The Bane of Political Correctness

“As you know, very recently the secretary of state proclaimed his loyalty to a man guilty of what has always been considered as the most abominable of all crimes — of being a traitor to the people who gave him a position of great trust.  The secretary of state, in attempting to justify his continued devotion to the man who sold out the Christian world to the atheistic world, referred to Christ's Sermon on the Mount as a justification and reason therefore, and the reaction of the American people to this would have made the heart of Abraham Lincoln happy. When this pompous diplomat in striped pants, with a phony British accent, proclaimed to the American people that Christ on the Mount endorsed communism, high treason, and betrayal of a sacred trust, the blasphemy was so great that it awakened the dormant indignation of the American people.   He has lighted the spark which is resulting in a moral uprising and will end only when the whole sorry mess of twisted warped thinkers are swept from the national scene so that we may have a new birth of national honesty and decency in government.”
                             

Senator Joseph McCarthy, Wheeling, West Virginia, 9 February 1950.
 
 McCarthyism and political correctness differ in little except depth and duration.   While McCarthyism’s mass hysteria is, of course, alive and well in the United States today, McCarthyism never sunk into American society as deeply or damaged it as irreparably as political correctness.
             

I had my first real encounter with political correctness in the 1980’s when I taught at Harvard, now its bastion.    Political correctness hung like a fog over our department and eliminated all free discussion.   We knew what we were supposed to say and the ostracism we faced if we didn’t say it.   This went well beyond the control of our thoughts to the control of our behavior, and our acceptance depended much more on appearing political correct than it did on actually being politically correct.
            

Political correctness has achieved ascendancy in the United States and gotten Americans to think what they don’t think by threating to ruin their lives if they don’t think what they don’t think, like McCarthyism, except that McCarthyism kept us under its thumb just for a few years while political correctness has continued to do so for decades.     As a result, we have a society based on people who don’t believe what they say they do, or, more likely, don’t dare to decide whether they do or not, for fear of questioning what they know they aren’t supposed to question, and who hope to get by on impressions.   The surface, therefore, bears no relationship with what exists underneath, if anything, in fact, does, and this had to crash at some point, as it now has with Trump.
              

For decades everybody at Harvard and places like Harvard have made a big point of their political correctness in order to convince others of their virtue, leading you to suspect they most want to convince themselves, and everybody has gone along with them.  This has kept society afloat on mutual self-congratulation and shingled our roof farther and farther out into the fog, and for the past thirty years I have predicted that, if highly intelligent people shackle themselves to a thin veneer like this, one day it had to come to roost, although I didn’t exactly predict November 8, 2016.
              

Political correctness bears no resemblance with the deep beliefs in fairness and democracy of my parents’ generation of the 1950’s and 1960’s.   Today’s political correctness, in contrast, requires no deep beliefs and is intended only for display, like rules of etiquette, except that rules of etiquette don’t have anywhere near the endless complexity of political correctness’s rules or their harsh consequences.
              

Political correctness purports to have the greatest conscience in the world without having any at all.    For instance, those who espouse political correctness, after creating Trump, take no responsibility for it whatsoever.    The damage much deeper than Trump, though.   Political correctness has hollowed out our society and led to the creation a people who have abandoned all independent judgment and personal discretion.
                   

We are here to discuss the bane of political correctness. The political correctness has sunk the American society as deeply damaged. While we run behind political correctness, we know what to do and what should be our further steps to work, but our thoughts are always controlled by our behaviours. Political Correctness has been ruining our society for decades. 

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Created on Mar 12th 2020 02:32. Viewed 217 times.

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