Deep Thought: Sea Changes
Created | Updated Last Week
Deep Thought: Sea Changes
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Today, all the scientists who rely on US government grants to fund their research are up in arms. The problem is terminology – also the Dunning-Kruger Effect and general linguistic incompetence on the part of people in a certain administration. They're dying, you see, to 'shut down' people they disagree with. Particularly when it comes to including those who do not fit into their particular, narrow definition of 'worthy': in other words, people who aren't just like them.
This is, of course, very silly. They are hardly the majority any longer – if, indeed, they ever were. And people who are too dumb to make a list of search terms are far too uncouth to be deciding where the research money should go.
They put out a list, you see, of key words that would cause them to 'defund' (they're all in love with that word and, no, they don't know what it means, either) a research project. Words like 'bias'. We don't want anybody investigating bias, you see.
A botanist protests, 'My research discusses sampling bias. . . ' You see the problem immediately, right? The same is true for words like 'diversity', 'inequality', 'female', and others. Even granted the premise, which is to eliminate DEI-related studies, searching for terms out of context is amazingly useless. By a curious coincidence, 'amazingly useless' also describes the people who are doing all this woke-witch-hunting.
Now, the courts are going to settle all this eventually – a federal judge has already put a restraining order on all of it – but in the meantime, I have a thought about the panicked attempt to stop diversity and inclusion from happening in US public life. And it starts with this statement: that boat has sailed, bubba. The horse is out of the barn. That page has been turned. You're a day late and a dollar short.
Why? Well, for one thing, 'white' people (for whatever definition of 'white' you've got going this week) are no longer in the majority. For another, the terminology doesn't matter: the kids are all woke, whether they or you know it or not.
About thirty years ago, some sportscaster or other used the term 'sea change' to refer to some alteration or other in the way a sport was played. I remember hearing this on the radio and being very annoyed. 'Just watch,' I said to myself. 'Old Soapy Sam there must have seen his kid's high school production of The Tempest. Now he thinks he knows something. He'll never let go of that phrase. Soon all the other sportscasters will be using it. Poor Shakespeare.'
That, of course, is exactly what happened. After the sports people ran the phrase into the ground, the motivational speakers picked it up. It spread to HR departments. By the time the clergy got hold of it, I knew that all was lost.
When Shakespeare coined the phrase 'sea change,' it referred to the idea of transmogrification:
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls which were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange. . .
That's a great image. 'Public opinion has undergone a sea change' is NOT an evocative statement. All it means is, 'People have changed their minds. I want to sound clever about it without actually doing any thinking.'
And yet. And yet. . . Public opinion has, indeed, undergone a sea change. And those are pearls that once were the eyes of the CEO with the bloated sense of self-importance. People are aware of the fact that other kinds of people exist, and can do things, and deserve to be fairly compensated for such.
I am looking forward to the next season of Resident Alien, a nice little science fiction series set in Colorado but filmed, as usual, around Vancouver. To get ready for the new season's arrival on Netflix, I've been rewatching the first two seasons.
An alien from a planet in Ursa Major is stuck on Earth and passing (barely) for human. His pseudonym is Harry and he's played by Alan Tudyk. A couple of ten-year-olds see right through his disguise (the aliens evolved from octopuses so they're mimetic, nice narrative dodge there). One of the ten-year-olds is white and male. The other is brown, female, and Muslim. No big deal is made of this. You only notice because Sahar wears a hijab. (Sometimes with a tinfoil hat under it.)
The other cast members include black, white, Asian and Native American actors. Identity politics are not a theme – we're more worried about what the aliens are up to. You barely even notice unless you're looking, but there are fully as many women in the cast as men, and, yes, they more than pass the Bechdel Test. In one episode, a large group of the women go out drinking together – this is a small town and they're all friends – and happen to find out that Deputy Liv hasn't had a raise in. . . forever. This leads to a raid on the mayor's files, political demands, and flyers scattered by helicopter. Equal pay for equal work becomes the law in Patience, Colorado.
This is just a piece of casual entertainment, based on a comic book. And it's 'woke', but it doesn't preach. It doesn't have to. Everybody knows what they're talking about. As I said: horses/barns, ships/sailed. . . the sea has already changed. Of the bones of past delusions are coral made.
When people say, 'Oh, stop looking at history like that. People in the olden days didn't know those things were wrong.' Things like slavery, gender inequity, class oppression, hyena capitalism. Er, yeah, they did. The ones doing it just hoped nobody would notice – or figure out how to do anything about it. The cat is out of the bag now. Have you ever tried to put a cat back into a bag?
I can't see the future (well, only on rare occasions, and then visually). I have no idea whether western civilisation – or, indeed, the planet – is destined to survive the latest set of mistakes in democracy. I hope it will. But even if it falls, as long as there is a planet under our feet, people are going to know. They may forget how the solar system works. They may go around saying the planet's flat. They may not remember what a virus is.
But they will know that you aren't supposed to treat other people as less worthy or entitled than yourself. And no matter how hard anybody tries to get away with that, the others will know they're doing wrong. We've got at least that far.
