PC [political correctness] represents, in essence, the institutionalisation of dishonesty, of deception, where people are given carte blanche to behave in an immoral way — ‘erect those fences, release the dogs, deport those people’ — but are encouraged to make it all seem nice and ‘non-hostile’. It brings to mind Wilde’s observation in his essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, that ‘the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it’. So today, the worst people in politics are those who are nice about the individuals they repress, whether it’s British politicians whose policies keep migrants in degrading limbo in Calais yet who insist everybody use nice words when talking about those migrants, or American army officials who kill Afghans yet demand that their soldiers write only PC, gay-friendly messages on the bombs that do the killing (as, remarkably, happened during the Afghan War).
Some apologists for PC describe it as simply ‘being nice’: ‘institutionalised politeness’. There’s nothing remotely nice about PC. It is the friendly slave-owner; it suppresses open, honest discussion; it obfuscates the divisions and tensions in modern society through stymying the expression of certain ideas; it is the ornate lid on a society which, however civil we make our speech, remains fractured, sometimes tense, packed with clashing interests that will never be resolved by niceness. Whether PC is being used as a glossy cover for brutal policies, as in the case of Calais, or is being used to justify anew old racial and gender divisions, as it does when it demands that we recognise and celebrate the alleged differences between blacks and whites and between men (competitive) and women (consensual), PC is a tool of censorship and conservatism, its chief accomplishment being the repression of difficult words and ideas in the name of pacifying public life.
Brendan O’Neill, “The Calais migrants and the moral bankruptcy of PC”, Spiked, 2015-08-03.
May 24, 2017
QotD: The evil of political correctness
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