Why the uneasiness? There are several reasons. In the first place we know that such strictures, though preposterous, are not without consequence. Indeed, the phenomenon of political correctness is a great teacher of the often overlooked fact that the preposterous and the malign can cohabit happily. The odor of thuggishness is never far from the lairs of political correctness. The student accused of lookism can be severely penalized for the offense, as can the student accused of racism, “homophobia,” or “mis-directed laughter.” In some cases, the academic thought police even attempt to regulate what is not said, as when an editor of a student newspaper was removed from his post because he had given “insufficient coverage” to minority events. We laugh when we read about poor Frosty, but the laughter dies when we consider that the professor who would have us melt Frosty is also someone responsible for the education of students. It is amusingly ludicrous to burden Mrs. Rowling’s entertainments with feminist rhetoric, but then we remember that books can be banned or slighted for less.
Milan Kundera’s novel The Joke traces the fortunes and amours of a young student, Ludvik, after his exasperatingly earnest girlfriend decides to show the authorities a postcard he had written to her as a joke: “Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!” As a result of this whimsy, Ludvik finds himself expelled from the Communist Party and the university, and is eventually conscripted to work in the mines for several years. Among other things, Kundera dramatizes the dynamics of political correctness. He is especially good at portraying one of its signal features: I mean humorlessness. One of the points of The Joke is that totalitarian societies cannot abide a joke; political correctness is a kind of geiger counter that registers deviations from the norm of earnestness. Any deviation is suspect, any humourous deviation is culpable.
The allergy to humor that is integral to political correctness is one reason the art of parody has suffered in recent years. Then, too, a parodist, to be successful, must be able to count on his audience’s ability to distinguish clearly between the parody and the reality being spoofed. The triumph of political correctness has long since blurred that distinction. Whose ideological antennae are sensitive enough to register accurately the shifting claims of victimhood and entitlement? A mayoral aide in Washington. D.C. uses the word “niggardly” in conversation with a black colleague; the colleague takes offense because he thinks “niggardly” is racist; the aide promptly offers his resignation, which is accepted. True? Or parodic exaggeration? True, all too true. Or what about the Obama administration’s directive that the global war on terror was henceforth to be renamed “global contingency operations,” or former British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s insistence that acts of terrorism perpetrated by Islamic radicals be rebaptized “anti-Islamic activity“? You really can’t make it up.
What Kundera gave us was a fiction about–in part about — political correctness. But documentary evidence is also near at hand. One can consult Solzhenitsyn, for example, or, even nearer at hand, study the pronouncements of think tanks like the Runnymede Trust, whose 400-page report on “The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain” a couple of years ago contained the surprising news that the word “British” has “racist connotations.” Even worse, it turned out, is the word English:
To be English, as the term is used, is to be white. Britishness is not ideal, but at least it appears acceptable when suitably qualified, such as Black British, Indian British, British Muslim and so on.
There is one insuperable barrier: Britishness, as much as Englishness, has systematic, largely unspoken, racist connotations. Whiteness nowhere features as an explicit condition of being British, but it is widely understood that Englishness is racially coded. The unstated assumption is that Britishness and whiteness go together like roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. There has been no collective working through of the imperial experience.
The absence from the national curriculum of a rewritten history of Britain as an imperial force, involving dominance in Ireland, Africa, the Caribbean and Asia, is proving to be an unmitigated disaster.
“Rewritten history”? You said it. Among the many recommendations made by “The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain” was the demand that British history be “revised, rethought or jettisoned” in order to meet the requirements of “inclusivity.” The report makes many other recommendations–it calls, for example, for race equality and “cultural diversity” inspections in schools, and suggests that television franchise holders be required to appoint a specified number of Black and Asian staff.
On an even more ominous front we have the activities of the European Union, that bastion of political correctness, whose tax-exempt ministers are appointed, not elected, who seem to be accountable to only to themselves, who meet in secret and issue binding diktats that affect the daily lives of people all over Europe. Nice work if you can get it. A few years ago the EU made it illegal for journalists to criticize its policies. Last year, it decided that racism and xenophobia were crimes that could carry a prison sentence of two or more years. “Racism” and “xenophobia” they defined as harboring an aversion to people based on “race, colour, descent, religion or belief, national or ethnic origin.” I do not love thee, Dr. Fell, the reason why I cannot tell — but it is certainly not because of your race, nationality, skin color, religious beliefs, sexual preferences, or any physical or mental disabilities from which you may suffer.
As these examples suggest, contemporary political correctness, though it may have originated and matured in the academy, is not only an academic product. It thrives in the academy, true, as bacteria thrives in rotting flesh. But political correctness has metastasized. It now thrives outside academia wherever a certain type of intellectual congregates. In the corridors of the European Union or in anxious bureaucracies like Oxbridge, the BBC, and the United Nations. I hasten to add that by “intellectual,” I do not mean “intelligent.” I mean characterized by a certain lofty moralism — progressive, abstract, activist. Dubbing this attitude a form of “Olympianism,” the political philosopher Kenneth Minogue details its initiatives:
There is a dire purposiveness about the Olympian passion for signing up to treaties and handing power over to international bureaucrats who want to rule the world. Everything down to the details of family life and the modes of education are governed and guided so as to fit into the rising project of a world government. The independence of universities in choosing who to admit, of firms choosing whom to employ, of citizens to say and think what they like has all been subject to regulation in the name of harmony between nations and peace between religions. The playfulness and creativity of Western societies is under threat. So too is their identity and freedom.
The Hudson Institute, Family Security matters, and Human Events are to be heartily congratulated (and earnestly supported: click on their web sites, linked above, and contribute!) for taking the initiative and bringing these issues to the public’s attention. This conference was billed as the first annual conference on reclaiming American liberty. It would be a melancholy task to speculate on how much more liberty we might lose by the time the second annual conference convenes — assuming, of course, that any such heterodox enterprise were still allowed to go forward.
Ah, the stupidity and thuggism of the left and academia is duly noted, and I despise it. BUT ain’t it grand, though, how the right, center, and apathetic can be equally stupid and thuggish each in their inimitable ways? Of course, often they are responding to the thuggery of the other side, or some of the thuggery inherent in human nature, as in bullying policies to stop bullying. Maybe the new PJM-MarkSteyn-Roger Simon meme should be, “Let bullies be bullies; anything else is un-American.”
And yes, bullying may be the core issue here. A lot of these policies are attempts to stop bullying, whether by seven-year-olds or 19-year-olds away from their parents, both of whom can now also be bullied in cyber-space.
Seriously, do we want a world (and it is possible that we do or should) where bullying in its infinite number of human manifestations, is given laissez faire treatment and we focus on making children tough so that they can stand it…and the weak ones will be traumatized, or occasionally die, because that is the natural and unavoidable plight of the weak, a basic law of nature, so to speak?
As for my own views, they would call for “reasonable restraint” on bullying, but I’m still working on exactly what “reasonable” is, and how loaded firearms fit into the equation.
At the core of political correctness is a refusal of reality, a refusal to call things by their real names, hence a the propagation of a lie.
Amen
Let us know when the lecture series moves on to solutions. Here is mine: those of us who understand the danger of this type of behavior need to cease granting the perpetrators the benefit of our politeness and begin greeting such blather with condemnation as offensive to the blatherer as the blather is offensive to us. Like last fall when I calmly and confidently explained to my son’s pretty little doe eyed early 20’s kindergarten teacher that the reason my son said “diversity is a load of crap” is probably because I told him that it was, and that the reason I told him it was is because it is. Unpleasant, but this garbage is learned in environments where it goes unchallenged and challenging it is the only reason to kill it.
“A few years ago the EU made it illegal for journalists to criticize its policies.”
Really?
That explains why there is no more criticism of the EU in the European press, appart from the occaisonal stories written by the few courageous journalists willing to go to gaol for the truth…..er hold on…
It’s not true is it? The EU never made it illegal to criticize its policies. So why is would Roger say this thing, why, why. Did Roger make it up? Has he gone mad? What is going on?
Well, it went like this. There was a man who worked for the EU as a Civil Servant called Bernard Connolly. While he was on holiday, but still an employee of the EU, he wrote a book called “The Rotten Heart of Europe: The Dirty War For Europe’s Money” which, denounced the EU policy of monetary union. The EU fired him. In 2001 He appealed against the dismissal. The body that hears appeals against dismissal of EU Civil Servants is the European Court so it appears as a legal case even though what they argue about is the Staff Code not laws that apply to non-employees:
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:61999J0274:EN:HTML
Mr Connolly said I can say what I like about my employers and they can’t do a thing about it because of my right to freedom of speech and anyway ‘I was on holiday’. The court said, you can say what you like about your employer, but if you break trust with your employer then they also have the right to fire you This didn’t create a new precedent to stop criticism of the EU it just maintained the right of employers to fire employees who write and publish a book calling them evil and stupid.
Then, the Daily Telegraph mischievously reported it as “Euro-court outlaws criticism of EU”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1325398/Euro-court-outlaws-criticism-of-EU.html
Then the proto-rightwing-o-nut-o-blog-o-sphere picks up the Telegraph reporting and, nine years later, Roger notices and writes about the EU outlawing criticism as an example of the menace of political correctness.
But it never happened. It has a grain of truth, but like most of these “POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GONE MAD” stories, it just didn’t happen the way it is told.
The exception is the case of the British city that outlawed the use of the word “crazy” for unwise ideas or policies. “Madness gone politically correct” really did happen.
Mr.Kimball: first and foremost, it is a redeemable moment to spend time with your blog,here…with thanks and ,perhaps,your lamplighting response to my struggle with James Brady’s “novel”-The Imperial Cruise, dressed up as historical “re-writing”- yes! your observ. of the Runnymede trusts’ thrust( couldn’t resist)caught the eye. Grains of truth melded with boorishly incessant white-christian male bashing- all taken out of time/context- and , even , Howard Zinn& Walter Williams, amoungst others sited in appendix glossary. Trouble is, he purports to head a foundation ( Brady Trust )that sends young Americans abroad to live with foreign families(most certainly not Israel)…a venture that certainly resonates with my view that Americans must obtain passports and get out to know the world – if they are going to continue to be an effective Superpower ( I am an English immigrant educ.in the US ) however, that appears to be our only congruency. with curiosity I await your response.
3. Duke of Sharon: ‘I calmly and confidently explained to my son’s pretty little doe eyed early 20’s kindergarten teacher that the reason my son said “diversity is a load of crap” is probably because I told him that it was, and that the reason I told him it was is because it is. Unpleasant, but this garbage is learned in environments where it goes unchallenged….’
Well, for your son’s sake, I sure hope someone challenges your garbage soon.
As we saw in Texas, PC can kill,it is not funny anymore.
Dwight, yes, there was plenty of bulying before. Yes, “get tough and suck it up” is a lousy response to bullying. But so is institutionalized bullying from the bureaucrats and the self-righteous.
Natural rights are the gifts of our Creator, not government. It is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, describing individual freedom. It only exists in America and is under assault today. Free individuals are the only pebble-droppers; the nails sticking up that government people are afraid of tripping over and seek to hammer down. It also means individual self-interest is more important than are the interest of communities. Obama and modern Democrats are opposed to that, as they are united in their support of Rousseau and Marx, not Jefferson and Madison. Check claysamerica.com for a new book, SAVE PEBBLE DROPPERS & PROSPERITY, soon to be on Amazon.com.
Duke,
Well said. The one-to-one confrontation is the most likely way to roll back PC. These cowards cannot stand that.
I feel some sympathy for the poor little girl. She was perhaps trying to do her best. If she has a degree in education, she would have learned a pile of crap, nothing worth passing on to your kid.
So now maybe she will wake up?
Wisdom from Theodore Dalrymple:
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”