Year" was simply another instance of this:  Time decided it wanted to pitch in and help the group effort of using a sympathetic child to push an environmentalist agenda.   I find the whole thing distasteful, however, and destructive of the reasoned conversation I wish we were having instead.