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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   24877 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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YOU KNOW WHAT NOBODY HATES EACH OTHER ABOUT YET? BIRD-WATCHING.

I wanted to post this over at /r/slatestarcodex but it's obviously CW material and surely someone should bring it to Scott's attention, as it wins him quite a large number of prophet points I suspect...

NPR reports that these American birds and dozens more will be renamed, to remove human monikers.

And the next day half the world’s newspaper headlines are “Has The Political Correctness Police Taken Over Bird-Watching?” and the other half are “Is Bird-Watching Racist?”. And then bird-watchers and non-bird-watchers and different sub-groups of bird-watchers hold vitriolic attacks on each other that feed back on each other in a vicious cycle for the next six months, and the whole thing ends in mutual death threats and another previously innocent activity turning into World War I style trench warfare.

The story is... well, pretty much exactly what you think it is, I bet.

Get ready to say goodbye to a lot of familiar bird names, like Anna's Hummingbird, Gambel's Quail, Lewis's Woodpecker, Bewick's Wren, Bullock's Oriole, and more.

That's because the American Ornithological Society has vowed to change the English names of all bird species currently named after people, along with any other bird names deemed offensive or exclusionary.

I don't really care? Except that I do care, to just this extent, as I've written before:

When stuff like this happens, one of my first reactions is to reflect on the fact that everyone gets forgotten eventually. Some of us get statues or scholarship funds or university chairs carrying our name or likeness a little farther into the future than might otherwise have occurred, but the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" was always destined to go away someday. Roads and schools and landmarks get renamed, statues are left to crumble.

And yet I concur with you--this sort of thing makes me uncomfortable. But it can't be because they are ending the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" that I had never heard of and could have predicted would eventually vanish anyway. I have wondered in the past whether similar cases bothered me because I didn't approve of the deliberate social engineering that tossing things down the memory hole reveals, but I find even that objection does not quite do it for me. I find that I'm not in principle opposed to people making the world over in their own preferred image, provided they do so within certain rational constraints. So I wondered if I should simply chalk my discomfort up to personal political bias, but this felt wrong, too--for example, I found myself bothered by the tearing down of Confederate statues even though I am not from the American South and had no other discernible reason to favor their preservation by reason of political bias.

At present the best I've managed to come up with is that I am bothered by the publicity of destruction. That is--what would have happened if the ALSC had, beginning last year, simply not mentioned the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" to anyone ever again? Simply conduct business as usual, and if asked by anyone about the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" respond only that the Award was "undergoing some conceptual reorganization in hopes of better-serving our community, but while we workshop it we'd love your participation in some of our alternative programs" or something.

Of course, they don't do this, because someone decided that they would get more attention (=dollars) with a press release on their "core values of diversity and inclusion" coupled with a prima facie sacrificial offering to signal sincerity. If you look very hard at what's happening, it's the memetic equivalent of sacrificing sick animals and weeds instead of the firstling of the flock--there's no real sacrifice taking place here--but the gods of social justice are so far pleased. This is probably because it establishes a precedent, so when they come calling for greater sacrifices--how long before the residents of Seattle demand to live in a state that isn't named for a slave owner?--the practice of signaling your allegiance by tossing things down the memory hole in a way that also alienates you from the Other Tribe has already become so ingrained that no resistance to such demands remains.

Both ideas and people fade, but it is one thing to lose your struggle against time, and something else entirely to be thrown into a volcano by someone trying to prove their loyalty to Moloch.

I am not an ornithologist. I'm not even a bird-watcher. The closest I've ever come is snapping an occasional photo of a bird that catches my attention. These changes have nothing to do with me... except, of course insofar as they represent the continued burning-down of the contributions of "my" culture to humanity's broader understanding of the world. The active removal--dare I say "erasure?"--of the past, so as not to offend the sensibilities of the present.

(But mostly, I'm once more astonished by Scott's peculiar prescience...)

If they're getting rid of genuinely offensive or hurtful names, okay fine. But renaming a bird that may be called, say, "Smith's Wren"? Why? The only reason I can see there is "Smith is an Old Dead White Guy".

This reminds me of what a lot of the liberal Protestant churches did in regards to LGBT+ matters. Think of all the LGBT+ people who would love to come to church, except they've been turned off Christianity by the bad old, mean old, regressive, 'that's a sin' teachings of the past! So they junk the 'offensive' doctrines, kick out the traditionalists/have a public, messy, divisive split, and then sit back and wait for the flood of new LGBT+ and allies congregants to fill the churches.

Which... doesn't really happen. They get a lot more out gay, lesbian and trans clergy and bishops (if they're a denomination that has bishops) but congregants? Ordinary people in the pews? Not so much. What tends to happen is that the split means a small, LGBT+ majority church here, and a somewhat larger (but still smallish) traditional church made up of those who were kicked out/left over there, which tends to maybe be a bit more vibrant and growing.

So they torpedo everything they used to have, but don't get the wished-for replacement numbers of the new people to fill in for the traditionalists who left, or to replace their aging/dying liberal remaining congregations.

And that's what I think will happen here. "Let's get rid of all these Euro-centric names, and the masses of BIPOC people who would love to become birdwatchers will turn up!" Except I don't think "that bird has a Western, Anglo name" is what is keeping black, Asian, Latino etc. people out of birdwatching. People who are inclined to "I've been calling it Bewick's Wren for thirty years, I'm resigning from this club" will leave or give up the hobby or form their own, separate group. People who never even heard of "Bewick's Wren" are not going to suddenly turn up because now it's called "Long-tailed Wren" or the likes.

Five bucks says “prothonotary warbler” remains unchanged! Referencing Catholics is still A-OK.

Oh, right. Per the article, it sounds like the AOS was bullied into doing the first one or two, then decided to blanket remove human names.

Trying to do this bird by bird would mean engaging in divisive debates about individual people and the merits of whether or not they should have the honor of having a bird named after them, he realized.

"That just seemed like it would lead to endless arguments," he says, adding that he didn't think the birding community should become the morality police for people who lived two centuries ago.

Some of the quotes read like they were convinced or "convinced" to make the right mouth sounds and fall in line.

Surely there would be far more obvious birds to start with in that case!

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