Saturday, February 7, 2015

The Poison that is Political Correctness

In a recent essay in New York Magazine that has, to use political science professor Samuel Goldman’s words, “burned up the Internet this week,” Jonathan Chait does a masterful job of articulating exactly what is wrong with political correctness. One of the most pernicious philosophical creeds in our country today, political correctness is eroding the foundation of what it means to be an American and is having a devastating effect on the very nature of our humanity. In his essay, entitled “Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say: How the Language Police are Perverting Liberalism,” Chait defines political correctness this way: “Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate.” Of course, it didn’t start out that way. Initially, the idea of political correctness was seen as a way of attempting to be more conscious about our own behavior, especially when it came to unconscious cultural bias, and this is also something that Chait very eloquently explains.

          [L]iberals are correct not only to oppose racism and sexism but to grasp (in a way conservatives
          generally do not) that these biases cast a nefarious and continuing shadow over nearly every
          facet of American life. Since race and gender biases are embedded in our social and familial
          habits, our economic patterns, and even our subconscious minds, they need to be fought with
          some level of consciousness. The mere absence of overt discrimination will not do.

So far, so good. But what became perverted was the nature of political correctness itself, until it gradually mutated into the form it commonly takes today, a cudgel used to punish those who, intentionally or not, have said or done something that a person identifying themselves with some kind of minority chooses to be offended by.

As far back as the ancient world, philosophers understood the problem with this type of thinking. The great Roman thinker and former slave--a discriminated minority if ever there was one--Epictetus wrote that, “People are disturbed not by things that happen, but by their opinions of the things that happen.” In other words there is nothing that is intrinsically offensive, instead it is our choice to be offended. Ultimately, this idea is all about self-responsibility. If I am taking responsibility for my actions, including my feelings, then I have control over my life. If I choose to be offended by the things that other say or do, then I am relinquishing that control and giving it over to the offender. And that’s no way to live. It also makes no logical sense. To go through life expecting others to accommodate you so that you’re not accidentally offended is ludicrous. It’s like walking through a field of land mines and expecting them to move out of your way so that you’re not hurt. Extending the analogy further, choosing to be offended is like getting angry with the mine for blowing you up. As minister Haddon W. Robbinson said in a different context, “What worries you masters you,” and it is clear that many marginalized minorities taking up the cause of political correctness have allowed their worries to master them.

The insidious effect of turning people into victims through the righteous indignation of political correctness is that they never develop a real sense of self-esteem. Even in the face of genuine instances of cultural insensitivity, political correctness fails. Chait cites research done by the Institute of Medicine showing that the best way to overcome culturally biased actions or language “is controlled exposure to it, and experts say avoidance can reinforce suffering. Indeed, one professor at a prestigious university told me that, just in the last few years, she has noticed a dramatic upsurge in her students’ sensitivity toward even the mildest social or ideological slights.” But that’s just the beginning of the problem. What this kind of penchant for seeking out ways to feel insulted brings about in young people is that eventually they become unable to endure criticism of any kind. In his essay, “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students,” university professor Mark Edmunson relates this story of just such an incident. “I remember a student telling me how humiliating it was to be corrected by the teacher, by me. So I asked the logical question: ‘Should I let a major factual error go by so as to save discomfort?’ The student--a good student, smart and earnest--said that was a tough question. He’d need to think about it.” This is a sad indictment of our young people and a chilling look at the future if we do nothing to stop it now.

College used to be a place where students learned--along with their course work--how to be better people. But a shift has taken place in higher education over the last twenty years, from a place where young people were exposed to new and challenging ideas, to one that merely reinforces the immature and infantile self-image of themselves they enter with. In Chait’s essay he says, “At a growing number of campuses, professors now attach ‘trigger warnings’ to texts that may upset students, and there is a campaign to eradicate ‘microaggressions,’ or small social slights that might cause searing trauma. These newly fashionable terms merely repackage a central tenet of the first p.c. movement: that people should be expected to treat even faintly unpleasant ideas or behaviors as full-scale offenses.” The result is a shift away from subjective courses of study in which students come face to face with their own inadequacies as human beings, to objective studies like science and technology where right and wrong are completely objective. Author Andrew Delbanco deals with this subject at length in his book, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. In his point of view the goal of colleges used to be “what every true teacher, at least since Socrates, has asked every student to do: engage in some serious self-examination.” But today, “college means the anxious pursuit of marketable skills in overcrowded, underresourced institutions, where little attention is paid to that elusive entity sometimes called the ‘whole person.’” It’s no wonder that with students spending their days rooting out “microaggressions,” they run the other way from the “macroaggression” that is the Socratic Method, what Edmundson calls “the animated, sometimes impolite give-and-take between student and teacher” that now “seems too jagged for current sensibilities.”

And what will these delicate students, with their hyper-sensitivity to anything they decide is “offensive,” be like in the real world? Well, they’re already out there, continuing to be fed the things they want to hear by a willing news media. As Chait writes, “Every media company knows that stories about race and gender bias draw huge audiences, making identity politics a reliable profit center.” At the same time, these “micro-victims” are trolling the Internet and using their cudgel of oppression to the point where their abuses are justified under the cover of political correctness. Chait quoties a New Republic article by Rebecca Traister saying that, “All over social media, there dwell armies of unpaid but widely read commentators, ready to launch hashtag campaigns and circulate Change.org petitions in response to the slightest of identity-politics missteps.” And while the anonymity of social media and the Internet seem fertile ground for faceless attacks on free speech, these abuses are not restricted to cyberspace, as Chait recounts in an incident on a college campus where a professor who clearly broke the law and violated a student’s Constitutional rights, nevertheless cloaked herself in the protection of political correctness to make herself the victim. “By the prevailing standards of the American criminal-justice system, [the professor] had engaged in vandalism, battery, and robbery. By the logic of the p.c. movement, she was the victim of a trigger and had acted in the righteous cause of social justice.”

But where the failure of this kind of thinking makes itself most clear, is in the inability of its supporters to think clearly at all. Living in a world of societal deconstructionism, they lack the basic understanding of logic and they foist their ill-conceived arguments on the public as if they had some kind of actual merit. A case in point is a rebuttal to Chait’s essay written by Amanda Taub called “The Truth About ‘Political Correctness’ is that It Doesn’t Exist.” Her very thesis shows her lack of intelligence. “The term’s in wide use, certainly, but has no actual fixed or specific meaning. What defines it is not what it describes but how it’s used: as a way to dismiss a concern or demand as a frivolous grievance rather than a real issue.” It doesn’t take a logician to see the fatal flaw in her argument. By changing the actual definition of the term from something that is--which is Jonathan Chait’s point--to the way it is used--which is her point--she isn’t even arguing about the same thing anymore, and the rest of her rant is therefore not a rebuttal but an excuse to make her own, separate, argument. Samuel Goldman, in his observations on the argument titled, “Yes, Political Correctness Really Exists,” calls this “a feat of rhetorical jujitsu,” which makes it seem a lot more purposeful than it really is. But let’s look at the point that Taub is making--which has absolutely nothing to do with Chait’s essay. She states,

          [P]olitical correctness . . . is a sort of catch-all term we apply to people who ask for more
          sensitivity to a particular cause than we're willing to give--a way to dismiss issues as frivolous
          in order to justify ignoring them. Worse, the charge of “political correctness” is often used by
          those in a position of privilege to silence debates raised by marginalized people--to say that
          their concerns don't deserve to be voiced, much less addressed.

This is a perfectly valid point, and an absolutely verifiable phenomenon. It just doesn’t have anything to do with political correctness as an entity. Instead, it is about using labels as a way to marginalize or eliminate argument. This is a point that Joseph E. Green makes in his new book, Dissenting Views II. In it he makes the same argument about people who use the words “conspiracy theorist” to dismiss the people espousing those theories as being somehow out of the mainstream of thought, in other words, crazy. “The term ‘conspiracy theorist’ is meant to be dismissive, obviously . . . You call someone a ‘conspiracy theorist’ to put them down or accuse them of being an intellectual outcast without having to think hard about it.” But the concept of labeling goes beyond manufacturing terms in order to dismiss particular groups. It is ubiquitous in our culture and is used in a myriad of ways by ignorant people to avoid thinking at all. In her novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee says it this way through her de facto protagonist, lawyer Atticus Finch, as he speaks to his daughter,

          “Scout,” said Atticus, “nigger-lover is just one of those terms that don’t mean anything--like
          snot-nose. It’s hard to explain--ignorant, trashy people use it when they think somebody’s
          favoring Negroes over and above themselves. It’s slipped into usage with some people like
          ourselves, when they want a common, ugly term to label somebody.”

Taub sees the use of the term “political correctness” as being wielded by those in power to marginalize those with less influence. “Arguments that get dismissed as mere ‘p.c.’ nonsense are overwhelmingly likely to be raised by people who are less privileged, and to concern issues that are outside the mainstream,” and that the attitude of those in power is “that marginalized people’s demands for inclusion are just a bunch of annoying whining, and that efforts to address their concerns are unnecessary.” What’s clear in all of this is that Taub utterly fails to understand the way p.c. demands rob people of their guaranteed right to free speech. Chait cites professor Bettina Aptheker in a recent essay stating, “Freedom of speech is a constitutional guarantee, but who gets to exercise it without the chilling restraints of censure depends very much on one’s location in the political and social cartography.” The problem is that while political correctness was an attempt to combat the subconscious abuse of minorities in our society at the hands of those in power, what it has become is an attempt to wrest the power from those in control through an assumption of shared societal shame. The complaint that Taub seems to have, is that many people aren’t buying into that shame and it angers her. At the same time, Chait sees a real danger in continuing to head down a road of righteous victimhood being used as a form of thought control:

          Liberals believe (or ought to believe) that social progress can continue while we maintain
          our traditional ideal of a free political marketplace where we can reason together as
          individuals. Political correctness challenges that bedrock liberal ideal. While politically less
          threatening than conservatism (the far right still commands far more power in American life),
          the p.c. left is actually more philosophically threatening. It is an undemocratic creed.

The irony in all of this, one that blogger Mitchell J. Freedman pointed out in his MF Blog, is that conservatives have co-opted their own brand of political correctness that centers on patriotism and the bible, and they are every bit as adept at using shame as a weapon to coerce people to their way of thinking as those on the left. “What I find sadly lacking [in the argument] is that the Right and conservatives also have political correctness . . . Political correctness on the Left is about sensitivity to racism, sexism and the like while . . . political correctness on the Right is about sensitivity to religion (one’s own of course), white males, traditional hierarchies and symbols, capitalism and the like.” But this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. If there’s an undemocratic creed to be had, you can be sure that the conservative right has every intention of using it to their advantage.

Fortunately, Jonathan Chait ends his essay on a positive note. “The p.c. style of politics has one serious, possibly fatal drawback: It is exhausting. Claims of victimhood that are useful within the left-wing subculture may alienate much of America.” And he also makes the point that our political system itself still relies on at least the appearance of free speech and thought. “Politics in a democracy is still based on getting people to agree with you, not making them afraid to disagree. The historical record of political movements that sought to expand freedom for the oppressed by eliminating it for their enemies is dismal.” Unfortunately, it still takes citizens themselves to participate in that democracy. And while Chait is confident “in the ultimate power of reason, not coercion, to triumph,” the continued undermining of the ability to reason in our culture, from the adoration and worship of small children by parents, to the demand on teachers in public schools to make classrooms “safe” and unchallenging, to a university system that no longer values self-examination--and the ultimate expression of this societal shift in the idea of political correctness--does not bode well for the future.