Is there a difference between “silly” and “non-silly” PC?

The inclination not to take PC seriously, discussed in a previous article, crops up again in the BBC story on “The Bellringer of Notre Dame.” Russell King, a lecturer on Victor Hugo at Nottingham University, is quoted as saying that the decision to rename the play “smacked of the most silly political correctness”.

Now, on first thought, this decision does indeed seem silly, in the sense that it doesn’t appear to be a necessary outcome of the liberal ideology of non-discrimination. It’s hard to imagine that anyone—other than the professional “disability advisor” on whose advice the theater company changed the title—would actually be offended at the famous words “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” On further thought, however, the renaming does seem to be part of the general movement to eliminate all distinctions and judgments, particularly distinctions that suggest that some human conditions (such as curvature of the spine) are less desirable than others. In which case the renaming is not silly at all.

It is thus not clear that there is a logical difference between the types of PC that are intrinsic to liberal egalitarianism and the types of PC that people call silly. Furthermore, even if there is such a difference, has not society’s abject failure to oppose all the non-silly manifestations of PC made the silly kinds inevitable?

In this regard, one notices a surprising similarity between the dismissal of some types of PC and the outrage at other types of PC, such as the anger of Congressmen over the Pledge of Allegiance decision. The U.S. political establishment has over the years accepted every interference of the federal courts into every religiously tinged activity in schools, even non-denominational prayers at high school graduations. But if you can’t have a generic prayer to God in a school, why should you be able to have any reference to the reality and supremacy of God in any organized school activity? On what logical basis can we say that a prayer at graduation is more an establishment of religion than the daily recitation of the phrase “One Nation, under God”? So the shocked indignation of the politicos does not impress me.

The point is that both the refusal to take PC seriously and the inconsistent and hypocritical anger at PC are part of the same phenomenon: the failure or refusal to think about PC in a rational principled way, because to do so would mean becoming a dissident from liberal society, and also because contemporary people really do accept the underlying idea of non-discrimination that drives PC.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 29, 2002 09:42 AM | Send