As with all of our political debates, those over “political correctness” have become even more polarized, vitriolic, and outsized than when I was in college at the height of the first culture wars, when it often seemed to me like just new etiquette for increasingly pluralist campuses and workplaces. Now, people use the phrase to refer to any call for basic human decency and intellectual honesty—and use it to dismiss such calls out of hand. On the other hand, many efforts at curbing or criticizing certain kinds of speech can seem genuinely, unnecessarily, repressive. Whether it’s an illiberal college group pressuring their university to disinvite entertainers or shut down debates, or fanatical gunmen threatening, and taking, the lives of journalists or bloggers, the stakes over what can and can’t be said have grown exponentially.
Have we reached a crisis of “Orwellian” proportions in the U.S.? I’d hesitate to say so, given the overuse and abuse of Orwell’s name and ideas as a catch-all for societal dysfunction. We have rallies in which tens of thousands gather to cheer for the demonization and slander of entire people groups. It hardly seems to me that anyone’s losing their freedom of speech any time soon. But John Cleese in the Big Think video above makes an argument about a particular kind of political correctness that he defines as “the idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion.” Describing this kind of speech policing as pathological, Cleese refers to a theory of a psychiatrist friend, Robin Skinner, that people who can’t control their own emotions “have to start to control other people’s behavior.”
Cleese doesn’t blanketly impugn the motives of all activists for politically correct speech. He notes a similar trajectory as I have when it comes to college campuses. “Political correctness,” he says, “has been taken from being a good idea, which is ‘let’s not be mean, and particularly to people who are not able to look after themselves very well,’ to the point where any kind of criticism of any individual or group can be labeled cruel.” Perhaps he’s right. (And Cleese is by no means the first comic to say so—and to swear off college campuses.) In any case, his observations about the necessary relationship of comedy to criticism or offense are dead on, as well as his conclusion that once the humor’s gone, so “goes a sense of proportion, and… you’re living in 1984.” I can’t think of a book, or a society, with less humor in it.
One point of interest: Political Correctness means a great many things to a great many people. For some it is about agency and self-determination, and righting historical wrongs so as not to perpetuate them in the present. For others, it tends more toward a patronizing activist crusade on behalf, as Cleese says in his definition of the term, of “people who are not able to look after themselves.” While he calls a little of this latter attitude a good thing, George Carlin saw it as condescending and disingenuous. By no means a respecter of any party ideology, Carlin described even seemingly innocuous forms of politically correct language as fascism masquerading as manners.
In my experience, few people can make arguments against politically correct language without occasionally falling into the trap of proving its point. But Carlin and Cleese make thoughtful cases, especially when they use humor—as Carlin did over an entire career of railing against the speech police. In his bit above on the increasing insistence on ungainly euphemisms and puffed-up jargon, he demonstrates what Cleese calls the effective antidote to a political movement run riot: a sense of proportion—as well as a sense of compassion.
Related Content:
Slavoj Žižek Calls Political Correctness a Form of “Modern Totalitarianism”
What “Orwellian” Really Means: An Animated Lesson About the Use & Abuse of the Term
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
I was introduced to political correctness in art school in the late 80s. At the time, in it’s simplest terms it meant – do the rational, intellectually correct, informed thing. The primary subject was hiring art teaching and the ‘right thing to do’ – the politically correct thing to do – was positive discrimination: hire teachers who were women, people of colour, LBGT, native people, etc. Which is what they did. It was on the news. As a white guy, this was disappointing but understandable. Reform was not going to work. Revolution was necessary. I’d find something else to do. I still had more opportunities than most. At the time, political correctness had little to do with language policing.
Amazingly, if we zip forward to today, we see the politically correct BDS movement – standing against the illegal occupation of Palestine – being confronted by state ‘political correctness’ laws which interpret their boycott of Israeli products as anti-Israel, which they conflate with being anti-semitic, and therefore racist. Boycotting Israel for bombing the world’s largest prison into rubble and body parts is racist, it seems. The gov says so.
Stewart Lee – Political Correctness
https://youtu.be/99s19HBs-6A
Will? We’re already there! Try making a movie like ‘Blazing Saddles’ today, and see what happens. The always-butthurt fragile snowflakes would lose their minds. We, as a nation and culture, have indeed lost our sense of humor.
It is neither possible nor our duty to “right historical wrongs”. It is, however, possible and certainly our duty to “not perpetuate them in the present”.
I hope you won’t mind if I use that as a quote from time to time.
Yeah, let’s just ignore all the crimes against humanity that Islam is doing and blame it all on the Jews. Wow. Speaking of occupation, it has been the history of Islam to destroy all “competing” religions by whatever means necessary, which is why ALL of the indigenous religions of what is now the Middle East happened, and is still happening.
And they are not very nice to women and gays, either.
But you probably get off on killing women, taking away all their rights, raping little boys and then killing adult men who do the same to other adult males.
Political correctness comes down to that we are forced to tolerate the intolerant.