Here’s my contribution to The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement Paperback , co-edited by Paul Gottfried and Richard Spencer.
The Closing of the Ring
by James Kalb
What “political correctness” means is that there are more and more topics that cannot be discussed in reputable circles, even among those who say they reject liberal orthodoxies. I have some slight personal experience in the matter, since I was recently told by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which is said to be the leading intellectual conservative publisher in America, that they would publish nothing further from me as long as I maintain a connection with The H. L. Mencken Club.
The Mencken Club is a discussion group run by Paul Gottfried. It has no political program, and no significant activities other than an annual conference that features mostly academic and journalistic speakers and is designed to provide a forum for nonliberal thought independent of “movement” conservatism. The Club has apparently contracted the intellectual equivalent of leprosy because it allows speakers to discuss group variations in intelligence and other qualities. Such issues are not the main focus of attention, which has to do with general political, cultural, philosophical, and historical issues, and the Club has no institutional position on them, but the mere fact they are sometimes discussed, and some participants are known for advocating the view that they exist and matter, was enough to lead ISI to break with everyone connected.
Such episodes make it evident that political correctness is becoming ever more stringent. Nonetheless, it is never discussed analytically. The idea seems to be that it is a natural expression of human sensitivity and loyalty to things that are obviously good, and rejecting it shows a psychological or character disorder. That lack of discussion means that our social world is being radically transformed in a way that has not been thought through. With that in mind, it seems sensible to ask what exactly political correctness is and where it comes from. Doing so should help us understand what it does, why it is so hard to fight, where it is likely to go, and what to do about it.
The nature of political correctness is fairly simple: it is the egalitarian welfare state applied to the social environment. It tells us that each of us should be able to experience his social environment as equally accepting and affirming, and everyone is required to help bring that goal about. With that in mind, political correctness demands changes that go to the heart of how people deal with each other. For example, it does not like the idea that particular kinds of people can be more or less suitable for particular positions. “More or less suitable” is the language of superiority and inferiority, and thus of discrimination and hatred. Training and job redesign are supposed to take care of whatever legitimate issues there may be. So if you are running the Navy you are expected to put women not only on submarines but in the SEALs. If you run into issues, it is your job to find a way around them.
Nor does political correctness want people to rely on complementary qualities when they form functional relationships. Some people do not have those qualities, and that puts them in a position of inferiority. So specific understandings of marriage and family have to go. Love and connectedness take many forms, and none can be preferred to any other. If you favor the traditional and natural understanding of marriage you are (as the Supreme Court recently said in the Windsor case) simply trying to injure those who prefer other sorts of connections. Nor does political correctness like old boy networks or ethnic ties. The idea seems to be that people who live and work together should build relationships based exclusively on common humanity, impersonal qualifications like academic degrees, and common devotion to fairness, diversity, and organizational mission statements.
With that in mind, political correctness does not like particular culture. That is the reason for such oddities as the attempt to replace public references to Christmas by references to Winter Holiday and the like. If culture functions, so English people do English things in English settings and Italian people do Italian things in Italian settings, that excludes others and treats their ways as less suitable. The result is that human relations have to become a combination of individual choice, managerial know-how, and psychological and social therapy that applies the same way to everyone everywhere. If Frenchmen and Chinese work better with Frenchmen and Chinese, because they see things the same way and have similar habits, that has to change, because everyone has to fit in equally well in all settings. The effect is that the cooperative habits and informal knowledge that develop within culture, and are responsible for the distinctive achievements of all civilizations, have to be eliminated.
The whole project is obviously disconnected from reality. It is radically at odds with how human life works, so it can be relied on to make people cruder, stupider, less functional, and more isolated. At some level people know that, so most people find political correctness and its demands stupid and disruptive. But if it is so bad, and people know it, why are so many intelligent, experienced, and responsible people so firmly committed to it? Why does everything count in its favor and nothing against it?
People sometimes say it is because of the media, or social pressure, or an odd kind of competitive status seeking that claims superiority on the ground that one is less bigoted (and therefore more egalitarian) than other people. All that is no doubt true in its way, but why do those forces all point in the direction they do? Resentment mongering might explain some of it, but resentments are universal, and they are normally ignored or suppressed unless they are considered justified. If low status white people resent “affirmative action,” for example, that is considered a sign of racism that proves the need to redouble efforts.
To some extent the situation can be explained on semi-Marxist grounds. People whose position and wealth comes from money, bureaucratic position, and professional qualifications want to get rid of other competing principles of authority like family, religion, local community, and particular culture. They do not like connections like sex and culture that do not lend themselves to quantification, supervision, and control by those at the top. So it is not surprising that people at the top like political correctness, which says in effect that all such messy opaque connections, distinctions, and authorities have to be done away with. Everything has to be put on a bureaucratic or monetary basis <so it can be supervised and controlled. Experts, bureaucrats, lawyers, managers, therapists, and people with tons of money should run everything, because they are the ones who run the only institutions that are allowed to work.
And in fact the great age of political correctness has turned out to be the great age of inequality based on money, organizational position, educational certification, and so on. The radical equality political correctness demands does not extend to dimensions of social identity that have to do with liberal institutions and their functioning. The selective targeting of nonliberal connections has in fact contributed to inequality by destroying solidarity among ordinary people, along with habits, attitudes, and arrangements such as religion and family life that help them lead orderly, decent, and productive lives. That is one reason the last couple of decades have seen Oprah become a billionaire, and the average life expectancy of uneducated white women decline by five years. Oligarchs used to worry about rebellion on the part of the enraged masses, but the problem is less pressing if the masses can be reduced to a fragmented lumpenproletariat, and that is what political correctness does.
Still, that explanation is not completely satisfying either, since it does not show why political correctness is immune to experience. People who are trying to run things do not really want to turn the populace into a degraded mass of not-so-functional people, like those Charles Murray and Theodore Dalrymple write about. Nonetheless, the more social dysfunction political correctness causes and the more its assumption of comprehensive equality on certain dimensions of human identity is falsified the more fanatical its supporters become. People at the top really do believe in it, and cannot imagine doing otherwise. They view it as an essential part of what it means to be a legitimate human being, and the higher their IQ and the more years of schooling they have the more fervent their belief.
What such features of the situation show is that political correctness has to do with the basic ways educated public thought makes sense of human life. That means it has to do with fundamental concepts of what is real, reasonable, and valuable that precede all particular judgments of reality and practicality. When political correctness is the issue, normal ways of judging political and social policy simply do not apply.
Educated public thought today is based on the attempt to make knowledge rigorous and human action sovereign over nature. That attempt has led to modern science and technology, and it has also led to political correctness. The relationship is clear. The politically correct demands mentioned above all insist on abolishing the effect of traditional social arrangements that cannot be made clear and controllable, like those relating to sex, family, religion, ethnicity, and particular culture. Instead, we must have enlightenment, which means rule by arrangements that supposedly are simply rational, like neutral expert bureaucracies.
The point of the new arrangements is supposed to be facilitating the achievement of whatever goals people happen to have. We are not going to base anything on questionable claims about highest goods, natural law, or objective moral order. Instead, we will go with preferences, which are concrete and demonstrable. Once we do that, though, equality becomes the obvious standard: people equally have preferences, and their preferences are equally such, so all people and all preferences have an equal claim to fulfillment. (An exception is that non-politically correct preferences, which do not fit the system, get squashed.)
One preference almost everyone has is a preference for the esteem of other people, so that should be equalized as well. Esteem, after all, has to do with value, and value is thought to be subjective and therefore changeable through training. And since people give social respect very high priority, that kind of equality should get high priority as well. So in a very few steps rationalizing ways of thought applied to the construction of social environment bring us to political correctness: mandated equality of status, acceptance, and esteem, at least with respect to qualities the liberal system does not believe it needs to function.
And here we come to a paradox, since political correctness is, among other things, antiscientific. It forbids inquiry, crushes dissenters, insists on falsehood, and has led to scientific fraud, and to retaliation and in some cases even physical force against researchers. It must do so to exist. For an outlook on life to work it must fit the world as it is. So if you insist on political correctness you must insist that the world is egalitarian or can be made so without serious damage. The technocratic culture that insists on political correctness also insists that evidence, reason, neutral expertise, and science have the highest possible authority. Unfortunately, those things tell us that there are human differences that are both stubborn and important. So there is a problem, and it can only be solved by absolute insistence that none of those things tell us what they evidently tell us but instead confirm the wisdom and practicality of political correctness. If there seem to be conflicts, political correctness comes first, because people care about social status and personal experiences more than about scientific rigor.
To all appearances pretty much everyone who matters agrees with that solution when the issue comes up. When James Watson and Larry Summers got beaten up by the forces of political correctness, they did not respond that the evidence says what it says, they agreed with their attackers. Indeed, the more the evidence indicates conclusions that are not politically correct, the more everyone has to ignore, deny, or reinterpret it. That is why the demands of political correctness become ever more far-reaching. They involve inversion of fundamental social realities for the sake of a cause that is understood to be absolutely fundamental. Such a project, if it is to be kept up, must increase in fanaticism as the profundity of the barriers to its success become more apparent. As the logic of the situation develops, speaking directly and openly on an ever broader array of issues becomes disruptive and out of place in any orderly discussion. Hence the constant narrowing of permissible opinion, discussion, and association, as recently exemplified by the reaction of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute to participation in The H. L. Mencken Club. Whatever else may be said of ISI’s conduct, it was not idiosyncratic but reflects the environment in which they are operating.
Political correctness leads to odd consequences that are not seen as such because it results from a flaw at the heart of the project that defines liberal modernity, the attempt to make the technological outlook a general outlook on life. That project cannot succeed, because it demands an impossible degree of neutral rigor. Neutrality and rigor are achieved at the cost of narrowing focus, for example by excluding qualitative issues in favor of what is measurable. The result is that some things cannot be made rigorous, and in particular social life cannot be understood as mechanism, human beings cannot be turned into components let alone equal components of an infinitely adjustable machine, and esteem cannot be manufactured and divided up equally.
The reason people today want to extend the technological outlook in an obviously unjustifiable way to the whole of social life is that it is seen as uniquely valid, and that is important when it comes to basic social principle. A social order needs to be seen as entitled to respect, and it becomes entitled to respect by expressing the accepted understanding of what makes sense. Today it is the technological understanding that people find most convincing, so the social order has to express that understanding. Otherwise people will not look at it and say “that makes sense so I will go with it.”
That requirement, which requires all social relations to become technological, is what leads to political correctness. Technology does not distinguish good and bad purposes, so free to be you and me has to be the watchword. Technology does not distinguish beneficiaries, so everyone should be treated equally and get what he wants equally. Technology wants to control the whole of visible reality, because modern science aims at that kind of universal understanding, so social engineering should apply to everything in sight, and the government should be responsible for the total social environment.
To give up on that responsibility would be to give up on the application of reason to human life. It would say that the form of reason that defines rational action, which is now thought to be technology, applies to producing and distributing hamburgers but not to producing and distributing things we care about much more, like social position. People would find that intolerable, because man is a social and rational animal who needs to believe that the social principles that define who he is, demand his allegiance, and tell him what he should respect and disdain are reasonable in the highest degree. Otherwise he will not really accept them or the authority of the social order they define. He will think of that order as an arbitrary alien force that he wants to get out from under. People do not want to live that way, and social authorities do not want them to take that view, so the authorities are always going to identify themselves and what they stand for with what is considered highest and most reasonable and authoritative. Today that means they must identify themselves with a fully technological point of view that treats the social order as a sort of machine for producing satisfactions and distributing them equally. As shown above, that means political correctness.
It is worth noting that what matters from the standpoint of social authority is technology as image and ritual rather than actual technology. Actual technology is a boring drudge that sometimes helps us and sometimes does not. In order to become the highest social principle it has to become symbolic. It is the function of institutions like the Supreme Court and figures like Barack Obama to make it so. What the Supreme Court does is dress up in robes, engage in rituals, and produce oracles that tell us that the legal order is rational, politically correct, and worthy of allegiance. Our current president, just by being who he is and performing ritual acts like giving speeches, appearing on “The View,” and coming out openly for “gay marriage,” is thought to dispel dark and irrational forces and bring us into a new world of freedom, equality, and enlightenment. And all institutions must express their allegiance to the new order, an allegiance that constantly needs to be reaffirmed because of the shakiness of the intellectual basis of that order, by identifying and expelling dissidents. It is on such rituals, which identify the social and the sacred with the technological, that legitimacy depends in our age.
If what I have said is so, and the problem is the merger of reason, technology, and the sacred, what do we do about it? The obvious way back to sanity is an understanding of reason that makes it possible to think about human relations and the social order in a more sensible way. In principle such an understanding would make a great deal of sense, because a comprehensive technological outlook is far less rational than it claims to be. Its irrationality is demonstrated by the impossibility today of discussing social issues in an honest and straightforward way.
The point of modern science and technology is exact prediction and control. That means that it emphasizes quantity and specific causal mechanism. That is the reason people insist on statistics and studies when they discuss anything whatever today. That way of thinking is extremely powerful where it applies, but its usefulness soon runs out. For example, the normal way to understand extremely complex evolved functional systems like human societies is not mathematics and mechanism but experience and typical configuration, functioning, and goals: in other words, what kind of society it is, how it is organized, and how it normally works and to what ends. The problem is more like understanding the conduct of an acquaintance or life and habits of an animal than the workings of an automobile.
There is no reason to believe that mechanistic understandings can generally replace more intuitive ones, or that they bring us to the true reality of things while the latter only give us a mythical version. It is therefore necessary to expand what counts as rational thought beyond the technological. So the obvious way out of the hole we are in is to embed the specialized form of reasoning used in the hard sciences, which emphasizes number and what Aristotle called material and efficient cause—that is to say, matter and the forces that immediately affect it and make it do things—within a larger conception of reason that allows us to deal with situations in which the methods of the hard sciences do not tell us much. In other words, we need to add to the mix Aristotle’s formal and final cause, the functional configurations things typically fall into and the goals those configurations typically bring about, as well as classical natural law, which is basically a statement of how human life and goals should be arranged so that they work best together. Without those additions we will be stuck with a social constructivism that falsifies human life, does not help us understand and deal with it effectively, and leads to absurdities like political correctness.
So our task is to dethrone what is now treated as the highest standard for reason and reality and replace it with something else. That, of course, is a big job, but the case is not hopeless. The outlook now official does not work well, it is not a natural one for human beings, it has many intellectual and popular critics, and it requires a system of constant propaganda and re-education to maintain its dominance. Nor is its current degree of dominance something that has existed for long. Before the upheavals of the Sixties cultural and religious traditions had much greater legitimacy in public discussion, as displayed for example by repeated references to Christian civilization by Winston Churchill and others. The dominance of the technological standard came about as a result of a revolution in thought, and failing revolutions may stumble on for a while but they do not last forever.
What the technocratic outlook has going for it, in addition to its alliance with powerful institutions, is the difficulty of finding an alternative that meets with general agreement. It is based on a few principles that are difficult to dispute, like the validity of modern natural science and the effectiveness of modern technology, together with the (usually implicit) claim that those principles are sufficient for public life and thought. To replace the current outlook those who dispute it must put forward additional principles, but none of those put forward has found nearly the same degree of acceptance, so none has become usable as part of public reason.
One reason progress is so difficult is that the technological outlook is so well-guarded on its own terms. It makes rejection of perspectives that fall outside its scope a matter of basic principle in the name of verification and Occam’s Razor. Extended argument is needed to establish other principles, the technological outlook encourages the view that long arguments are unreliable, and the media-saturated world that technology has created discourages people from attending to them in any event. So more than argument will be needed to establish and maintain a cohesive scheme of principles that goes beyond the technological and is able to attract the support needed to serve as the basis for public discussion.
Such a scheme must develop as part of a tradition that people live by. The technological outlook established itself step-by-step in ever more aspects of life until it reached its current position of extreme dominance, and a counter-tradition would have to do the same. But how could if do so in an ever more centralized, cosmopolitan, commercialized, bureaucratized, and media-saturated world, and in the face of an opposing view that is armored against external influence?
The obvious way that might come about is through the growth to dominance of some religious community based on a broader and more functional understanding of knowledge and reality. The technological outlook does not offer a satisfying way of life, so loyalty tends to be weak at the individual level. It is hard to solve the problems at that level through individual lifestyle choices, since the problems arose by making such choices the supreme standard. We should therefore expect the prospect of moral community offered by religious commitment to become increasingly appealing as daily life continues its slide into triviality and chaos. As such communities increase in importance we should expect those stuck with the burden of ruling an increasingly dysfunctional world eventually to stop fighting and start relying on them. That is how the Roman Empire became Christian, and more recently how independent deal makers came to dominate Russia and China. What cannot go on will not go on, and a social world based on a hopelessly narrow and inadequate understanding of knowledge and reality that makes discussion impossible will not last forever. The only serious political issue today is what will replace it and how.
[The foregoing essay incorporates material that first appeared online in two pieces on inclusiveness published in November [and December] of 2013 in Crisis Magazine.]