{"id":26915,"date":"2014-07-20T10:11:50","date_gmt":"2014-07-20T15:11:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=26915"},"modified":"2014-07-20T10:11:50","modified_gmt":"2014-07-20T15:11:50","slug":"culture-political-correctness-and-social-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/07\/20\/culture-political-correctness-and-social-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Culture, political correctness, and social change"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week’s Goldberg File<\/em><\/a> email newsletter included an interesting discussion of the power of political correctness and how society continues to change:<\/p>\n

What is commonly called \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d doesn\u2019t get the respect it deserves on the right. Sure, in the herstory of political correctness there have been womyn and cis-men who have taken their seminal<\/del> ovulal ideas too<\/a> far<\/a>, but we should not render ourselves visually challenged to the fact that something more fundawomyntal is at work here.<\/p>\n

Political correctness can actually be seen as an example of Hayekian spontaneous order. Society has changed, because society always changes. But modern American society has changed a lot. In a relatively short period of time, legal and cultural equality has expanded \u2014 albeit not uniformly or perfectly \u2014 to blacks, women, and gays. We are a more heterodox society in almost every way. As a result, many of our customs, norms, and terms no longer line up neatly with lived-reality. Remember customs emerge as intangible tools to solve real needs. When the real needs change, the customs must either adapt or die.<\/p>\n

Many conservatives think political correctness forced Christianity and traditional morality to recede from public life. That is surely part of the story. But another part of the story is that political correctness emerged because Christianity and traditional morality receded. Something had to fill the void.<\/p>\n

I wish more conservatives recognized that at least some<\/em> of what passes for political correctness is an attempt to create new manners and mores for the places in life where the old ones no longer work too well. You can call it \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d that Americans stopped calling black people \u201cnegroes.\u201d But that wouldn\u2019t make the change wrong or even objectionable. You might think it\u2019s regrettable that homosexuality has become mainstreamed and largely de-stigmatized. But your regret doesn\u2019t change the fact that it has happened. And well-mannered people still need to know how to show respect to people.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Now, I don\u2019t actually think Christianity is necessarily inadequate to the task of keeping up with the changes of contemporary society. (The pagan Roman civilization Christianity emerged from was certainly less hospitable to Christianity than America today is. You could look it up.) But Christianity, like other religions, still needs to adapt to changing times and the evolving expectations of the people. I\u2019m nothing like an expert on such things, but it seems to me that most churches and denominations understand this. Some respond more successfully than others. But it\u2019s hardly as if they are oblivious to the challenge of \u201crelevance.\u201d<\/p>\n

My concern here is more about mainstream conservatism. I think much of what the Left offers in terms of culture creation is utter crap. But they are at least in the business of culture creation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week’s Goldberg File email newsletter included an interesting discussion of the power of political correctness and how society continues to change: What is commonly called \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d doesn\u2019t get the respect it deserves on the right. Sure, in the herstory of political correctness there have been womyn and cis-men who have taken their seminal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,11,13],"tags":[360,262,198,196,351,43],"class_list":["post-26915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-religion","category-usa","tag-christianity","tag-culture","tag-equalrights","tag-lgbt","tag-politicalcorrectness","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-707","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26915"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26916,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26915\/revisions\/26916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}