The best short definition I’ve ever heard of political correctness came from a professor of philosophy: ”PC is a degenerative disease of the left,” he said with a wry smile and immediately gave me permission to use his line, the relevance of which is these days becoming ever more tangible.
The more indisposed it becomes, the more obvious it is that political correctness is on its way out.
A symptom of this wasting away presented itself in the latest edition of an otherwise earnest South African periodical, which I won’t name simply because I happen to admire its patron beyond limits and, anyway, it wasn’t of her hand.
The periodical’s editorial was headed ”Time to discard racial preferencing” — whatever that exotic coinage might mean. In the body of the editorial a fascinating sentence appeared: ”Culture is a dynamic force. Thus black people in the United
States have a particular affinity for art and music which leads to over- representation in those spheres of life.”
First of all, the sentence is in conspicuous disagreement with the editorial’s headline; it’s clearly a case of ”racial preferencing”. But what else is the author saying with the line about the specialised affinities of black people in the US?
Is he merely confirming that old patronisation about black people having a ”natural sense of rhythm”, or is he merely doing a bit of PC bum-creeping? Either way it’s an extraordinarily fatuous statement.
By implication it suggests that white people in the US lack in these regards, also that black people not permanently resident in the US have none of these select cultural gifts. Rednecks love that sort of thinking.
Admittedly in a docile fashion, the sentence is racist. Discrimination is odious whichever way it points. It is racist to say, for instance, that black men have swifter physical reaction times than white men and therefore are better football player material — as was claimed recently by a sports writer in England.
Try saying that with white men as the owners of the swifter reaction times and see how far you get. Most of all, the editorial’s sentence is both feeble and quaint, as indeed political correctness itself is becoming as the atrophy takes over. It is a perfect example of how political correctness tends to devour itself from within.
It’s a bit like cancer in that way. Cancer often starts off as an insignificant dark mole on the skin, a tiny confused polyp in the bowels, a little dot of misbehaving cells in the liver or lungs. Before you can say chemotherapy, a dreaded lump is felt.
A new pain terrifies you in the night. The aetiology of political correctness is as camouflaged. The primary PC tumour originates in that part of the brain where there resides what in adulthood still remains of our endogenous ”quantum of compassion” — to borrow John le Carre’s phrase.
Despite the inroads of materialism and the cynicism that goes with it, most of us have these little patches of our human sensibilities, battered but alive. Sometimes desperately, we hang on to them, proof that we are human, individual.
It is in these patches, our fragmented consciences, that PC germinates, grows and eventually flourishes into a subconscious plant that slants its shadow over all thought and imagination.
At first PC is welcomed, mainly because it acts as a shield between us and the naggings of our privileged guilt. Just as with a physical neoplasm, which feeds on a body’s normal intake of nourishment, the PC growth is nurtured regularly with a truly vast supply of factory-made goodness supplied to the host mind.
Tumour du Jour. There it lies, getting slowly bigger, more incurable and decidedly waxier. But enough of these unpleasant metaphors. For all its apparent malignancy, political correctness is actually benign in its ambitions.
It brims with good intentions and spunky congeniality. But for mankind’s tendency to suffocate anything good that comes its way, PC could have been progressive.
Instead, it is beginning to wither, people are becoming indifferent to its moral ecstasies, and the principal reason it was doomed to failure from the start was because, in its origins, PC was devised by militant feminists. So emotionally attenuated motherhood guaranteed PC’s eventual decline.
That’s where it is today: beginning its first withdrawals, getting its asthenic retreat under way. PC has always fed on its own rectitude and now that’s coming back with interest.
People are heartily sick and tired of being compartmentalised, told how to behave, instructed as to what it is permissible to say in the presence of the PC chattering classes. People want to get on with being people, they don’t require yet another set of guidelines to help them cope with the eventualities of their emotions and prejudices.
In essence, the basal objective of political correctness is to replace one set of prejudices with another.
The subversive ends of political correctness are among its most lethal. Its primary casualty is human individuality. With its sets of linguistic barrier lines and its no-go areas, political correctness would render all human emotion to containment within prescribed codes of behaviour and expression.
It is the new censorship and, just like the old, is patronising, artificial and intrinsically reactionary. The good news is that Big Person is at last beginning to crumble away.