What happened at Harvard between Cornel West and Larry Summers is a perfect illustration of political correctness in action. You begin with two things: a lie and a political program. Mix carefully in an atmosphere of self-righteousness and, presto! You get the topsy-turvy world of euphemistic doublespeak in which truth is always negotiable and emotional blackmail triumphs with impunity.

It is sometimes thought that facts are sturdier things than ideas and theories. The history of tyranny shows that this is not the case. The empirical world of factual reality is far more susceptible to the onslaughts of power than the mental world we populate with ideas. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt observed,

facts and events are infinitely more fragile things than axioms, discoveries, theories… . Perhaps the chances that Euclidean mathematics or Einstein’s theory of relativity … would hav ...

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 20 February 2002, on page 2
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