Political Correctness (PC) is a term that has undergone a lot of change in meaning and usage over the last few decades. The usage I will be talking about is defined in Wikipedia: “This phenomenon was driven by a combination of the linguistic turn in academia and the rise of identity politics both inside and outside of it. These led to attempts to change social reality by changing language, with attempts at making language more culturally inclusive and gender-neutral.” As the article also points out, this is one of those places where good intentions have been badly twisted. These days calling something politically correct is often meant or taken as an insult.
Political correctness is closely linked to tolerance and free speech, and how all these mesh into goat sacrificing will be the topic of this essay.
Tolerance is defined as the ability or willingness to put up with something, in particular opinions or behaviors that one does not agree with. This is an important virtue in civilized living, and it becomes more and more important as prosperity allows people to support more diverse living styles.
Although tolerance is important, it is at odds with instinctive Us versus Them thinking. Specifically, it is easy to define “Them” as people who are doing things differently or expressing different opinions about how things should be in the world. And it's easy to get worried about what someone is up to if they are a “Them”. At the cool-headed analytic-level, the virtue of tolerance is well recognized. But instinctive Us versus Them thinking is powerful, and it keeps finding ways of sneaking in to actions taken in the real world to pervert efforts at tolerance.
Free speech is a pillar of tolerance - people should be able to say what they think, even if it is uncomfortable for other people to hear it. This is the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights: Freedom of Speech. Freedom of Speech was included in the Constitution for a very good reason: Colonial Americans recognized more clearly than their British Empire counterparts that heart-thinking without good head-thinking lead to actions that were out of touch with harsh reality and thus expensive because they didn’t work. The best way to prevent this was straight talk - pointing out painful truths that would put an end to a heart-felt plan while it was still being planned.
The First Amendment made good sense at the head-level. But ever since, heart-level-thinking has been trying to sneak in what I call “yes, but”. For example: “Yes, of course free speech is protected, but hate speech is damaging so it must be stopped.” Because heart-felt “yes, but’s” are constantly cropping up, tolerance and free speech must be vigilantly protected - they don’t protect themselves.
Heart-level-thinking is the foundation for sacrificing free speech and tolerance in the name of Political Correctness.
As described in the above-cited Wiki article the Political Correctness concept was renewed again in academic circles in the 1990's as an “improvement” on free speech. The goal was to improve society by refining how people use language. This is a timeless goal. Developing polite society speaking styles is an ongoing example that dates back to the Agricultural Age. In the case of the 1990’s politically correct speech movement, one goal was to make language more culturally inclusive and gender neutral. An enduring benefit was the introduction of “Ms” as a title for females who didn’t want to reveal their marital status and deal with the implications that flowed from that in the workplace environment. But there were a lot of choices that just made speaking more cumbersome such as not allowing “he” to be an androgynous pronoun. This leads to, “When he or she is driving his or her car down the road he or she must watch for uncovered person-holes.” Another effect was to roll out yet another generation of euphemisms. African-American replaced Black, which had replaced Negro, which had replaced Colored - all of these within my lifetime. New Speak in George Orwell’s book, 1984, is another, darker, example.
This noble aspiration of improving our lives by improving our language is another aspiration that gets twisted by Us versus Them thinking. The pitfall in this case is prescriptionism. “You shouldn’t use that old term because it is bad thinking. And the action it describes is a bad action. And if you didn’t use the word, you wouldn’t be thinking that way. You’d be thinking my way, the one right way.” This is de facto intolerance… but very comfortable to the person declaring the right way. The goat sacrificing here is the waste caused by delusion: Not being able to talk about harsh reality means not being able to deal well with it.
The delusions associated with “right speaking” start as being silly, but they can become extreme and develop teeth. The teeth can be law changes, such as passing hate crime legislation, or vigorous, sometimes violent, protesting. This 14 May 14 WSJ editorial, “Bonfire of the Humanities: Christine Lagarde is the Latest Ritualistic Burning of a College-Commencement Heretic” by Daniel Henninger, tells how Brandeis, Smith and Haverford College had speakers withdraw from 2014 commencement speeches because of students protesting their beliefs. From the article, “No one could possibly count the compromises of intellectual honesty made on American campuses to reach this point. It is fantastic that the liberal former head of Berkeley should have to sign a Maoist self-criticism to be able to speak at Haverford. Meet America's Red Guards.” The article goes on to comment about the gradual “disintegration of the humanities into what is virtually agitprop on many campuses….Professors of Economics and the hard sciences roll their eyes in embarrassment at what has happened to once respectable liberal-arts departments at their institutions.”
“Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”
This nursery rhyme dates to the 1860's at least. I remember being taught this as a five year old by a pair of mothers when I was getting taunted by two older boys outside their house. I wanted the moms to come out and tell the boys to stop. Instead they told me, “Go out and tell them that.” I did, and, no surprise to me, it didn't change their behavior in the least. “Ah well... So much for the power of magic chants” was my reaction at the time. Even at that tender age I was skeptical of magic.
To my surprise, in the 1990s, the converse of this came to have great weight in US academic circles - words can hurt you! This was the foundation for invoking hate speech and political correctness regulations, first on college campuses, then in business circles and various government legal systems.
Wow! How times had changed since my childhood!
This change has not helped our communities. This is a case of good intentions powered by from-the-heart-feelings getting twisted, and the twist is creating a lot of waste and sacrificing in our communities. The goal, the bright side, was to make it easier for diverse people to cooperate - if people are polite to each other they can work together more easily. Sounds good, but effective cooperating is rooted in tolerance and understanding the circumstances. Mutual understanding of the harsh realities being encountered calls for good analytic-thinking and straight speaking, not euphemism and talking around issues. Here is a list of some dark sides I see to PC that interfere with free speech or result in waste.
There is one more big bright side to this free speech issue that should be recognized. While PC and various other language controlling movements have been a chronic threat to free speech, the communications revolution has been a huge benefactor to it. When the USSR broke up in 1989, I was expecting a bloodbath. I was expecting it because there had been bloodbaths associated with every previous social revolution in the 20th century. When the transition happened comparatively peacefully, I thought about what had changed? The change was the vast improvement in what people could report from on-the-spot, as in, first being able to take videos with small, portable cameras, and then a decade later being able to transmit them over the Internet.
This ability to report on-the-spot violence has reduced violence dramatically because it can’t be covered up. It’s an example of technology helping reveal harsh reality - doing so has reduced delusion and made our lives a lot better.
Controlling speech to eliminate bad speech sounds like a good idea. But it is in fact a costly concept in civilized living conditions. Like much other goat sacrificing it is done with the best of intentions. But because good intentions are not followed by cool-headed observation of the speech monitoring process, they get twisted. In practice, the result becomes waste (and in this case, ironic twisting), because the aspiration of people getting along better is twisted into hateful intolerance. Further irony takes place as people learn to get thin-skinned, and the bad speech gains its magic power! It can hurt! The more this happens the more difficult it becomes to cooperate and explore new ideas.
The PC movement is far from the only attack that has been mounted on free speech. It is just one example. This is why tolerance is something that needs to be constantly taught, meaningfully taught, and then vigilantly monitored. And it is why free speech is such an important pillar of civilized living.