Our critiquing culture is creating a generation extremely comfortable confronting injustice. This may absolutely result in an era of frequent "wolf crying." Unfortunately, for every example of hypersensitivity there are tenfold examples of privileged apathy, where biases are overlooked, lives are devalued, and injustices go unaddressed. For every outraged overzealous youth, there is at least one rich, old, white man (perhaps a comedian) telling everyone to just relax.
The implicit argument against "political correctness," that "P.C." types make too much out of too little, is an unexamined premise. Who is anyone else to tell anyone that there's nothing to see here? Why is it not "politically correct" -- that is, why shouldn't we call it that -- when someone complains that their feelings are hurt, as is obviously the case, when their overlooked biases, privileged apathy, etc., are exposed, denounced, or simply mocked? The supposedly principled argument against political correctness is that some people go overboard politicizing everything, but the real visceral argument against the phenomenon is an ad hominem argument that the politically correct are simply too thin skinned for their own good or the good of society -- that they would suppress or censor things because their feelings are hurt. This is the reasoning behind facetious arguments against the "gay flag," the colors of which decorated the White House the night after the Obergefell decision. If the "gay flag" offends a reactionary, so goes this thinking, then the reactionary has just as much moral right to protest against its display as anyone has to protest the display of the Confederate flag. It's the same reasoning that leads people to believe that Donald Trump is being persecuted because his comments about immigrant rapists hurt the feelings of Hispanics and their bleeding-heart sympathizers. For all that the term "political correctness" evokes an image of doctrinaire intellectuals dictating campus speech codes on ideological grounds, many reactionaries perceive political correctness to be void of intellectual content and based entirely on emotions. They are mistaking their own reaction to political correctness with the thing itself. Nevertheless, if the reactionaries -- not counting Jerry Seinfeld, who has a different agenda if any -- want to make a case against emotionally driven, hypersensitive politics, they ought to set an example and stop whining in such an obviously hypersensitive, purely emotional way whenever anybody criticizes them. Otherwise it will look like they whine and flaunt their hurt feelings because they have no intellectual defense against those things the "politically correct" attack. If that's the case, it should be no more offensive for someone to be politically correct than it is for them to be mathematically correct, no matter how much people wish that two and two would make five.
4 comments:
Freedom of speech is good. It is set forth in the constitution. Political correctness is the direct opposite of freedom of speech. The very phrase "Political Correctness" is creepy and Orwellian. If a given idea is "correct", is is simply correct. If an given idea requires the force of politics to coerce people into pretending it is "correct", it is, clearly, incorrect. Political Correctness is a cancer destroying the fabric of our country. Those who enforce it are no better. Boo!
Remember, though, that "politically correct" is a pejorative term that no one uses to describe themselves or their own beliefs. At the same time, there are many people who feel that politics is coercing them into pretending things are correct that actually are correct, e.g. racial or gender equality. When some people cry "political correctness!" they really mean "My prejudices are sacred."
@anonymous 1: Free speech is not good. It would be good if all people involved had an equal level of education, intelligence and were dedicated to an ideal of truth. What American "freedom of speech" equates with is the "right" to say anything - regardless of truth or validity - and to insist others MUST accept it as such. There is nothing good about people being allowed to openly spread lies, misinformation, ignorance and hate and being allowed to justify it as a "right".
One other thing, anonymous. In the early days of our nation, we didn't require "political correctness" because we had dueling. I'd be more than happy to agree to an end to political correctness if we brought back dueling...as purely a matter of honor, of course.
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