Weekend reads: Everyone is an activist
No arena of life is spared from the protests of political actors. See: hornets, apologies, and, of course, science
This weekend, someone tagged me in a tweet about a story from The New York Times. It appears that an insect — formerly known as the “Asian Giant Hornet,” or the “Murder Hornet” — has recently been renamed in an attempt “to reduce negative and nationalistic associations.” I give you this, from the Times piece:
Chris Looney, an entomologist at the Washington State Department of Agriculture who has been leading efforts to control the spread of the hornets, wrote the official proposal to change the insect’s name. He cited various reasons for doing so, including the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Connecting a scary insect, already associated with murder and attempted eradication, to Asia, might stoke more anti-Asian sentiment.
While I am indeed very concerned about the surge in anti-Asian crimes — with two recent examples involving elderly Asian-American women — I fail to see how the name of a bug could be related, even in the most tangential of ways.
The same goes for the murder hornet bit. Witness this puzzling piece of mental gymnastics, also from the Times:
Although its sting can induce swelling, excruciating pain and sometimes deadly allergic reactions, the northern giant hornet is not aggressive toward humans — and it’s unlikely that any could have “malice aforethought” in related fatalities. Even in targeting other insects, Dr. Ware raised doubts as to whether the hornet’s behavior could be described as murder. “I don’t know that insects are capable of murder,” she said. “We don’t say that lions are murderers when they hunt.”
The renaming business is apparently the work of the Entomological Society’s Better Common Names Project, which previously scored an *important* victory on the offensively-named Gypsy Moth, now referred to as the Spongy Moth.
Though obviously amusing, this trend does point to a decidedly unfunny development — which is that, these days, everyone considers themselves an activist. And those who do not tend to keep quiet about it.
Here, in one single story, we have several layers of activists — the individual entomologist activists, the Twitter activists who egged them on, the Entomological Society activists who institutionalized the niche cause, and, finally, the enthral-to-activists journalist who took it seriously.
This pattern tends to occur again and again when you a) drag politics into every conceivable area of life and b) convince a generation of people that it is an absolute moral imperative to take offence at, and then organize around, the most trivial of matters. (All while turning a blind eye to the fact that doing so exhausts the time, energy, resources, and good will of the public that could have been used to tackle the more pressing problem — in this case, the issue of anti-Asian street violence.)
This dynamic plays out around us all the time. The politicization driving it — aside from being tedious, and turning perfectly normal people into dogmatic killjoys — essentially corrupts public life.
I thought about this recently, reading a piece at Persuasion, from the American judge and senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Stephanos Bibas, on the corruption of the most basic and generous of human gestures: the apology.
The instinct to apologize is laudable: When in doubt, be humble and make amends. But real apologies grow out of the fertile soil of relationship and community. Today’s demands for apology, though, are dangerous. They debase the coinage of apology, masquerading as the real thing. Far from healing, they can sow bitterness and discord.
And I thought of it again this weekend, reading this thought-provoking essay calling for a restoration of civility in science and the Covid debate, which epidemiologist Shira Doron argues has been similarly corrupted by political actors.
Here’s a key takeaway from Doron’s piece:
… Academic institutions must be supportive of faculty who choose to publicly express opinions which may seem to go against the current narrative. After all, history teaches us that some of the most impactful scientific discoveries were made by brilliant minds (such as Galileo and Semmelweis) who were willing to challenge the dogma despite strong opposition from academia.
I have colleagues at other institutions who tell me they have been warned by their employers to stay quiet about their opinions on controversial topics like vaccine mandates or masks if they go against the grain. And it’s not just hospitals and universities silencing dissenting opinion. Researchers who depend on grant funding, especially if it comes from the National Institutes of Health, as much of the US research funding does, have told me they keep their opinions to themselves for fear of having their grant proposals rejected or losing the ones they already have.
We are a society in the grips of extreme politicization. We need to back away from it.
Science is an excellent place to start.
I spent about 20 years studying the visual system of the Praying Mantis... and I published what may ne one of the first scientific books about this creature (The Praying Mantids, Jonhs Hopkins University Press, 1999). However, all of these years I have been traumatized by the oppressive name of this animal. I actually think that it caused the Crusades. I insist that its name be changed to the "Just-Contemplating-Something-Innocuous Mantis". Otherwise, I just won't feel safe.
Have people changed with respect to these hypersensitive musings, or is it something else?
Let me attempt to answer my own question in suggesting it is something else.
I think the hypersensitive is a genetic thing that can be altered by life experience. If a parent of multiple offspring you will likely agree with this. One child is a steamroller. Criticism does not phase her. She is born with thick-skin and also abundant self-confidence for defending herself as needed. She measures fairness, but more so fairness in opportunity. She is proactive and goes for it. The other child melts into tears with a cross-eyed look. He needs constant reassurance that he is a worthy animal on the planet. He measures fairness on outcomes. He is more apt to be passive and waiting around for something to happen that he can react to.
It is possible that both will shift with life-experience (coping skills can be taught, and life can knock the self-confidence out of some), but generally these traits are pretty baked-in.
Historically the thick-skinned would dominate as they would be more actionable and more emotionally self-controlled.
I think what has happened is that the hypertensive have been empowered by changes in the media who will not only gladly allow them to air their hypertensive grievances but have weaponized them to mob and passive-aggressive attack the thick-skinned that dare to make them feel inferior by comparison. The campuses have been the seed for this... teaching victim grievance fake scholarship instead of building life skills to help student become functional adults that can successfully navigate a tragic and malevolent world.
It should not be political except that the hypertensive grievance warriors all flock to the left and are committed to remake the world in their image.
It is a difficult dysfunctional dystopia to escape from because they have leveraged the psychology of normal moral people that care about fairness and victims. Thinking about the example of your two children with differing sensitivity; you would love and care for them both. However, you would be more focused on the hypertensive child as needing more consideration and attention. The thick-skinned child you know will be fine. So even as the child struggles and exhibits much more negative reactionary behavior, you would be much more tolerant in understanding.
This unbalanced tolerance explains the hypocrisy of the left and why the left is so committed to identity politics. With the psychology of people to give latitude to the behavior of victims, the goal is to form a hierarchy of victim identity groups from which to politically operate from within and behind. AND, to brand any opposition group as anti-victim (oppressor) so that their ability to react in defense is constrained.
3rd wave postmodernist feminists are some of the most nasty and destructive people playing within the game of politics. But they are female, but also a majority lesbian and thus untouchable victims. Scientists are also victims... constantly attacked by those science deniers and needing to be shielded from it. And certainly insects are victims. And so are minorities... especially those can be exploited to support left politics.
Meanwhile I will still refer to them as Murder Hornets.