Apparently, “all physicists and other scientists” should divert time and effort from their actual work, the important stuff, the thing that pays the bills, in order to become familiar with indigenous “bodies of knowledge.” Presumably, on grounds that one simply can’t do physics or astronomy without a detailed knowledge of magical talking beavers and rival chiefs stealing the Moon.

The assembled scholars boast that they are “not seeking to improve scientific ‘truth’” and that the purpose of their intellectual toil is “not to find new or better explanations of light.” As if such gifts were theirs to give, or a remotely plausible outcome. Instead, they are vexed by the “social power relations” of scientific enquiry, its objectivity and usefulness, and the fact that the quantifiable and demonstrable tends to trump mythology and the adorable ramblings of one’s Very Indigenous Grandpa. 

After some pre-emptive disapproval of the “colonial” violation of hypothetical microbes, whose autonomy and wellbeing would apparently be desecrated by human curiosity, we’re told that “making SETI more diverse” – i.e., giving influence and authority, and a salary, to people with no relevant skills – is a matter of great importance. “There’s really no downside,” says Ms Charbonneau.

The upside, however – i.e., the premise of the whole 2,300-word article – is, to say the least, a tad vague. Apparently, hiring Iroquois or Pawnee people, or Australian Aboriginals, or whoever is deemed sufficiently brown and therefore magical, would result in “the expansion of our pool of what civilisations might look like.” “It just makes sense,” says she.

Readers unschooled in intersectional woo may be puzzled as to why those chosen as suitably indigenous and put-upon would have much to add to the doing of modern astronomy and space exploration. A pivotal role in any success seems unlikely. Readers may also wonder why those who can construct orbital telescopes and land robots on distant planets should defer in matters of science to those who can’t. 

It’s hard to miss the pretension around this “ancient wisdom,” the patronising dishonesty, and the implication that the rest of us are expected to pretend too. But the definition of astronomy – a branch of science that uses mathematics, physics and chemistry to study and explain celestial objects – is being stretched in order to flatter primitive mythology with zero scientific content beyond a very rudimentary calendar.

I’m not sure what’s achieved by gushing over the fact that what we now know as the constellation of Orion was referred to as a canoe by an arrested Stone Age foraging culture. A culture that, despite tens of thousands of years of purported “astronomy,” had bugger all to show for it. While Galileo Galilei was calculating the heights of lunar mountains and discovering the moons of Jupiter, our Aboriginal “astronomers” had little to say on the subject.

And while Angelo Secchi was pioneering astronomical spectroscopy – and proving that the blinding disc in the midday sky must be the same kind of object as those twinkling specks seen at night, only much, much closer – and pondering what follows from that realisation – our Aboriginal “astronomers” were still banging on about sky emus.

Having been mocked for his unargued assertions and casual racism, Mr Allen is now complaining that people, presumably white ones, “don’t want to engage” with his unargued assertions and casual racism. The truth of his claims is, he says, “obvious.” An attitude that would, I suppose, explain the lack of evidence or any reciprocal standard, and the apparent disregard for any expectation of such.

However, perhaps a few atoms of sympathy are in order. It occurs to me that if your immediate environment is one in which race-based claims aren’t subject to challenge or scepticism, even when sweeping and rather dubious, it must be quite unnerving to encounter these things for the first time. 

Ms Leung airs her distaste for “white men ideas” – as if they had been uniform across continents and throughout history – while reminiscing about attending a “white AF conference” two years earlier. I was unsure what the “AF” might refer to and searched for some literary or scholarly explanation. It then occurred to me that a “white AF conference” is, to borrow the woke vernacular, a white as fuck conference. Which is how not-at-all-racist academic librarians convey their thoughts, apparently.

Readers may also wish to ponder the implications of a librarian and self-styled educator, schooled at the University of Washington and Barnard College, New York, and who is offended – something close to enraged – by the existence of “white ideas” and the “so-called ‘knowledge’” of “white dudes.” 

We are informed, firmly, that, “It’s impossible to see the rise of mixed beauty ideals as a positive thing, because at its heart sits an unsettling insistence on white superiority.” It’s impossible, you see. Though how Ms Morris arrived at this assertion is less than clear. This being the Guardian, however, it does have an air of inevitability, of predestination.

Ms Morris tells us that in her youth not being white and not looking like the women seen most often in media and advertising made her feel “insecure.” And yet now, when women who resemble her, racially, are all but ubiquitous in media and advertising – way out of proportion to actual demographics, and even added anachronistically to historical dramas – this is also a cause of unhappiness and resentment, and an excuse for convoluted theories of racial victimhood.

If you want to see evidence of maturity and self-possession, the Pitzer College Media Studies department, where Ms Alegria Martinez spends her time and some poor sucker’s money, probably isn’t the first place to look. And I think that, for many, that’s the tacit appeal of identitarian wokeness – it’s a chance to defer adult norms, and an excuse to act out pretentious, inchoate tantrums.

But it is a strange thing, this combination of assumed superiority and infantile emoting. Remember, Ms Martinez and Ms Aguilera emailed the entire campus, repeatedly and quite vehemently, with their views on hooped earrings and who should be allowed to wear them. It does, I think, take a particular chutzpah to publicly claim to be oppressed – by other people’s earrings – while spending more than the median household income at a glorified holiday resort. 

Says student Shahamat Uddin, “The reason ‘coloured people time’ exists is because non-Western cultures tend to have more polychronic work environments, and there is a different prioritisation of family and relationships over capitalist productivity and work demands.” Which is obviously what every employer wants to hear. And pay for. Every month.

A “polychronic” culture, since you ask, is one in which chatting and distractions are both commonplace and encouraged, and in which “issues such as promptness” – and reliability and productivity – are not prioritised. As favoured in, say, sub-Saharan Africa, that engine of civilisational blossoming and human betterment. 

In the video below, filmed at the University of Cape Town, members of the science faculty meet with student protestors who wish to “decolonise” the university – and not pay their bills. During the meeting, one of the staff, one of the “science people,” points out that, contrary to claims being made by a student protestor, witchcraft doesn’t in fact allow Africans to throw lightning at their enemies. He is promptly scolded for “disrespecting the sacredness of the space,” which is a “progressive space,” and is told either to apologise or leave. 

It turns out that nothing says blurring gender lines – and being totally cool with whatever your child chooses – like pre-emptively hiding away anything with footballs on it. It’s curious how the author’s professed openness – all this free-and-easy blurring of gender lines – seems to require quite a lot of nudging and censorship, and the anxious hiding away of objects deemed too manly.

At which point, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that readers’ comments are not welcome at the Today site, and Yahoo News, where the item above is also published, is “temporarily suspending article commenting.” This, we’re told, is in order to “create a safe and engaging place for users to connect over interests and passions.” Yes, we will engage and connect by not talking about things.

It does often seem that people writing on certain topics, and with certain political leanings, are to be spared the indignity of discussion or disagreement. Say, people who use their own small children as a political experiment. Or whose list of things deemed “too masculine” includes a shirt with a tractor on it, owning a Ford car, and, obviously, manual labour.

Mr Resnikoff doubtless imagines himself as the one who’s enlightened, sophisticated, and not at all prejudiced. And yet he veers towards hysteria based on nothing whatsoever beyond the race and presumed social class of a polite, visiting plumber. And note that the plumber’s reticence on political matters – i.e., his professionalism and good manners – is viewed by Mr Resnikoff as suspect.

“In… schools,” we’re told, “the desire to punish is racialised,” and “white people’s feelings often have outsized consequences on People of Colour.” The example given to illustrate this alleged phenomenon is of a white, female art teacher – Dr Stabler’s immediate predecessor – who “was said to have wept at the end of every school day” and who pursued assault charges against a black student who forcibly cut said teacher’s hair.

This assault, presumably intended to humiliate the woman and assert dominance over her, is passed over with remarkable ease by Dr Stabler, as if the “white feelings” of the teacher, and the implications of such behaviour – and its accommodation by leftist educators – were unworthy of exploration.

Apparently, hearing that your immediate predecessor was harassed and assaulted, and reduced to tears on a daily basis – by the same teenagers you’re hoping to teach about art – couldn’t possibly be a warning sign, or have any informational content, beyond a belief that those indulging in the disruption, harassment and assault must be steeped in “cultural knowledge,” and obviously oppressed, and therefore deserving of further latitude.

“As the new teacher hired to replace her, I also dealt with feelings of frustration, humiliation, guilt, and anger,” says Dr Stabler. “On the occasions when I reported infractions to parents or administrators, I too played a regrettable role in the consequences my students received at school and at home.”  He’s so sorry for having dared to complain about classroom misbehaviour and vandalism, and for being targeted for humiliation. All those “white emotions” we shouldn’t care about.

Other examples of students displaying their “cultural knowledge” – and “kinetic” creativity – include the punching of a white male teacher, who subsequently agonised over whether to press charges, and which prompts Dr Stabler to deploy the euphemism “interpersonal conflict.” 

Given the sweeping nature of the demands, the absence of any kind of realistic and meaningful argument, with actual points of fact that one might address, is a tad curious. Instead, we get a list of seemingly arbitrary words, among which, “colonisation, slavery, and white supremacy.” Oh, and “settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, classism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia…” Needless to say, the list is quite extensive, though not particularly illuminating. Less an explanation as an incantation. Magical words. With which to conjure contrived, pretentious guilt. A kind of modish neuroticism.

We are, however, told that the priorities of physicians, nurses, and medical administrators should be less about “professionalised knowledge,” those drug dosages and such, and more about “lenses of social justice.” These allegedly corrective lenses will “allow physicians to more effectively engage in… social change.” Suitably re-educated, their mentalities rewired, medical workers will have “bidirectional relationships with… the land.”  Which is obviously what you want when that itchy rash won’t go away. 

The grown adult quoted above is Professor Susan Jebb, employed by the University of Oxford to think deeply on matters of diet, and current chair of the Food Standards Agency. For our disapproving academic, the workplace is akin to a “smoky pub,” due to the occasional presence of cake, and therefore conjures – in her mind, at least – notions of “passive smoking.” Being offered a slice of cake during one’s coffee break is, it turns out, grounds for invoking victimhood.

Professor Jebb insists that her desire to make workplace cake-bringing taboo – and seen as something harmful and antisocial – is “not about the nanny state,” or, dare I suggest, some personal inadequacy. You see, the advertising of cakes and other confections – and the fact that they may be accessible in the workplace – is “undermining people’s free will.” Free will being demonstrated only by compliance with Professor Jebb’s New Rules Of Cake-Eating. And which is why, one assumes, this grown woman, a professional intellectual, can’t say no to a bit of sponge. 

Apparently, modern medical science, with its oppressive Western paradigms, is insufficiently deferential to “our ways of knowing, being and doing.” We must, says Ms Blow, “embrace all knowledge systems.” “Our unique lens, which views health as holistic and all-encompassing, has often been ignored or worse, considered inferior,” Ms Blow informs us. Well, not everyone is happy trusting their recovery to healing songs and delusions of aboriginal sorcery, and there’s only so much you can achieve by pushing crushed witchetty grubs into a person’s ear.

Despite attempts to romanticise aboriginal medicine, the persistent differences in health and lifespan rather speak for themselves. If aboriginal approaches, untainted by “colonial organisations,” are so praiseworthy and desirable, one wonders why aboriginal people suffer from alarming rates of diabetes, cancer, tuberculosis, chlamydia, and any number of other afflictions – from cardiovascular problems to hearing loss and disastrous oral hygiene. And the less contact they have with the “biomedical models” that so offend Ms Blow, the more pronounced the disparities seem to be. Being “disruptive” and “the antithesis of colonial” doesn’t appear to be working out awfully well.

Readers are invited to imagine working in a supposedly highbrow environment, among supposedly clever people, in which politely pointing out a basic logical and moral error – one resulting in actual institutional racism, as opposed to the imaginary kind – results in gasps of indignation, accusations of “harassment,” and many of your peers reporting you for “privilege” and “harmful language,” with a view to getting you punished in some way. And then being told that your intent, however clear and carefully articulated, has absolutely no bearing on whether you’ll be found guilty. It’s positively surreal.

But it does, I think, offer a glimpse into the strange, unhappy world of woke psychology. 

Following this lengthy declaration of innate racial wrongness, the panellists begin to ruminate on “how best to confront the corrosive force of online hate targeted at journalists.” Being a journalist on Twitter, where the public can talk back, sometimes bluntly, is equated with surviving in an active warzone and other “hostile physical environments,” with women, the majority of the panel, apparently hardest hit. Journalists, we’re told, are “exposed to danger in the digital world” and consequently suffer high rates of “anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic distress.” As a result of being mocked or disagreed with on Twitter. “We don’t want our journalists to be killed,” says Catherine Tait, the president and CEO of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Even being referred to by the public as woke is presented as a basis for weeping, a form of psychological torture. Indeed, almost any kind of demurral is framed as an attempt to “silence” the journalists’ self-declared heroism, to deny them their cosmic destiny. And hence, it seems, the imperative to shut down reader-comment sections on national newspaper websites, on grounds that readers are no longer content to confine their feedback to the polite correction of typos.

However, the more plausible explanations for why journalists may not be held in the highest possible regard remain oddly untouched. Even when Hill Times columnist and “anti-racism expert” Erica Ifill boasts that she doesn’t bother to interview white men. And the implications of a room full of statusful media professionals being fixated with the supposed pathologies of “whiteness,” and being pretentious and neurotic, and mentally uniform, and both distant from and disdainful of the concerns of the public that they claim to serve, are, needless to say, not vigorously explored. 

Nevertheless, readers may have noticed just how readily and persistently many of our leftist commentators have tried to hammer their default narrative onto events, regardless of the fit. Our glorious state broadcaster spent three days referring to muggers and arsonists as “protestors,” until finally embarrassed out of doing so. I heard one reporter asking a besieged resident, “Is this about the cuts? It’s about the cuts, isn’t it?” When the resident disagreed, the disappointment was audible.

Those actually doing the thieving offered more revealing explanations. As one pair of female looters put it while drinking stolen wine: “Chucking bottles, breaking into stuff, it was madness… good though. Good fun. Free alcohol.” Obligingly, with prompting, the duo added a political dimension, of a sort: “It’s the government’s fault. I dunno… the Conservatives… yeah, whatever, whoever it is. We’re showing the police we can do what we want.” 

The speaker quoted above is Dr Julia Storberg-Walker, an associate professor of education at George Washington University. A teacher of teachers, of those who will in turn shape young minds, or try to, anyway. Our educator’s realisation of her own “whiteness” – and thus innate wrongness – was, we’re told, a result of “somatic, embodied training,” which is essential, apparently. In order to struggle with one’s “positionality” as a White Devil, a doer of “harm,” a devourer of souls.