Conservative DePaul prof. rags on Greta
Tenured Jason Hill courts controversy anew with attack on ‘ecofascist’ and ‘your smug generation’
Climate activist Greta Thunberg is under attack from a right-wing DePaul University professor. (Wikimedia Commons/Anders Hollberg)
By Ted Cox and Ameya Pawar
A tenured DePaul University professor with a record of courting controversy is at it again with “An Open Letter to Greta Thunberg,” in which he calls the teenage climate activist an “ecofascist” and demeans “you and your smug generation.”
Philosophy Professor Jason Hill published the letter on the conservative Frontpage Mag website on Monday. Adopting a pedantic, overbearing tone, Hill grants Thunberg status as a “credentialed adult” and then proceeds to diminish her mission as an activist calling for urgent action on climate change.
“Here is a hard truth to ponder, Greta,” Hill writes. “If the great producers of this world whom you excoriate were to withdraw their productivity, wealth and talents — in short — their minds from the world today, your generation would simply perish. Why? Because as children you have done nothing, as yet, with your lives besides being born. This is what we expect of children until such time as they can be producers by learning from their elders. You are understandably social and ecological ballast. You are not yet cognitively advanced to replicate the structures of survival of which you are the beneficiaries.”
Quoting from an “anonymous blogger,” Hill adds, “Your generation is unable to work up to 40 hours per week without being chronically depressed and anxious. Its members cannot even decide if they want to be a boy or a girl, or both, or neither, or a ‘they.’ They cannot eat meat without crying. I might add that your generation needs ‘trigger warnings’ and ‘safe spaces’ as pre-conditions for learning in school. Its members have a pathological need to be coddled and protected from the challenging realities of life. Your generation is the biggest demander and consumer of carbon-spewing technological gadgets and devices. An hour without any of them and too many of you succumb to paralyzing lethargy. Your generation is the least curious and most insular set of individuals one has ever encountered. Your hubris extends so far that you think you have nothing to learn from your elders.”
Allow us to suggest that stereotyping an entire generation as snowflakes who can’t work 40 hours or even put down their phones without breaking down is a helluva way for a Catholic university to recruit students.
The 16-year-old Thunberg began a series of what she called Friday “school strikes” last year in Sweden to draw attention to climate change as a political issue, and she brought her mission to the United States with an appearance at the United Nations in September that even Hill was willing to grant was “impassioned.” Since then she’s been barnstorming across North America and taking part in weekly climate school strikes.
That’s not good enough for Hill, who accuses her of dropping out of school because there’s no future for the planet unless we all return to our natural state. “The logical endpoint of your ecological vision would see us living in primeval conditions eking out an existence in jungle swamps in which we would regard poisonous snakes and man-eating tigers as our moral equals,” Hill writes. “If civilization is left in the hands of your ecofascist supporters we will be living in grass huts, drinking animal-feces-infested water, and shrinking in fear from polar bears instead of killing them for food when they attack us.
“Greta, living in complete harmony with nature is the death of creativity,” he adds, in a point that would no doubt irritate Henry David Thoreau, Ansel Adams, and any number of Japanese haiku poets and landscape painters. “Your generation needs to be taught the morality of wealth creation, rather than only parasitically benefiting from it. The only revolution you will lead is one into nihilism and civilization regression.”
Hill goes on to lecture on “the moral case for fossil fuel” and basically calls Thunberg a Luddite. Along the way, he dismisses adults sympathetic to Thunberg and her views as “guilt-ridden obsequious Babbitts.” Later, in promoting the piece on Twitter, he retweeted a post calling Thunberg “the poor child that is being used and brainwashed by the left,” a common right-wing trope.
“Professor Hill’s words are his own and do not reflect the views of this university,” said DePaul spokeswoman Carol Hughes in a statement. “DePaul's Guiding Principles on Speech and Expression articulate a commitment to providing a setting in which ideas can be exchanged civilly and respectfully. As an educational institution DePaul is committed to a civil exchange of ideas and learning from one another to create not only a just society, but a just world. DePaul believes faculty should be allowed to express their position on a topic, even if it can be seen as provocative, while also aspiring to be a community marked by mutual respect. Our professors and students share academic freedom, guaranteed to them by their membership in the university community. They also share freedom of speech, guaranteed to them by the Bill of Rights. DePaul will ensure that all faculty and students are empowered to exercise these rights, and DePaul will provide an appropriate environment where ideas can be exchanged freely in an atmosphere of safety for all.”
Hill’s DePaul webpage cites that “his areas of specialization are ethics, social and political philosophy, cosmopolitanism, philosophical psychology, philosophy of education, and race theory.” We’re not sure about the ethics of attacking a 16-year-old activist with a reductio ad absurdum argument that casts her as ignoring her “elders” and advocating nothing less than a return to the primitive state of nature, but it seems to us mere sophistry at best and mansplaining at its worst, philosophical hypocrisy that demeans his own profession in the field he’s chosen.
As for “the moral case for fossil fuel,” Hill should perhaps take a peek outside his Ivory Tower and see that temperatures are 30 degrees below normal in mid-November, we’ve had a couple of record early season snowfalls in Chicago just in the last two weeks, and if he walks down to the Lincoln Park lagoon he’ll find the Lake Michigan water level lapping at the very edges of the cement boundaries — that is, if it hasn’t already frozen over. The lakeshore is eroding in Rogers Park, and Lake Shore Drive has been shut for hours at a time when waves wash in and flood the roadway.
Illinois set a new mark for the coldest temperature every recorded in the state just last winter, and moisture-laden air led to heavy rains and flooding across the state last spring, delaying spring planting and wreaking havoc in the agriculture industry in what farmers can only hope is not the manifestation of the new normal.
Hill never actually argues against climate change as science in his letter to Greta; he simply states that if we follow through on what she’s proposing we’ll be back in “jungle swamps” and “grass huts” fighting off snakes and polar bears.
But all right, let’s keep the discussion on Hill’s high-minded plain as regards politics and its impact on events. If Hill really specializes in “social and political philosophy,” he might want to actually confront “the moral case against fossil fuels.” He’d find that some of the very “ecofascist supporters” of Thunberg he rails against, the Illinois Youth Climate Strike group, not only attack the causes of climate change, they also advocate concrete proposals in the form of their support for the Clean Energy Jobs Act. Hill might be surprised that key elements of that bill now pending in the General Assembly are meant to play to the very “morality of wealth creation” Hill espouses, by creating incentives for investment in green technology like wind and solar energy and the jobs that inevitably go with them.
Dare we suggest that Illinois Youth Climate Strike might actually be able to teach Hill something — if he’s at all receptive to confronting his own orthodoxy. But the evidence would seem to suggest he’s a lost cause who is only intent on spreading his own fame — or infamy — by taking up confrontational, incendiary positions and pandering to the far right.
It’s worth noting that, above Hill’s open letter to Greta, Frontpage Mag has this inspirational quote from David Horowitz: “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” The Amazon page for Hill’s new book, “We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People,” touts: “As seen on ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight,’” the Fox News program.
Earlier this year, Hill issued “a professor’s call to shut down our nation’s universities,” writing: “The gravest internal threat to this country is not illegal aliens; it is leftist professors who are waging a war against America and teaching our young people to hate this country.” He’s called on President Trump to deploy troops to Chicago to attack the city’s gun violence. And, in a piece that got him in hot water with the DePaul studentry in April, he argued “The Moral Case for Israel Annexing the West Bank — and Beyond,” writing: “Jewish exceptionalism and the exceptionalist nature of Jewish civilization require an unconditional space for the continued evolution of their civilization. What’s good for Jewish civilization is good for humanity at large. Jewish civilization is an international treasure trove that must be protected.
“Not all cultures are indeed equal. Some are abysmally inferior and regressive based on their comprehensive philosophy and fundamental principles — or lack thereof — that guide or fail to protect the inalienable rights of their citizens.”
DePaul students called for him to be censured. University President A. Gabriel Esteban defended Hill on academic freedom, but DePaul also scheduled a forum on the Middle East and free speech in response. Hill charged that his student critics were “part of the growing anti-Semitic culture that is pervading American campuses.”
That’s just more wood on the fire, however. Now, it would appear, Hill is about to find out that, even as a tenured professor, climate change might well produce more heat than even he can stand.