My recent encounter with the booklet THOUGHT PRISON by Bruce Charlton was thought provoking enough and eye opening enough to challenge me to gather in to one place my thoughts on the nature of modernism, liberalism, leftwingism, socialism, materialism, pseudo-Darwinism, deconstructionism, and all the other ‘isms’ grouped under the general umbrella of Progressive thought. As Mr Charlton did, rather than struggle to find a word to define a cloud of thought its partisans take great pains to make undefined, I will here call all these streams of Progressive thought ‘Political Correctness’ or PC.
I recommend the book. My one reservation is that Mr Charlton sees no hope for the overthrow of PC. Because he writes in an aphoristic style, I do not know what reasoning or evidence convinced him of the point, so I cannot argue against it. I will, despite my general agreement and great admiration for his work
My opinion is that to define PC is tantamount to destroying it.
That is precisely why PC folk take such steps to obscure their meaning, goals, and means. That is why they will not be ‘labeled’ and why they dismiss those of us who label them as thinking in a way that is ‘too black and white’ i.e. too simplistic. Their thinking is to say ‘black is white’ i.e. inversion, paradox, falsehood.
When you say nonsense clearly, it has no persuasive force: you raise a smile rather than raise an army. But when you utter nonsense obscurely, ah, then you are like unto a spirit of the kingdom of darkness, and no one can see you, no one grapple you, no one smite you with his sword. The mission of PC is sabotage, not melee: and saboteurs do not like banners and uniforms to identify them no more than PC likes definitions, labels, reason.
Like Rumpelstiltskin, you need but call them by their right name to watch them rip themselves in half in fury.
The modernists of PC gained their predominance by persuading people not that PC was true (for they do not believe it true) but that it is nice, and that we, to be nice, must also pretend to be nice.Any opposition of the undefined niceness is defined as not nice.
Their gains were rapid, but it took them a century or more to gain them, and, by the nature of PC, the gains cannot be permanent. Let their losses begin today, and now, even if it takes ten centuries, or longer. I need but convince one mind to turn away from political correctness toward factual correctness, and their armies are forever one man shy. He need but convince two, and so forth. They did not win all at one dramatic stroke, nor shall we.
I begin with a quote from David M. Huntwork at Ornery American http://www.ornery.org/essays/2007-10-11-1.html. His is the introductory paragraph. Kai Chang’s words are in italics.
Kai Chang from the blog Zuky wrote a piece titled The Greatest Clichéé: The Unexamined Propaganda of “Political Correctness” which sought to ”reclaim” the phrase Political Correctness and to wave a finger at all those who have dared to strike back at the PC advocates. It has been hailed as the “”definitive analysis of Political Correctness”” by a variety of Left wing bloggers while at the same time completely sidestepping its true nature. The author manages to both deny and misguide when it comes to this issue. His obvious hesitancy in dealing with the PC movement is both striking and revealing.
The phrase “politically correct” can be used in two distinct ways: either with its original literal meaning, or with the mocking sarcasm that’s common these days. I’ll get to the former in a moment, but I’ll begin with the latter. As it’s commonly used, “PC” is a deliberately imprecise expression (just try finding or writing a terse, precise definition) because its objective isn’t to communicate a substantive idea, but simply to sneer and snivel about the linguistic and cultural burdens of treating all people with the respect and sensitivity with which they wish to be treated. Thus, the Herculean effort required to call me “Asian American” rather than “chink” is seen as a concession to “the PC police”, an unsettling infringement on the free-wheeling conversation of, I suppose, “non-chinks”. Having to refer to black folks as “African Americans” rather than various historically-prevalent epithets surely strikes some red-blooded blue-balled white-men as a form of cultural oppression. Having to refer to “women” rather than “bitches” lays a violent buzzkill on the bar-room banter of men preoccupied with beating on their chests and off other body parts.
Usually we conservatives are so taken aback by farragoes of vicious nonsense that we can think of nothing polite to say in reply. The sheer insolence of the denial of reality, the sheer nonsense of the illogic, leaves the conservative mind, which is to say, the rational mind, dumbfounded. We continue to be so amazed at the sheer effrontery of the falsehood, and unparalleled silliness of the denial, that our all too human reason is left with no traction, no means to construct an argument.
You cannot argue against Jabberwocky. If someone says you are a mimsy borogrove or a frumious Bandersnatch, what is one to say back? You cannot reason with a man whose denial of reality is absolute. Once the opposition has established that evidence simply does not matter, what evidence can you present to show that it does?
Here below is a good visual metaphor for the relation between Political Correctness and Logic, with Joey Bishop as Political Correctness, and Ann Morgan Guilbert as the bewildered faculty of Logic in the human mind confronted by arrant, arrogant, aggressive and utterly nonsensical evil.
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