Political Correctness is Neither from Mars nor Veus
I myself grow rather weary of watching shows or reading books from a foreign culture, where fornication is considered lawful and admirable, sexual perversion laudable, and there are no families to be seen. No one goes to Church, no women are feminine, and no men are masculine.
That culture is political correctness — but it is more foreign to me, and more offensive, than reading traditional Japanese novels or watching Chinese historical dramas where polygamy and suicide are regarded as normal. At least the Chinese dramas show a proper respect for motherhood and family duties. They are peopled with real, if pagan, people, whose emotions and motives make sense to me.
I will be reading merrily along in what I think is some perfectly ordinary adventure story or science fiction yarn, when suddenly a minor character, such a policeman, will announce that he has a husband. No one around him reacts as if he is a sick pervert or a crazypants. Because in crazypantsland male is female and female is male.
Or the characters will time travel to ancient Mesopotamia or the Jurassic, but the narration will give the date in terms of a calendar called ‘B.C.E.’ which is a calendars whose only purpose is to tweak the nose of Christians, and call them evil for daring to make a scientific calendar that coordinates between earthly seasons and astronomical motions.
Whereas in a Chinese costume drama, a mother who is worried that he son is too deeply in love with his first wife, and therefore too distracted to serve the Emperor, will arrange to marry him to a concubine, so as to dilute that love. She selects as the concubine the first wife’s best friend, that way they are more likely to find domestic harmony with their mutual husband. The son throws himself on a sword in front of the Dowager Empress to prove his love for the first wife, but he never disobeys his mother.
These are all non-Western and non-Christian but perfectly understandable expressions of perfectly understandable human emotions.
On the other hand, when in a cop show, the cop’s partner decides to fornicate with the cop’s daughter, the true depth of emotion is displayed when the partner kneels and offers the daughter a box from a jewelry store. Inside is not a ring — fooled ya!–but a key. He is offering to move his gear into her apartment, to make the fornication and the eventual break easily to manage logistically.
The cop, instead of drawing his sidearm and blowing the brains out of the man who is frelling his daughter outside of wedlock, merely looks mildly grumpy and says the situation is ‘weird’ but he is glad is his daughter is seeking happiness in shallow copulation with an unmarried man who has only moderate affection for her.
These are not human emotions. A Martian, perhaps, would look upon the reproductive antics of his daughter, and hopes that she will raise his grandchildren as bastard in a single-mother home with no father, almost certain to be beaten or killed by one of her serial live-in lovers, but no real father from our planet, not one worthy of the than, hopes this.
The creatures in politically correct films and stories have a stiff and unconvincing range of emotions: characters designated good guys are tolerant, and designated bad guys are intolerant, everyone is self-centered but not selfish, and they all refer to friends as family members.
It is like watching dead-eyed manikins being moved in awkward jerky motions through human poses, and hearing slightly flat and oddly-spaced words issuing from frozen, half-smiling lips.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
