When Charles Douglas-Home, editor of the (London) Times, died in 1985, a trust was established for an annual talk and prize in his memory. Previous winners of the Douglas-Home Trust prize have included V. S. Naipaul and Anthony Daniels (and, one may note, not Walter Duranty). This year’s winner was a chap named Roger Kimball. Bravo!
Roger delivered the first version of his talk at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival last May (read The Guardian’s account here); a longer version will be published in National Interest this fall; a volume of the D-H T essays, ten or thereabouts so far, will be published by The Claridge Press in England in a year or so; and, whew, The Times finally got around to publishing an abridged version, which is appended below:
November 22, 2003
Political correctnessDeadly sin number eight: benevolence
The emotion of virtue is deforming the way we speak and write, argues Roger KimballAll good people agree
And all good people say,
All nice people, like Us, are We
And every one else is They.
--Rudyard Kipling, We and They
The phrase "political correctness" has been a public gadfly for only about a dozen years now. It has had a curious career. Today, we tend to associate the phrase with the (generally conservative) assault on efforts to enforce speech codes, promote affirmative action, and nurture other items high on the wish-list of multicultural aspiration. You know the menu: hunting, no; public school, no; patriotism, no. On the other side there’s Brussels, Kyoto, Durban, Wounded Knee . . . like Molly Bloom, the very place names tremble with an excited Yes.
Criticism of political correctness occupies an important place in the armoury of conservative polemic, and this is one reason we are regularly encouraged to ignore it, either by bald denial (it is all an invention of right-wing fanatics bent on turning back the clock of progress) or the reliable "Yes, but . . ." rejoinder ("OK, political correctness exists, but it is a harmless sport" or: "Yes, it exists and is widespread, but it is an enlightened boon, not a bane").
In any event, because we tend to associate political correctness with attacks on political correctness, it is worth noting that the epithet seems to have originated not with conservative commentators but with college students in the late 1980s and early 1990s. "Politically correct" described the self-righteous, ecologically sensitive, vegetarian, feminist, multicultural, sandal-wearing, anti-capitalist beneficiaries of capitalism--faculty as well as students--who paraded their outworn Sixties radicalism in and out of the classroom.
Of course, the roots of political correctness go back a long way. Political correctness can be seen as part of the perennial human attraction to moral conformity, to be part of what the American art critic Harold Rosenberg called the "herd of independent minds". It can also be enlisted in what Alexis de Tocqueville called democratic despotism; a force of infantilism rather than tyranny that "degrades men without tormenting them".
Yet the impulse to conformity and democratic despotism are only part of the story. We come closer to the heart of political correctness with figures such as Robespierre and St Just. They and their comrades sought to bring post-revolutionary France into line with what, following their hero Rousseau, they called "virtue". The fact that they measured the extent of their success by the frequency with which the guillotines around Paris operated highlights the connection between the imperatives of political correctness and tyranny--between what Robespierre candidly described as "virtue and its emanation, terror".
Nearer our own time, Mao, with his sundry campaigns to "re-educate" and raise the consciousness of a recalcitrant populace, offers a classic example of political correctness in action. Add to those efforts the linguistic innovations that George Orwell described in the afterword to 1984 as "Newspeak" and you have limned the basic features of political correctness: "The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ’this dog is free from lice’ . . . It could not be used in its old sense of ’politically free’ or ’intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless."
Just so, the politically correct of our own day seek to bring about a moral revolution by changing the way we speak and write about the world: a change of heart instigated, embodied by a change of language.
Today, the phrase "political correctness" describes some exaggerated bit of left-wing moralism, and is generally met with a smile. We smile when we read about an elite American college that has enrolled the sin of "lookism"--the belief that some people are more attractive than others--into its catalogue of punishable offences. We scoff when we hear about the University of Michigan professor who complains that J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books "conventionally repeat much of the same sexist and white patriarchal biases of classical fairytales". But we do so uneasily.
Why the uneasiness? There are several reasons. In the first place we know that such strictures, though preposterous, are not without consequence. Indeed, the phenomenon of political correctness is a great teacher of the often overlooked fact that the preposterous and the malign can cohabit happily. The student accused of lookism can be severely penalised, as can the student accused of "misdirected laughter". It is amusingly ludicrous to burden Rowling’s entertainments with feminist rhetoric, but then we recall that books can be banned for less.
Perhaps the most stultifying aspect of political correctness is its addiction to benevolence, to the emotion of virtue. Consider the case of Peter Kirstein, until recently an obscure professor of history at Saint Xavier University in Chicago. Kirstein was one of many who received a form-letter email from a cadet at the US Air Force Academy soliciting advice about a forthcoming conference. Kirstein’s reply catapulted him to temporary notoriety: "You are a disgrace to this country and I am furious you would even think I would support you and your aggressive baby-killing tactics of collateral damage. Help you recruit. Who, top guns to reign (sic) death and destruction upon nonwhite peoples throughout the world?. . . You are unworthy of my support.
What is interesting is not so much Kirstein’s loathsome little missive but the self-infatuated conviction of virtue that informs it. On his website Kirstein lists the 12 points of his "teaching philosophy", the most telling of which is the first: "Teaching is a moral act."
There is undoubtedly a sense in which teaching is a moral act. But its morality is like happiness according to Aristotle: it is achieved not directly but indirectly through the responsible engagement with life’s tasks. Indirection--moral subtlety, an appreciation of human imperfection--is a resource untapped by the politically correct. In their pursuit of a better, more enlightened world, they let an abstract moralism triumph over realism, benevolence over prudence, earnest humourlessness over patience.
As has often been noted, an absolute commitment to benevolence, like the road that is paved with good intentions, typically leads to an unprofitable destination. Combined with fanatical moralism, benevolence produces a toxic brew. As the philosopher David Stove pointed out, "Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao, or Ho Chi Minh, or Kim-Il-Sung, or Pol Pot, or Castro (were) persons convinced both of the supremacy of benevolence among moral obligations, and of the supremacy of morality among all things. It is this combination which is infallibly and enormously destructive of human happiness."
Of course, as Stove goes on to note, this "lethal combination" is by no means peculiar to communists. It provides the emotional fuel for utopians from Robespierre to the politically correct bureaucrats who preside over more and more of life in Western societies today. They mean well. Inequality outrages their sense of justice. They see tradition as the enemy of innovation, which they embrace as a lifeline to moral progress. They cannot encounter a wrong without seeking to right it.
For centuries, political philosophers have understood that the lust for equality is the enemy of freedom. The rise of political correctness has redistributed that lust over a new roster of issues: not the proletariat, but the environment, not the struggling mass, but "reproductive freedom", gay rights, the welfare state, the Third World, diversity training, and an end to racism and xenophobia. It looks, in Marx’s famous mot, like history repeating itself as farce. It would be a rash man, however, who made no provision for a reprise of tragedy.
___________
This is an edited extract from Political Correctness, or, the Perils of Benevolence by Roger Kimball, commissioned by the Charles Douglas-Home Trust. Charles Douglas-Home was Editor of The Times 1982-85. The trust was set up in his memory. Roger Kimball is managing editor of New Criterion magazine
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