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What is Political Correctness exactly?
Political correctness...is a term used to describe language, ideas, policies, or behavior seen as seeking to minimize offence to racial, cultural, or other identity groups. Conversely, the term politically incorrect is used to refer to language or ideas that may cause offense or that are unconstrained by orthodoxy. Wikipedia
The above is the opening to Wikipedia's entry on political correctness. As misleading as this is, there are many points I agree with in the full entry, and I urge the reader to read it. It is, however, deficient in crucial aspects.
Visitors to this website will know that I frequently use the term " the politically correct" to refer to those I oppose on philosophical, political and cultural grounds. A number of people have accused me of using the term as a rhetorical device, merely a put-down phrase that in the long run has little content. I simply level it at people I disapprove of. This has prompted me to undertake the long overdue task of explaining the precise meaning I have in mind when talking of the politically correct, political correctness, and the PC-class.
Others of like mind may refer to their political opponents as the Left, secular progressives, liberals, and the liberal/left. In fact, I use these terms depending on the context. Do they mean the same thing and are they interchangeable? For me there is an overlap of meaning with different emphases.
I use the term "Left" generally when referring to Marxist-based theories, among which is radical feminism and homosexual activism, which I have now started to refer to as femo-fascism and homo-fascism (I will shortly justify these terms in a formal comment). I use the term "liberal" to refer to the non-Marxist liberal theorists, those who feel more affinity with the thought of John Stuart Mill. The Millian-type liberal is less malignant and inimical to Western Civilization. After all, the genuine Millian liberal will tolerate the existence of religion in the state while the Marxists' chief object is to destroy religion, particularly Christianity for which they harbour a neurotic hatred, in some cases leading to psychosis. Witness the violence of some Marxist groups.
Finally, "secular progressive" refers to those who find salvation for mankind in science. Progress for the human race will be achieved by ridding society of the bonds of superstitious belief (religion) and putting society's faith in science to advance its welfare. Darwinists like Richard Dawkins belong to this group.
The intellectual status of some theories and the intellectual ability of some theorists whose views are opposed to mine are indisputable. But there is more to it than just the theory. For what does one do with a theory about the political organization of society? Critically there is the practical implementation of the theory. And I will come back to this shortly.
There is not as much compartmentalization in these terms as I seem to suggest. Adherents of the different theories, as I have already said, would recognise an overlap with others. The crucial point, though, is that the philosophical underpinnings are the same for what is really a class of theories no matter how divergent they are in some respects. Those philosophical underpinnings were established in the period leading to the French Revolution. Indeed, they provided the justification for the French Revolutionaries in their task of tearing down state and society in order to regenerate it in accordance with their abstract ideas.
The philosophical view the theorists shared was the belief that human reason and human will were sufficient for men to organise state and society. The authority of religion, custom and tradition was to fall before the tribunal of human reason, rendering them illegitimate. Individual reason was to stand supreme. The method reason followed came to be known as rationalism. The rationalistic method led inevitably to a materialist metaphysics and an empiricist epistemology. The former asserts that there is nothing except the material and nothing beyond the material. The latter asserts that all knowledge comes by way of sense observation, making scientific verification the final judge on what constitutes knowledge. The materialist/empiricist basis is necessarily and essentially atheistic. Marxism and its many spawn are the pre-eminent example of atheistic theory. Marx claimed 'religion is the opiate of the working class' simply because his materialist theory necessarily disqualified God.
This rationalistic class of theories overturned the metaphysics and epistemology that had consciously underwritten Christian Civilization since the time of St Augustine of Hippo (354 - 430 AD), who had recast neo-Platonism to defend and explain Christian teaching. This combined metaphysical and epistemological outlook is known in philosophy as Classical Realism. It's important to understand what it is and how it is opposed to the materialist/empiricist views that gained ascendancy during the eighteenth century. A useful definition is to be found in the Encyclopaedia of Philosophy:
[Classical Realism] is the doctrine that the human intellect discovers in the particulars apprehended by sense experience an intelligible order of abstract essences and necessary relations ontologically prior to particular things and contingent events and that from this order the intellect can demonstrate necessary truths concerning first causes and the beings and attributes of God. (From the entry on William of Ockham, p. 306).
This summarises the philosophical foundation of Natural Law Conservatism. Thus what I am writing here should be read in conjunction with my page on natural law conservatism.
If the materialist/empiricist mind, solely reliant on individual reason, rejects the objective moral and political order the classical realist claims as the foundation of state and society, what does that mean for the organization of state and society? How does a group of radically free and equal individuals (for that status is deduced from the materialist/empiricist view) organise themselves in society? It is not a question of organising themselves in society, it is a question of originating society. (Yes, there are no limits to the conceit of the rationalist mind.)
A group of free and equal individuals agree to organise themselves according to the standards and law they create for themselves. They form a consensus on what those standards are. In this way, they maintain their freedom by electing to obey the standards they themselves have dictated. This is all very well, one might think. The trouble is that the particular standards and laws, by virtue of their being created by the ultimate tribunal of human reason, risk sliding directly towards a state of absolutization where the collective's inflexible will prevails and disqualifies the slightest deviation, making outcasts of those who deviate. By virtue of the rigid nature of an abstract proposition, there is no room for deviation. Deviation is not possible unless the collective regroups and legislates new standards.
All sounds good in theory, but in practice the state will either have no stability, or it is impossible to wrestle authority from those put in governing positions by the consensus or, as Rousseau put it, by the General Will of the people. One can understand why the Nazis and fascist regimes had no real difficulty with these ideas. The Soviet Union and communist China, neither. Indeed, they are the stunning examples of what I am describing.
This is a brief explanation of the course the rationalist method will take leading to a materialist/ empiricist view on which state and society will be based. Of course, what sort of actual society will develop will depend on the will of the group that comes to dominate. It has been shown, as in the examples I have given, that one class will dominate and their standards will be those the rest of the community will have to obey - or be outcasts. The great paradox of regimes based uncompromisingly on the individual's radical freedom and equality is that such regimes are the worst examples of totalitarianism - the gas chambers or the scaffold or the gulag or starvation are their symbols.
In the West we have to contend with the abstract idea of popular sovereignty which has not yet been as destructive but continues to bring about the decay of the concept of human rights and representative government that arose and developed out of Christian civilization. Popular sovereignty has its roots in the atheistic materialism of the Enlightenment; representative government and its institutions in the concept of equality and objective moral standards of Christianity.
The reason why the nations of the West remained viable developing societies with a measure of freedom and equality while the communist East sank inexorably into the cruellest tyrannies is that the former maintained fundamental elements of Christian civilization and respect for institutions - particularly the institutions of the law - that had grown over the centuries and had proven their worth. In this respect, I believe it cannot underestimated the influence Edmund Burke had either directly or indirectly on the political thinking of Western governments.
In Australia respect for society's institutions and the acceptance of objective moral principles prevailed until the early 1960s. We lived by and large in a stable successful society until then. I have clear memories as a teenager of the beginning of the gradual overthrow of Christian belief, objective moral standards, and the undermining of our institutions. I was a witness to the loudmouth selfish unconscionable behaviour of the student radicals, many of whom were indoctrinated by the notorious John Anderson, proselytising atheist Professor of Philosophy for many years at Sydney University. Some of those radicals are now our society's fat cats - fat on government money and patronage. I was present at perhaps Australia's first riotous student demonstration outside the American Consulate in Sydney in May 1964. It was a political awakening for me as I thought I saw some evil spirit moving through the rioting crowd as it surged this way and that, sparking spot brawls with the police. The sixties Leftist radicals in Sydney taught me what genuine hypocrisy and political manipulation were.
It hardly needs to be said that the materialist/empiricist outlook I have briefly described above was the fundamental motivation of the radicals. Of course, there were your Trotskyites, Bolsheviks, Marxists and anarchists of all sorts. You also had your liberals of different colours. But the basis was a materialist/empiricist view of the world. A line, with a few swings and swerves, can be drawn from the sixties radical movement to the present day where the ideals of that movement have triumphed over the ideals of traditional Western society. The evidence is everywhere of its domination. The ideals of traditional Western society are often the subject of mockery, satire, or plain denunciation. Those who openly subscribe to those ideals have no chance of employment in certain sectors while in others they will be marginalised.
It is this class with a materialist/empiricist outlook as its fundamental basis that I call the politically correct class. Political correctness encompasses all those who subscribe to that fundamental basis whether they understand its philosophical analysis or not. Indeed, the worst representatives of the PC-class are those who mindlessly regurgitate the main tenets of political correctness in a doctrinaire manner, without bothering to listen to the arguments of those who disagree. Their object is to silence those who dissent. In their world there is no room for deviation.
I believe the majority of people in the countries of the West are socially conservative. This is often manifested in the uproar caused by policy and legal decisions that run contrary to commonsense. For example, barring parents from taking photos of their children at a sports meet, suppressing the long criminal record of someone once again before the courts, of awarding $50,000 dollars to a burglar who was beaten up by the owner of the home he broke into, of awarding $50 million dollars to an ex-wife of four years who had nothing to do with the former husband's money earning - I could go on and on.
Then there are the grand policies of feminization, homosexualization and Darwinization of society that I comment on - all a particular orientation of the major theoretical basis of political correctness. I refer the reader to the comments made and those I will make.
The problem is that the ordinary citizen has little idea of the background to decisions or policy that leave them blinking in incomprehension. They often have little idea of what they are actually voting in when they support a particular party or politician. And the high walls around legislative and common law processes are impenetrable.
The epic task of the philosophical conservative is to breakthrough the ideological bonds that keep the ordinary person in the dark, and to get them to understand how aggressive political groups are skirting the democratic process to ram through policy or legislation that will deliver yet more mad outcomes. Understanding exactly what Politically Correctness entails is a necessary start.
The manipulation of language is of crucial importance in PC-class's campaign. I refer the reader to one of my comments.