Here’s a chapter from 2008 for a projected collection of essays. The book never got published, but here’s what I wrote:
PC and the Destruction of Culture
by James Kalb
Political correctness is an odd tendency. It does not fit in with how people normally think about things, so no one knows what to make of it. We try to laugh it off, but it does not laugh off. It seems too stupid to be real but it trumps everything all the same.
Nature of PC
To discuss what it is we must define it. By “political correctness,” then, I mean insistence on standards and practices thought necessary to ensure equal respect and treatment for people regardless of identity and lifestyle.
The goal is interpreted quite broadly. The point is not that people should be treated the same in official settings, or that they are equal on basic points, so that they all have souls, the right to a fair trial if accused, and the right not to be murdered, beaten, robbed, or swindled. It is that they should get equal respect and consideration in all the affairs of life, and it is intolerable when that is denied them on grounds related to who they are.
Implications
To be politically correct is to make that principle the supreme standard of social life. The effects of doing so are quite far-reaching. One effect is that we are required to consider every way of life and configuration of human qualities that is felt to affect personal identity to be as good as every other. Otherwise, our evaluation of people will be related to who they are.
The practical result of that requirement is denial of reality. To avoid denigrating people we must avoid believing they differ in ways that make some less good than others in some respect. So we must believe that men and women are the same, Islam is never a problem, and every 17-year-old in Los Angeles can be taught to understand trigonometry and quadratic functions.1 If we do not believe all those things, then some women will suffer discrimination, some Muslims will feel unwanted, and some young people, especially those from less fortunate backgrounds, will be told that they are inferior. Such results are now considered altogether intolerable.
The problem, of course, is that people and groups differ in all sorts of ways, some of which matter a great deal. To some extent political correctness admits the point, but tries to defuse it by “celebrating diversity”—by claiming that all differences are positive. Instead of believing people fall into types that are better and worse in some way, we must view everyone as special, each in his own way. If someone has an attachment—an ethnic or religious connection, a configuration of sexual habits—and feels it as part of who he is, that is part of what makes him special, and we must view it as a general benefit to society.
A New Religion
Such views are obviously nonsensical. Some diversity in some respects is good, other diversity in other respects is bad, and it is silly to claim otherwise. The evident falsity of PC beliefs does not, however, lead to their rejection, but rather strengthens them by ruling out discussion and obliging us to simple-minded support. You are suspect if you moderate PC in any way, for example by suggesting that while groups are equal in value there are group differences that matter. Anything short of the most comprehensive egalitarianism means you claim the right to compare, question, and distinguish, and that makes you unreliable.
Something that transforms normal understandings so completely must have transcendent importance, and it is evident that PC relates to something big. What it relates to, in fact, is a new gospel: the gospel of equal concern. That new gospel, we are told, is the same as the old, only better. It completes and corrects the previous version, and cuts out irrelevant and embarrassing archaisms. It moves heaven down to earth, and makes it available to us here and now if we only accept what we are told. It will destroy the demons of the past—hatred, bigotry, division—and establish a new age of freedom, equality, unity, world peace, and unbounded horizons.
In respectable mainstream churches the new gospel has largely replaced the old. The forms and language mostly remain the same but the content is quite different. I went to a wedding recently in a rather beautiful Episcopal church in an old Pennsylvania town. Instead of the Stations of the Cross on the wall, they had the stations of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals—gender equality, fighting HIV, global partnership, and so on.2 The substitution was no fluke. In mainstream churches traditional religion has largely given way to psychological therapy and social betterment, and “mission” has come to mean promotion of secular social progress. The form of progress that is most urgently needed, it is thought, is elimination of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on.
Destructiveness
To be sure, there are arguments for such views. Love of neighbor involves respect and consideration for specific persons, regardless of description and social position. The principle of equal concern can therefore be seen as a restatement of Christian principles. So how, proponents ask, could a Christian or any decent human being fail to favor it?
The answer, of course, is that Christian love of neighbor is part of a larger moral scheme. As such, it is subordinate to love of God, and thus to respect for the created world and its moral order. When taken out of that setting and made absolute, it deprives us of any standard other than human wishes, so that arbitrary will replaces natural law. For that reason the new gospel is going to bring us not utopia but the reign of willfulness, and therefore stupidity, brutality, and corruption.
Distortions of thought
The proponents of PC play the role of prophets. As such, they do not take kindly to contradiction. People who reject their version of righteousness or their miraculous transformation of reality are heretics who have separated themselves not only from respectable society but from decency, rationality, and probably the human race.
The distortions of thought that are demanded go very far. When a black worker in Connecticut was fired for theft, and responded by killing eight co-workers, the big question in the press was whether white racism was the explanation.3 When an incompetent Muslim army officer, who held his position only because of affirmative action,4 decided to do jihad and killed a dozen of his fellow soldiers, the response of the Army Chief of Staff was that “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”5
Such reactions make sense from a PC standpoint. If equal consideration is the highest standard, then racism and xenophobia are principles of absolute evil. They are also pervasive, since it is natural for human beings to have particular ties and loyalties, and thus to discriminate and exclude. Under such circumstances, the perpetual struggle against bigotry and exclusion takes priority over everything else. If someone who is presumptively a victim of racism or xenophobia kills those presumed his tormentors it is therefore wrong to focus on the guilt of the killer at the expense of his victimization. To do so would divert attention from a supremely important social issue to a distracting and inflammatory detail, and that is not the sort of thing a responsible official or journalist would do.
Distortions of policy
The effect of ideals is determined not by the intentions of those who hold them, which may be good, bad, or confused, but by their effect on the workings of society. Practical problems caused by PC are obvious to anyone willing to notice them. In education, for example, it has meant non-stop indoctrination in place of learning, attempts to remodel boys and girls to make them indistinguishable, and the sacrifice of standards in order to eliminate gaps, especially those among ethnic groups, in participation and achievement.
The latter effort has been especially destructive. The surest way to eliminate gaps, and thus satisfy what is now considered our most pressing educational need, is to abolish discipline, to hire, admit, and promote by quota, and to give everyone high grades. Those are also sure ways to create stupidity, mendacity, and chaos. Stupidity and mendacity are tolerable in a bureaucratic setting, so quotas and grade inflation are here to stay, but chaos causes immediate practical problems. The response has been to enforce basic discipline (no weapons in school!) but eliminate discrimination by eliminating discretion. Hence the plague of “zero tolerance” policies that have resulted, for example, in sentencing a six-year-old Cub Scout to 45 days in reform school because he brought a camping utensil to school that could be used as a knife as well as a fork or spoon. It appears that it would have been discriminatory to distinguish a middle-class Cub Scout with a camping tool from a lower-class gang member with a switchblade.6
More generally, PC has meant a variety of irrational, expensive, and destructive initiatives throughout public life. Political demands to close the home-ownership gap by lending more money to ethnic minorities led to reckless mortgage loans and thence to the 2008 financial collapse in America.7 Women and homosexuals must be included everywhere, so we now have gay youth leaders (many of whom have their own reasons for being attracted to the work)8 and ever-expanding efforts to transform the culture of science and the military to make them more female-friendly. And a major reason for recent policy failures in the Middle East has been the stubbornly-held view that the overthrow of Arab governments by invasion or revolution would naturally bring immediate radical change for the better. All men want freedom, democracy, and consumer satisfactions, the theory goes, and it would be racist to doubt the ability of Arabs and Muslims to secure those universally-recognized goods for themselves once old structures are eliminated and free elections can be held.9
Destruction of Culture
Serious though such consequences have been, the problems go far deeper, to the very roots of civilized life. A basic problem is that in principle PC destroys culture simply as such. That may not be obvious, since it claims to like culture so much that it insists on equal respect for all cultures, thus encouraging a hundred flowers to bloom. In fact, it kills them all, thereby making a tolerable social world impossible.
The problem is that culture is not something we do by ourselves. It involves habits, attitudes, expectations, and beliefs that we are entitled to rely on, and that give us and our fellows a common understanding of what the world is like, what life is about, how we should act, and what we can expect from others. If we are to accomplish anything most of what we do and rely on others to do must go without saying. Culture enables that unspoken part of life to become a complex functional system and so enables us to live socially.
Man is social, so culture enables him to be human. The problem with multicultural inclusiveness is that every culture is particular, and whatever the culture some people—gays, Wiccans, Somali immigrants or whoever—are not part of it. PC tells us that such people must be included and receive equal consideration in every setting. Their identities are bound up with their cultures, though, and it would be exclusionary to subject them to the assumptions of a culture not their own—to act like Christmas is something to celebrate, for example. The result is that cultural assumptions must be progressively eradicated from public settings, and it becomes impossible for culture to function.
Cultures get in each other’s way, and there is no PC way to resolve the conflict. How, for example, can codes of manners, or ideals of sexual conduct, or standards regarding family obligations, or expectations of reliability in this situation or that carry any weight, when they differ among different peoples and each version must receive equal respect? Since it is functioning culture that creates the human world we inhabit, the result in principle is the end of that world. Attempts can be made to fill the gap by ever-more-comprehensive systems of regulation, training and control, but such attempts inevitably fail.
Feral children—children raised apart from human society, perhaps by wild animals or on account of abuse—have apparently existed, but they have been very different from Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. They have lacked many normal human qualities because they have lacked culture. In its perfection, PC would turn us all into feral children. In some ways it has already done so. Indications such as crime rates, family life, everyday manners, popular entertainment, and political participation suggest that in spite of the PC emphasis on mutual respect, and in spite of the time and money spent on education, training, and social therapy, people in the West have become much less social, cultured, and respectful of each other.10 Without common habits, attitudes, and expectations that can be relied on they are not a people, and do not act as if they shared common interests.
Such problems are sometimes blamed directly on immigrant and other minority communities, but such communities suffer most of all from the disintegration of culture. It is less immigrants than their descendants, formed by diversity, deracination, the welfare state, politically-correct schooling, and the consumer society, who get into trouble.11 Blaming social problems on the resistance of majority populations to multiculturalism is even more aside the point. Their desire to maintain the personal and cultural networks that give them a comparatively civilized way of life is praiseworthy, however opposed it may be to official ideology. Even liberals accept special measures to preserve a threatened minority culture, but in a globalized world all cultures are threatened minority cultures. So why not act to preserve them?
Intellectual Sources
Blatant falsity—the big lie—is often advantageous, especially in a complex society that relies on claims of special expertise, but it cannot be the fundamental reason for the dominance of political correctness. If people have odd and destructive beliefs that they stick to no matter what, it probably shows there is something wrong with how they are making sense of things. If the oddity pervades an entire society, it is likely to show a problem in the fundamental understandings that are generally accepted.
The social need for meaning
Basic principles matter. They determine a form of life: what things are, what they mean, what can be thought, what can be said, and what can be done. Conversely, the conditions of life limit what understandings can have social authority. Some limitations relate to particular conditions, the society’s technological level for example, but others apply always and everywhere.
In particular, every society must hold in common some view that shows how the world makes sense and how human life fits into it. In other words, it must accept something that functions as a religion. That is almost a logical requirement. To understand their own actions people have to understand their position in the world and how their actions connect to the world to advance something worth advancing. Otherwise action is pointless, and we cannot look at what we do that way. To be literary, we cannot—and do not—live in the world according to Samuel Beckett.
The requirement is not only individual. Society depends on common efforts, and the efforts must make sense to those participating. It is possible of course for a particular undertaking with limited objectives to make sense to participants who understand it very differently. Churchill and Stalin could cooperate against Hitler, and Westerners can engage in simple barter relationships with animist hunter-gatherers.
Nonetheless, such relationships become unworkable as their objectives and the kinds of cooperation they demand become more complex and enduring. Something as all-inclusive as a human society could not function without broad agreement on basic principles. The industrialization of social life and expansion of state responsibilities to include childcare, education, healthcare, social welfare, and social attitudes generally makes that need more acute and comprehensive than ever.
Liberal thinkers such as John Rawls claim that agreement on basic issues is unnecessary in liberal society because reasonable beliefs however divergent can lead to practical conclusions that are sufficiently similar to guide the activities of government.12 Who believes it, in an age in which state initiatives permeate social life to the extent they do today? Whatever anyone says, there always has to be an established religion or something equivalent. That is why present-day liberal society, which supposedly values freedom and diversity of opinion, features nonstop indoctrination in schools, workplaces, and the media.
Radical secularism is an illusion. If you try to get rid of religion, you are not going to get rid of religion. Instead, you will get some scheme of attitude and belief that functions as a religion while pretending neutrality, and is likely to go off in strange directions because it cannot be discussed and understood as what it is.
Meaning and modernity
Officially, at least, the modern West has given up on the idea of an intrinsic moral structure of things. That is part of what is understood as the scientific outlook. The world is atoms and the void, together with human subjectivity that is somehow splatted into the purely mechanical world described by modern physics.
That stripped-down view of reality creates problems when applied to human life as a whole. One is that it allows the world to have no purpose other than whatever purpose we give it. Our purposes differ, however, so saying the purpose of the world is the purpose “we” give it tells us nothing. Also, it seems odd for a purpose we invent to be a rationally compelling reason for doing something. Rightness is the guide and justification of decision. How then can decision determine rightness? How can something become the right thing to do just because someone decides to do it?
There are two basic solutions to those problems within modernity, the fascist one and the liberal one. The fascist solution is to say that purposes are objectively binding, and therefore provide a standard of what is right, if you get beaten up when you do not go along with them. On that view the purposes that count are the purposes of whoever is in a position to do the beating—that is, whoever is the top man on the top team. On such a view, the basic principles of government and indeed social order are “we are number one” and “the will of the leader is the highest law.”
The liberal solution
That is a wonderfully clear system and has some logic behind it, but it was tried and failed spectacularly. For that reason, the liberal solution won out. That solution is more complicated. It starts by accepting that purpose confers value. It then notes that all purposes are equally purposes, and infers that everybody’s purposes equally confer value. Each of us is equally able to make things good or bad just by viewing them as good or bad. That makes each of us in a sense divine: our will creates moral reality. Instead of the wonder-working leader of fascism there is the divine I of liberalism. It is every man his own Jesus.
It is important to note that the view is not that nothing is really good or bad so we might as well do what we feel like doing. That view would make our actions at bottom irrational. We do what we do, and that is all there is to it. People cannot live that way, though, because man is a rational animal, and in order to understand his own actions he has to believe that what he does genuinely makes sense. So the view has to be that our choices make things truly and objectively good, thereby changing something real in the world.
That is a subtle distinction, but it is important because it explains the moral world our contemporaries live in. They believe in political correctness because they believe that we are gods. They also believe our divinity is always in jeopardy, and must always be urgently defended and enforced, because it is vulnerable. We are divine, but we are also socially constructed, so social failure to validate our divinity crushes us. It is a kind of murder.
Sources of the divine “I”
Such beliefs are a natural outcome of present-day thought. The way of thinking with the most public authority today is scientism, a view that limits knowledge to modern natural science and so views the world, including human life, as a mechanistic system of cause and effect.
Liberalism, which is based on the same stripped-down view of reality, follows scientism as much as possible. Liberal social policy therefore tries to achieve its goals through administrative means and on the assumption that man is a simple utility maximizer. If liberals want people to act in a certain way, their favored approach is not moral leadership but some combination of incentives, penalties, technical training, additional resources, and changes in environment. If sex is causing problems, for example, they do not praise and model love, fidelity, and chastity, they distribute condoms and technical advice on how to avoid various inconveniences.
However, the aspiration toward mechanism creates a basic problem. Scientists and liberals see their views as true, and themselves as rational and autonomous. In addition, their system needs overall goals to function, but goals are not part of a fully mechanistic system. For that reason adherents of scientism and liberals cannot fit human life entirely within the system of material causation that they believe constitutes the world.
Working scientists can avoid that issue for the most part, since they do not need to present a comprehensive theory of reality. Their research deals with particular problems, and they can allow those they cannot solve to remain problems. Liberals cannot leave basic issues alone, since liberalism must function as the supreme principle of politics and morality, and must therefore offer and justify an overall way of life.13 They often try to avoid basic issues by claiming to be pragmatic reformers concerned only with particulars, but globalism, the growth of human rights law, and increasing judicial intervention into political life makes appeal to basics unavoidable.
So liberalism must treat individual man as a being who, in important respects, transcends the mechanistic and rationally knowable system of nature. Since liberalism is individualistic, it must also deny that the individual acquires his special qualities through participation in something higher and shared. In other words, it must treat the individual as free, unique, unknowable, authoritative, self-validating, and sovereign. It must attribute to him traditional attributes of God.
The basis of liberalism in general is belief in the godlike creative reason through which the individual devises and calls into being his intellectual and moral world. As the United States Supreme Court has put it, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”14 Contemporary politically-correct liberalism adds to that fundamental belief an emphasis on the identity of essence and attribute in the divine being, an identity that is necessary in a being that serves as the highest standard and therefore cannot have nonessential attributes. From that identity it infers, in the case of the divinized individual, that to comment negatively on any of his qualities is to attack categorically him and all that he is.
So I am God and you are God and every gay Wiccan Somali is God. Each of us is his own I AM THAT I AM, so it is blasphemous to speak slightingly of any of us or of any of our qualities. God is inscrutable and beyond rational categories, so to classify and rank us and subordinate us one to another, or to subordinate any of us to any scheme other than that established from time to time by our own will, is presumptuous. If you do not accept and praise us just as we are, you are our absolute existential enemy who wants to annihilate us. True piety—which is the same as recognition of moral reality—requires that each of us be treated equally as an absolute ultimate principle.
That view, or something as close to it as possible, is the view that people today find morally and spiritually compelling. It tells them how life makes sense. In a world that has become flat, boring, and pointless it gives them back the Holy in the form of the human Other. Even better, it gives it back to them in the form of their own wills. It tells them that God is within each of us, so we are holy too, and the God Within is simply each of us as we already actually are—no effort or compliance with external standards is needed. We have to put up with other people and their desires, so we are subject to standards to that extent, but our qualities and purposes, just as they are, get the same divine status as other people’s.
And in any event, we get called names and driven out of polite society and very likely employment if we do not go along. In many places we can even get fined or put in jail.15 The evident reason for the extreme sensitivity is the fragility of the conception of individual man as divine and absolute. The basic understanding of reality remains mechanistic, so the vision of the individual as divine tends to slide back into a view of the individual as an object to be used by other people for their own purposes. Liberalism is therefore in perpetual danger of collapsing into fascism; hence the belief that failure to support PC wholeheartedly leads naturally to slavery and extermination camps.
Conflict management
The religion of the divine me has problems beyond fragility. A big one is that it heightens the problem of conflicting goals. In the case of the deified fascist leader, it is easy to know what to do when goals conflict: you do what the leader says. But what do you do when we are all God and we disagree?
Liberalism solves that problem by defining legitimate conflict out of existence. The way it does that is by distinguishing sane and legitimate goals from irrational goals manifesting a pathology that calls not for respect but for therapeutic intervention. Sane and legitimate goals are those that accept everyone’s equal divinity. I want other people to stand in awe of me and what I want, so I have to stand in awe of them and what they want. Rational and legitimate thoughts and actions are simply those that accept that principle. What could be more obvious?
Even principles that are as obvious as that can lead to difficulties. If your desires and mine oppose each other, and both appear legitimate, how can the conflict be decided when all desires are metaphysical absolutes? I cannot decide for you nor you for me, and no appeal to a substantive principle of the good is possible, so the solution is to decide the conflict by reference to logical analysis of liberal principle and the technical and practical necessities of its implementation, all as determined by neutral experts.
The result is the EU: government by human rights, economic utility, and administrative convenience, all as determined by bureaucratic functionaries answerable only to each other. The unique ability of such a system to resolve the puzzles of liberal modernity explains the absolute commitment of European elites to what is called the European project. The EU is less a political scheme than a metaphysical necessity. Without it, from the standpoint of our governing classes, the world becomes irrational, violent, and frightening.
Managerial liberalism
Within the managerial order established by contemporary liberalism and best exemplified by the European Union the people are managed in the interests of the system, and in their own interests as the system understands them. The divinity within and its goals are thus fitted to a system of rational management that prevents conflicts, maintains balance, and satisfies legitimate preferences as much and as equally as possible. The Divine I is domesticated, and becomes interchangeable with Nietzsche’s Last Man.
Permissible goals
More specifically, the managerial liberal order allows us to have goals of the following three kinds:
Career. Careerism keeps the system working, because it makes people productive and keeps them busy so they do not cause trouble. It also gives energetic and talented people an extraordinarily effective motive to keep their heads down and always say the things that please social authorities.
Private satisfactions that are consistent with other private satisfactions—shopping, sports, video games, pornography, free-floating spirituality, and other hobbies and indulgences. You can do whatever you want as long as it is consensual and does not affect other people very much or injure you in a way that affects work performance or health care costs.
Support for the managerial liberal state. It is acceptable to obey the law, pay your taxes, agitate for PC, vote for the EU, and have whatever opinions you want on subordinate matters. It is not acceptable to propose or work for anything fundamentally different from the established system. “Human rights” do not protect opposition to the system of human rights, so there is no right to oppose contemporary liberal government.16
If you do not accept those limitations, and insist on adopting irrational and pathological goals, then you cannot be made part of the liberal system of equal freedom, the only just and rational system of human life. That makes you an enemy of reason and of humanity. You have, in effect, resigned from the human race, so you are no longer a god but a demon. That is why if you or someone associated with you gets murdered it is no big deal.17
PC Culture
In fact, of course, PC does not really destroy all culture, since no society could function without some system of common habits, understandings, and expectations. Instead, it destroys traditional culture, and replaces it with a makeshift pieced together from advertising, political propaganda, industrially-produced entertainment, and half-baked therapeutic concepts.
Although ill-conceived and defective, PC culture is not simply chaotic but receives form and orientation from the needs and governing assumptions of present-day bureaucratic and commercial institutions. It gives life a goal through careerism and moderate hedonism. It has official ideals, nondiscrimination and altruism, and even saints, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. It provides diversion and a form of community through sports, popular entertainment, and the cult of celebrity. And it allows us to attain individual transcendence by taking permitted pursuits to extremes, as in the case of extreme sports and the higher consumerism.18
A basic theme of politically correct culture is opposition to natural and traditional distinctions, like those of sex, heritage, and religion, that are neither necessary to liberal institutions nor reducible to purely private tastes and satisfactions. Those brought up in PC culture find it genuinely revolting to give weight to such things—to be racist, sexist, homophobic, religiously bigoted, and so on. Rejection of such distinctions and the ties they reflect is basic to their identity and sense of legitimacy as human beings, and they feel infinitely superior to the bigots who cling to them.19
Religion is viewed as an irrational and disruptive force, but most liberals nonetheless accept that spirituality can be legitimate as an individual and private pursuit. They insist however that the spiritual be kept out of social and political life except to the extent it serves to poeticize liberal goals and principles. To that end PC insists on the transformation of all religious traditions, eviscerating them of substance while claiming to fulfill them by incorporating them within itself.20 Such reinterpretations are especially appealing to religious professionals who want to cut back on the personal demands of their position while adding to its public respectability.
High culture is more troublesome. PC cannot simply ignore, reject, or belittle it, because it is the outlook of an elite class that claims superior knowledge and perception, but it cannot simply carry its tradition forward either, because to assert such a tradition is to assert the distinctiveness and value of a particular culture. PC therefore turns high culture against itself and against the larger cultural complex it expresses. The point of high culture becomes transgression against itself, against nature, and against humanity, all of which have come to seem tyrannical limitations on the will.21
Coolness
Politically correct culture is deeply unsatisfying. It cannot deal with life as a whole because it only reflects aspects that fit the liberal public order. It therefore ignores the heights and depths of life—love, loyalty, family, enmity, loss, defeat, aging, and death. It reflects the outlook of the young, ambitious, unimaginative, and relatively successful for as long as they keep their forward momentum, and has little to offer other people.22
Even for the young and ambitious it is inadequate, because it makes everything so thoroughly mundane. Something more is evidently needed to make life larger, more open-ended, and above all less boring. A makeshift remedy, but the best available within the liberal order, is provided by “coolness.”
Coolness seems trivial, but people take it much more seriously than they admit. It started with jazz musicians, and still has something of the spirit of the night, of escape from everyday reality, of unconditioned freedom, of improvisation without a goal. It is the liberal equivalent of the divine grace that bloweth where it listeth23 and none can define.
So it has something in common with sanctity. The cool are in the world but not of it. They possess a certain disengagement, so that they are independent of their surroundings and not easily excited or flustered. They are not conventional, and recognize immediately whatever they are presented with. That gives them a sort of perfect pitch in matters of perception, expression, and practical decision.
Of course, coolness is also very different from sanctity. Sanctity is about eternity, coolness about now. It has implicitly religious aspirations, but its hedonism and individualism mean they go nowhere. The lives of the saints have enduring interest because they point beyond themselves, the lives of the cool do not.
Its lack of content allows coolness a place in the spiritual world of liberalism, but is otherwise a radical defect. It makes it a matter of style: that is why a clumsy attempt to be a saint is admirable, while a clumsy attempt to be cool is ridiculous. At bottom, of course, it makes no sense. It is notoriously unsustaining, and those who live by it either fall into gross hypocrisy (“sell out”) or grow out of it. Within the liberal order, though, growing out of it means growing out of the only thing, other than sex, drugs, celebrity, fanaticism about sports, food, and other trivia, or lots and lots of money, that redeems life from quotidian dullness. It means turning into a boring, conventional, older person, just like Mom and Dad.
Overthrowing the tyranny
Liberal modernity begins with the modern scientific attempt to understand and control the physical world by treating it as mechanism, and tries to do the same with regard to the social world. Political correctness is part of the same movement, so it is part of an attempt to turn the social order into a machine—a soulless technically-rational contrivance—for generating satisfactions.
A machine likes to deal with identical units that are equally available for any purpose. PC, the insistence that our differences not be allowed to matter, serves that goal, turning us all into interchangeable consumers and functionaries. It also disrupts local and traditional institutions by imposing burdensome requirements and extirpating distinctions of sex, culture, and religion that are basic to their manner of functioning. In that way it destroys centers of power that might compete or interfere with universal rationalized institutions such as global markets and transnational bureaucracies.
PC thus entrenches our present ruling classes and the institutions they dominate. In conjunction with efforts like the EU, it makes the power of politicians, officials, academics, educators, entertainers, journalists, and businessmen absolute, and it justifies that power in the face of democratic objections by the failure of the people at large to live up to its constantly-evolving demands. A system of freedom and equality thus becomes a global system of tyranny based not on physical threats but on minute and comprehensive social control and the suppression of all other forms of social functioning.
That system is nonetheless fragile, because it is at odds with human nature. Human life is not technology, so liberal institutions are insufficient for its needs. We do not make our world, and are neither gods nor machines. To understand and deal with life and the world we must accept particularity and transcendence: we must see ourselves as concretely situated through family, people, and culture, and as participants in a larger world ordered by principles that give it orientation and meaning. Liberal modernity does not allow us to do that, so it will not last.
We therefore have good grounds for hope. Political correctness has the support of all powerful and respectable institutions, but it is a consequence of an intellectual and spiritual error that can be overthrown by intellectual and spiritual means. That is why our rulers, in spite of their stated commitment to free thought and expression, feel compelled to suppress contrary views and subject us to nonstop propaganda. The struggle will of course be difficult. PC is the natural outcome of current understandings of man and reality, and its defeat will require recapture of fundamental concepts that allow a broader understanding of nature and reason with a place for particular ties and transcendent commitments. Fundamental concepts and fundamental orientation go together, so it will also require conversion of life.
Radical change has come about before, and it can come about again. The Church and its teachings and traditions are essential to the effort. The crisis of the modern world results from a weakening connection between thought and reality, and it can be resolved only by restoring our grasp of the nature of things. That grasp, perhaps by definition, is religious, and for Catholics it can only be found within Catholicism. Be that as it may, a renewed grasp of basic realities must take definite institutional and dogmatic form to stand up to modernity and bring about a different way of life. Who but the Church can give it that form? The triumph of the secular in present-day public life and discussion has thus made it clearer than ever that extra ecclesiam nulla salus. Those horrified by liberal modernity have no choice but the bark of Peter.
Since 2003, Los Angeles students have had to pass a year of algebra and a year of geometry to graduate from high school. By 2016, most will have to pass a second year of algebra as well. Duke Helfand, “A Formula for Failure in L.A. Schools”, Los Angeles Times, January 30, 2006, available at http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-dropout30jan30,0,1678653.story (accessed January 6, 2012).↩︎
For a discussion of the goals, see http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ (accessed January 6, 2012).↩︎
See, e.g., Patrik Jonsson, “Is racism at heart of Connecticut shooting? Answer still unclear.” The Christian Science Monitor, August 4, 2010, available at http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0804/Is-racism-at-heart-of-Connecticut-shooting-Answer-still-unclear (accessed January 6, 2012); Ray Rivera and Christine Haughney, “Amid Mourning, Eerie Details Emerge About Connecticut Shootings,” The New York Times, August 4, 2010, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/nyregion/05shooting.html (accessed January 6, 2012). Suspicions that racism may have played a role were rebutted by facts such as the business owner’s history of anti-racism activism, but nonetheless led to a year-long police investigation culminating in a 543-page report that concluded that there was no evidence to support the suspicions. Zach Howard, “No proof of racism at site of 2010 shooting rampage: police,” Reuters, May 12, 2011, available at http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/13/us-connecticut-racism-idUSTRE74C04P20110513 (accessed January 6, 2012).↩︎
See, e.g., Bryan Bender, “Ft. Hood suspect was Army dilemma,” Boston Globe, February 22, 2010, available at http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/02/22/ft_hood_suspect_was_army_dilemma/ (accessed January 6, 2012).↩︎
Zakaria, Tabassum, “General Casey: diversity shouldn’t be casualty of Fort Hood,” Reuters, November 8, 2009, available at http://blogs.reuters.com/talesfromthetrail/2009/11/08/general-casey-diversity-shouldnt-be-casualty-of-fort-hood/ (accessed January 6, 2012).↩︎
Ian Urbina, “It’s a Fork, It’s a Spoon, It’s a … Weapon?” The New York Times, October 11, 2009, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/education/12discipline.html (accessed January 6, 2012). For a collection of comparable cases, see John W. Whitehead, “Zero Tolerance Schools Discipline Without Wiggle Room,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/zero-tolerance-policies-schools_b_819594.html (accessed January 6, 2012).↩︎
See Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner, Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon (Times Books 2011) for a general account.↩︎
The official dogma, of course, is that there is no connection whatever between homosexuality and sexual pursuit of young people. For a review of research to the contrary, see Judith A. Reisman, “Crafting Bi/Homosexual Youth,” 14 Regent University Law Review 283-342 (No. 2, Spring 2002), available at http://drjudithreisman.org/archives/regent.pdf (accessed January 11, 2012).↩︎
As George W. Bush put it in 2004, “There’s a lot of people in the world who don’t believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that… I believe people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren’t necessarily–are a different color than white can self govern.” See George Will, “Time for Bush to See the Realities of Iraq,” Washington Post, May 4, 2004, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64323-2004May3 (accessed January 10, 2010).↩︎
For a summary of changes in the United States that followed the cultural revolution of the 60s, see William J. Bennett, The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators American Society at the End of the 20th Century (Revised and Expanded Edition) (WaterBrook Press 1999).↩︎
For the particular example of Mexican-Americans, see J. Breslau, G. Borges, N. Saito, D. J. Tancredi, C. Benjet, L. Hinton, K. S. Kendler, R. Kravitz, W. Vega, S. Aguilar-Gaxiola, M. E. Medina-Mora, “Migration From Mexico to the United States and Conduct Disorder: A Cross-national Study,” Archives of General Psychiatry, 2011; 68 (12): 1284 DOI: 10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2011.140, abstract available at http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/68/12/ (accessed January 11, 2012), and Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz, Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race (Russell Sage Foundation 2008).↩︎
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 2005).↩︎
Liberals claim they do not need to do so, apparently because the liberal way of life allows people to pursue variations of personal taste that do not much affect other people. There is no reason to take such claims seriously.↩︎
Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 851 (1992).↩︎
Criminal prosecutions for statements critical of Islam or homosexuality provide examples.↩︎
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights explicitly adopts that principle:
Article 14.
(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
(2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising … from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations…
Article 29…
(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
United Nations General Assembly, Universal declaration of human rights. New York: United Nations (1948). Available at http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html (accessed January 6, 2012).↩︎
Consider, for example, the response to the assassination of the anti-immigration politician Pym Fortuyn. See Steve Sailer, “Did Pim Fortuyn Have It Coming?” UPI, May 8, 2002, available at http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2002/05/08/Commentary-Did-Fortuyn-have-it-coming/UPI-26111020879680/ (accessed January 7, 2012).↩︎
The latter is manifested, for example, in the wine and food mysticism on display in the very successful and actually rather good films Sideways and Babette’s Feast.↩︎
Consider, for example, Gordon Brown’s belief that to be concerned about immigration is to be disgustingly bigoted, or Barack Obama’s belief that small-town people are attached to their churches and local connections because they are bitter about their failures in life. Rosa Prince, “Gordon Brown calls campaigner ‘bigoted woman’,” The Telegraph, April 28 2010, available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7645072/Gordon-Brown-calls-campaigner-bigoted-woman.html (accessed January 11, 2012), and Katharine Q. Seelye and Jeff Zeleny, “On the Defensive, Obama Calls His Words Ill-Chosen,” The New York Times, April 13, 2008, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/us/politics/13campaign.html (accessed January 6, 2012).↩︎
As noted above, it turns the Stations of the Cross into the Stations of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.↩︎
Regietheater in opera is an obvious example. Current literary studies provide many more.↩︎
One sign of the class orientation of present-day culture is the deterioration in the way of life of the less successful. Marriage, for example, is becoming an upper-class but not lower-class institution. See, e.g. W. Bradford Wilcox, “The Evolution of Divorce,” National Affairs (Fall 2009), available at http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-evolution-of-divorce (accessed January 10, 2012).↩︎
John 3:8.↩︎