Familiarity Breeds PC

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 396.

A REFORMATION OF MANNERS?

Since the late 1980s, when it first came to general attention and acquired a name, political correctness - hereafter PC - has been part of our lives.

The most prominent fact about PC is that it is mainly a linguistic phenomenon. Words and phrases that were commonplace 50 years ago are now taboo. Many ideas that were likewise commonplace may not now be put into spoken or written words. Some of those ideas were actually true so that the taboo on their expression hinders us in dealing with reality.

The greatest driving force behind PC was the desire to rectify relations with people of other races. The United States has been a multiracial society from its founding, the red and black always mixed in with the white. The care with which educated Americans have always deployed racial terms—the absurdly exaggerated care, as it seemed to British observers—was a natural response to this familiar fact. With the reshuffling of the racial deck that occurred in the 1960s following the Civil Rights movement and the end of legal segregation, PC supplied the necessary adjustment of language and manners—a move from one way of dealing with the old familiar situation to another.

In Britain, on the other hand, the almost perfectly monoracial society was transformed, in a single generation, to multiracialism. It was not a mere reformation of manners that was called for, but a revolution. That revolution duly took place. As revolutions will—and aided by the absence in Britain of any constitutional free speech guarantees—the PC triumph in Britain left the old order in ruins, to the degree that citizens now fear to speak about problems of multiracialism in any terms at all.

It is actually a criminal offense in today's Britain to use “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour” to stir up hatred against anyone on grounds of color, race, nationality, or ethnic origin. In Oxford last year, a student was fined £80 on the spot for inquiring jocularly of a mounted policeman if his horse was gay. “He made homophobic comments that were deemed offensive to people passing by,” explained a police spokesman.

Thus PC, which only reformed manners in the U.S., has revolutionized them in Britain. The sons and grandsons of those who cheerily mocked American race manners now slink around in fear of the PC police—who are the actual police, with full powers to fine, arrest, and charge.

A reformation of manners cannot be considered complete until people's thinking has been changed. It is all very well to scrub the language clean of racism, homophobia, and the rest, but how can we be sure we have accomplished that inward revolution, too? Is it, in fact, possible to reform thought by reforming language? These are deep waters, in which philosophers and linguists have been fishing for centuries. Confucius was the first to assert that if you get the language right, all else will follow. Dr. Johnson disagreed, calling language “the dress of thought.” But even Johnson knew that the utterance of sweet things, once it becomes habitual, might seduce into thinking that they represent actual facts.