Lecture
Political correctness (English: political correctness) — a term for language practices intended to avoid offending or otherwise placing in an awkward position vulnerable groups of people (ethnic minorities, LGBT people, people with disabilities, etc.). The term is usually used as a pejorative, implying that the practices under discussion are excessive or unwarranted . Beginning in the 1980s, "political correctness" may also mean the use of inclusive language and the avoidance of words and actions that exclude from consideration or marginalise vulnerable population groups.
Political correctness (adjective: politically correct ; commonly abbreviated PC ) is a term used to describe language, policies or measures intended to avoid offending or harming members of particular groups in society. In public discussion and in the mass media the term is usually used pejoratively, implying that such policies are excessive or unwarranted. Since the late 1980s the term has been used to describe a preference for inclusive language and the avoidance of language or behaviour that may be seen as excluding , marginalising or offending groups of people who are disadvantaged or discriminated against, especially groups defined by ethnicity, gender or sex.
Early use of the term " political correctness " by the left in the 1970s and 1980s was as self-critical satire ; the usage was more irony than the name of a serious political movement . Among the left it was regarded as a joke, used to mock those who were too rigid in their adherence to political orthodoxy . [14]
The modern pejorative use of the term arose out of conservative criticism of the New Left in the late 20th century. This usage was popularised by a series of articles in The New York Times and other media throughout the 1990s and was widely used in the debates surrounding Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind . The term gained further currency in response to Roger Kimball's book Tenured Radicals (1990), and to the conservative author Dinesh D'Souza's 1991 book Illiberal Education .
Commentators on the political left in the United States argue that conservatives use the concept of political correctness to play down and divert attention from substantively discriminatory behaviour towards disadvantaged groups. They also argue that political forces on the right impose their own forms of political correctness in order to suppress criticism of their chosen supporters and ideologies. In the United States the term has played an important role in the " culture war " between liberals and conservatives .
The privilege of sanctity — the assignment to certain ideas of the attribute of sanctity, which shuts down critical thinking and gives consecrated ideas unimpeded movement under protection. Either a bug or a feature of human consciousness, it secured the well-being of the priestly estate in all previous epochs.
Once you begin to notice how the triggers work that switch people's reactions into "this is sacred" mode, shutting off critical thinking, you also notice an alarmingly large number of such triggers still in circulation — although the old values, such as "patriotism", are already clearly running out of steam.
The success of political correctness consists, in particular, in the fact that it too has somehow managed to penetrate the "holy of holies" and establish itself in the privileged domain of uncritical perception.
The phrase appeared in the 1970s and throughout the 1970s and 1980s was used by the left for self-critical irony; it did not imply a serious political concept . The phrase was a kind of in-joke and was applied to those who adhered too strictly to generally accepted practices .
The modern pejorative use of the phrase "political correctness" emerged as part of conservative criticism of the New Left in the late 20th century. This usage was popularised by several articles in The New York Times and other media in the 1990s . It spread during public debates over Allan Bloom's book The Closing of the American Mind " (1987 . In the 1990s the term was widely used in the "culture wars" between American liberals and conservatives.
William Safire states that the first recorded use of the term " political correctness" in its typical modern sense belongs to Toni Cade Bambara in the 1970 anthology The Black Woman . [32] The term probably entered modern usage in the United Kingdom around 1975.
In the early to mid-20th century the phrase " political correctness" was used to describe strict adherence to a whole range of ideological orthodoxies in politics. In 1934 The New York Times reported that Nazi Germany was granting reporting permits "only to pure 'Aryans' whose opinions are politically correct".
When Marxist-Leninist movements gained political power, the phrase came to be associated with accusations of the dogmatic application of doctrine in debates between American communists and American socialists . This usage referred to the Communist Party line, which, in the eyes of socialists, provided the "correct" positions on all political questions. According to the American educator Herbert Kohl , writing about debates in New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s,
The term "politically correct" was used disparagingly of someone whose loyalty to the CP line outweighed compassion and led to bad politics. It was used by socialists against communists and was meant to separate socialists who believed in egalitarian moral ideas from dogmatic communists who upheld and defended party positions regardless of their moral content.
- "Unusual Distinctions", The Lion and the Unicorn
In the 1970s the New Left in America began to use the term " political correctness" . [11] In the essay The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970) Toni Cade Bambara said that "a man cannot be politically correct and a [male] chauvinist ". After that the term was often used as self-critical satire . Debra L. Schultz said that "throughout the 1970s and 1980s the New Left, feminists and progressives ... ironically used their term 'politically correct' to guard themselves against their own orthodoxy in efforts at social change". PC is used in Bobby London's comic strip " Merton of the Movement" , followed by the term " ideologically sound" in Bart Dickon's comics . In her article "Toward a Feminist Revolution" (1992) Ellen Willis said: "In the early eighties, when feminists used the term 'politically correct', it was used to refer sarcastically to the anti-pornography movement's efforts to define a 'feminist sexuality'". [13]
Stuart Hall offers one way in which the original use of the term may have developed into the modern one:
According to one version, political correctness actually began as a joke on the left: radical students on American college campuses acting out an ironic replay of the Bad Old Days BS (before the sixties), when every revolutionary groupuscule had a party line about everything. They were addressing some glaring examples of sexist or racist behaviour by their fellow students, imitating the tone of voice of the Red Guard or of a Cultural Revolution commissar: "Not very 'politically correct', comrade!" [14]
Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind heralded the debate over "political correctness" in American higher education in the 1980s and 1990s. Jeffrey J. Williams, professor of English literature and cultural studies at CMU, wrote that "the attack on ... political correctness that simmered during the Reagan years became a bestseller thanks to Bloom's book The Closing of the American Mind" . " [35] According to Z. F. Gamson, Bloom's book "attacked the faculty for 'political correctness'". [36] Professor of social work at ChelSU Tony Platt says that "the campaign against 'political correctness' was launched by Bloom"
The popularisation of the term is attributed to Richard Bernstein's article in the New York Times in October 1990 . At that time the term was mainly used in academic circles: "Across the country the term pc, as it is commonly abbreviated, is heard more and more often in debates over what to teach at universities". Nexis citations in "arcnews / curnews" show a total of seventy citations in articles about "political correctness" for 1990; but a year later Nexis recorded 1,532 citations, and by 1994 this had risen steadily to more than 7,000 citations. In May 1991 The New York Times ran the following article, according to which the term was increasingly being used in a wider public arena:
What has come to be called "political correctness", a term that began to gain momentum at the start of the academic year last autumn, has spread in recent months and has become the subject of an angry national debate, mainly on college campuses but also in the wider arenas of American life.
- Robert D. McFadden, "Political Correctness: New Bias Test?", 1991. [16]
A once obscure far-left term became commonplace in the lexicon of conservative social and political challenges to progressive teaching methods and curriculum changes in US secondary schools and universities Policies, behaviour and speech codes that a speaker or writer regarded as imposing a liberal orthodoxy were described and criticised as "politically correct". [23] In May 1991, at the commencement ceremony for the graduating class of the University of Michigan, the then US President George H. W. Bush used the term in his speech: "The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudices with new ones. It declares certain topics off limits, certain expressions off limits, even certain gestures off limits".
After 1991 its use as a pejorative phrase spread widely among conservatives in the United States. It became a key term expressing conservative anxieties about the left in cultural and political debates going beyond academia. In two articles on the subject in late 1990 in Forbes and Newsweek the headlines used the term " thought police ", illustrating the tone of the new usage, but it was " Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus" by Dinesh D'Souza. (1991) that "captured the imagination of the press". Similar critical terminology was used by D'Souza for a range of policies in academia concerning victimisation, support for multiculturalism through affirmative action, sanctions against hate speech targeting minorities and the revision of curricula (sometimes called " breaking the canon"). These trends were, at least in part, a response to multiculturalism and the rise of identity politics with movements such as feminism, gay rights movements and ethnic minority movements. This response received funding from conservative foundations and think tanks such as the John M. Olin Foundation , which funded several books, such as D'Souza's. [23]
Herbert Kohl noted in 1992 that a number of the neoconservatives who promoted the use of the term "politically correct" in the early 1990s were former members of the Communist Party and were consequently familiar with the Marxist use of the expression. He argued that in doing so they intended "to insinuate that egalitarian democratic ideas are in fact authoritarian, orthodox and communist-influenced, when they oppose people's right to be racist, sexist and homophobic".
In the 1990s conservative and right-wing politicians, think tanks and speakers used the phrase as a pejorative description of their ideological enemies — especially in the context of the culture wars over the language and content of public school curricula. Roger Kimball, in his book Tenured Radicals endorsed Frederick Crews's view that PC is best described as "left eclecticism", a term defined by Kimball as "any of the most varied anti-establishment modes of thought, from structuralism and post-structuralism, deconstruction and Lacanian analysis to feminist, homosexual, black and other explicitly political forms of criticism". [24] [35]
Liberal commentators argued that the conservatives and reactionaries who used the term did so in an attempt to divert political discussion away from substantive questions of remedying social discrimination — such as racial , social-status , gender and legal inequality — against people whom conservatives do not regard as part of the social mainstream. [26] [48] Jan Narveson wrote that "the phrase was born to live between intimidating quotation marks: it suggests that the operative considerations in the so-called field are purely political in nature, as against the true considerations of principle on which we ought to act ..." Commenting in 2001, one such British journalist, [49] [50] Polly Toynbee , said that "the phrase is an empty right-wing smear, designed only to raise its own voice", and in 2010 that the phrase "political correctness" 'was born as a coded cover for anyone who still wants to say paki , spastic or queer ". [51] Another British journalist, Will Hutton , [52] wrote in 2001:
Political correctness is one of the brilliant tools that the American right developed in the mid-1980s as part of its demolition of American liberalism ... The most perceptive thinkers on the American right quickly saw this: by declaring war on the cultural manifestations of liberalism — by pinning the charge of "political correctness" on its supporters — they could discredit the entire political project.
- Will Hutton , "Words really are important, Mr Blunkett", 2001.
Glenn Loury wrote in 1994 that to address the subject of "political correctness" when power and authority in the academic community are being contested by parties standing on either side of the issue is to invite potential "friends" to scrutinise one's arguments, and "enemies" too. Combatants on the left and on the right will try to assess whether the writer is "for them" or "against them". [53]
Geoffrey Hughes suggested that the debate about political correctness concerns whether changing language actually solves political and social problems, with critics viewing it not so much as a solution to problems as censorship, intellectual intimidation and a display of the moral purity of those who practise it. Hughes also argues that political correctness tends to be promoted by a minority rather than being an organic form of language change
In the opinion of some critics, conservatives use the term "political correctness" to divert attention from discrimination against vulnerable population groups . It is also argued that the right itself promotes terminological changes analogous to what it criticises as "political correctness", but with the aim of suppressing criticism of its ideology
The modern debates over this term were provoked by conservative criticism of a supposed liberal bias in academia and education , and since then conservatives have used it as a principal line of attack. University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors and the lawyer Harvey A. Silverglate link speech codes at US universities to the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse. They state that speech codes create an "atmosphere of repression", arguing that they are based on "Marcusean logic". Speech codes "prescribe a revised notion of 'freedom' based on the belief that imposing moral standards on a community is justified", a view that "requires less attention to individual rights and more to securing 'historically oppressed' persons — a means of achieving equal rights". Kors and Silverglate later founded the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which opposes violations of due process rights, in particular "speech codes". [56] [ unreliable source? ]
Similarly, a common conservative criticism of higher education in the United States is that the political views of faculty are far more liberal than those of the population at large, and that this situation fosters an atmosphere of political correctness. William Deresiewicz defines political correctness as an attempt to silence "unwelcome beliefs and ideas", arguing that it is largely the result of the commercialisation of education, since faculty and campus staff are afraid of angering students on whose fees they depend.
A preliminary study published in 2020 found that students at a large US public university generally considered faculty to be open and encouraging of the free expression of differing points of view; nevertheless, most students worried about the consequences of voicing their political views, since "anxiety about expressing political views and self-censorship ... is more widespread among students who identify as conservative". [59] [60]
Some conservative commentators in the West claim that "political correctness" and multiculturalism are part of a conspiracy whose ultimate goal is to undermine Judeo-Christian values . This theory, which holds that political correctness originates in critical theory at the Frankfurt School , as part of a conspiracy that its proponents call " Cultural Marxism ". [61] The theory arose out of Michael Minnicino's 1992 essay "New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness'", published in a journal of the Lyndon LaRouche movement . [62] In 2001,The Death of the West in which "political correctness is cultural Marxism", and "its calling card is intolerance". [63]
In the USA the term is widely used in books and magazines, but in the UK its use is confined mainly to the popular press. [64] Many such authors and popular media figures, especially on the right, have used the term to criticise what they see as bias in the media. [23] William McGowan argues that journalists get stories wrong or ignore newsworthy stories because of what McGowan regards as their liberal ideologies and their fear of offending minority groups. [65]Robert Novak, in his essay "Political Correctness Has No Place in the Newsroom", used the term to accuse newspapers of adopting language-use policies which in his view tend to go too far in avoiding any appearance of bias. He argued that political correctness in language not only destroys meaning but also demeans the very people it is supposed to protect. [66] The authors David Sloan and Emily Hoff argue that in the USA journalists pay no attention to political correctness in the newsroom, equating criticism of political correctness with the old label of "liberal media bias". [67] According to the author John Wilson, left-wing forces of "political correctness" have been blamed for unrelated censorship, with Timeciting campaigns against violence on network television in the USA as contributing to a "mainstream culture, [which] has become cautious, sanitised, frightened of its own shadow" because of "the watchful eye of the PC police", while protests and advertiser boycotts against television shows are as a rule organised by right-wing religious groups opposed to violence, sex and depictions of homosexuality on television. [68]
Political correctness is often satirised, for example in The PC Manifesto (1992) by Saul Jerushalmy and Rens Zbignieuw X, [69] and in " Politically Correct Bedtime Stories" (1994) by James Finn Garner , which presents fairy tales rewritten from an exaggeratedly politically correct perspective. In 1994 the comedy film PCU looked at political correctness on a college campus.
Other examples include the television programme " Politically Incorrect" , George Carlin's " Euphemisms " [ citation needed ] and The Politically Correct Scrapbook . [70] The popularity of the cartoon programme South Park led Andrew Sullivan to coin the term " South Park Republican " , and later to Brian C. Anderson's book " South Park Conservatives » . [71] In season 19 (2015) South Park introduced the character PC Principal , embodying and mocking the principle of political correctness. [72]
The Colbert Report " host Stephen Colbert often spoke satirically about the "PC police". [73]
Groups that oppose certain generally accepted scientific views on evolution , second-hand tobacco smoke , AIDS , global warming , race and other politically contentious scientific questions have used the term "political correctness" to describe what they see as the unwarranted rejection of their point of view on these questions by the scientific community, which in their view has been corrupted by liberal politics. [74]
"Political correctness" is a label commonly used to describe liberal terms and actions, but not equivalent attempts by the right to change language and behaviour. [75] The economist Paul Krugman writes that "the bigger threat to our discourse is right-wing political correctness, which, unlike the liberal version, has lots of power and money behind it. And the goal is very much like what Orwell tried to convey with his notion of " Newspeak ": to make it impossible to talk, and perhaps even to think, about ideas that challenge the established order". [30] Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute defined the right's own version of political correctness as "patriotic correctness".
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