What is a woman?
An innocuous question, you might think.
After all, most people either think that they are a woman, were born of a woman, have kissed a woman, live with a woman, or work with one. Somewhere along the line you’ve encountered a woman, and it wasn’t complicated.
Unless you’re a new Democratic appointee to the Supreme Court, that is. In that case, you are unable to define what a woman is – even though to all intents and purposes you appear to be one yourself.
In fact, according to testimony given by Ketanji Brown Jackson, if we want to know what a woman is we need to consult a biologist.
If you think this is a partisan account, you may be right. On the other hand, you only have to watch the video footage to know that it’s also 100% accurate.
Why does this pantomime matter?
In part, because this tendency to bend language in the service of ideology has now moved on from the usual testing ground of trans rights, and is now entering more serious aspects of reality - including, most recently, economics.
In recent days economists across the US - and with their views bleeding into morning notes from analysts elsewhere in the world too – suddenly decided that a recession should no longer be defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth.
Now, mid-terms in the US are only a matter of 12 weeks or so away now, and it’s easy to imagine how the incumbent party wouldn’t enjoy headlines about recession - at the very moment they are struggling to maintain any hope of hanging onto their majorities.
But now that Democratic partisans in the economics establishment have dispensed with the two ‘consecutive quarters’ definition, the problem of all those pesky headlines has been dispensed with.
The reality of the two consecutive quarters of negative growth remains.
But then again, what is reality?
Do we even know any more?
What is a woman?
Can a man bear children?
Are two consecutive quarters of negative growth a recession?
The answers to these - and many other questions besides - are now no longer settled. Instead, the answers depend on which reality you’re living in.
Because it’s not just ‘woman’ and ‘recession’ that have been redefined to fit the newly minted world of modern media discourse. The meanings of other words have changed too over the past decade, as the attempted fashioning of the new reality has gathered pace.
Among the most obvious words which have had new definitions substituted in are ‘Nazi’, ‘equity’, ‘vaccine’, ‘gender’, and ‘peaceful’.
That latter is not system-wide, but there is a famous video of a left-leaning journalist describing a protest as ‘mostly peaceful’ whilst footage rolled behind her of a building that had just been set on fire by rioters.
’White supremacy’ has also changed its meaning over the past decade. Although you may not mourn the passing of the old meaning, it does nevertheless herald the dawning of a new reality if you conform to the new belief, espoused by critical race theory, that white children are born in sin. In fact, that’s a view that radical Protestants would emphatically have agreed with, all the way back in the days of Calvin and Luther, although they would have taken a more Martin Luther King-type approach, and applied it across all races.
So are we going round in circles?
We are, yes, if we insist on redefining reality every time it does something that’s unpleasant. Remember how inflation was ‘transitory’ less than two years ago?
Well, now the White House is describing what, until a few weeks ago conformed to the clear definition of ‘recession’, as a ‘transitional’ period for the US economy.
Which, of course, may in and of itself be true. Indeed, when is it never true that an economy is in a ‘transitional’ phase?
The problem is, though, that if an agreed definition of reality is increasingly being crowded out of discourse, then eventually the whole edifice will come crashing down.
After all, there are precedents. In spite of the fresh outrage of pundits like Tucker Carlson on the right or Jimmy Dore on the left, this tendency to redefine reality is not new.
It comes in the wake of the collapse of religion as the agreed framework both for reality and for morality in the nineteenth century, and was first given prominence by George Orwell during the Spanish Civil War.
In 1937 his own side in that war, the left-leaning Republicans, began to refashion language to cover up their own defeats, failures and crimes. In so doing they created a fantastical universe in which to live - a better world than the real one, perhaps. And they also ended up losing the Spanish Civil War.
So consider, when you weigh up whether or not to believe that the US is in a recession, what sort of world you’d like to live in, and what sort of world you actually do live in.
If they are both the same, it may be that your navigational instruments are off. Inflation is high, growth is trending negative. It’s not hard.