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PARTISAN REVIEW
sorbed, often without knowing it. There is obviously something very at–
tractive about telling other people what to do. I'm putting it in this
nursery way rather than in more intellectual language because I think it is
nursery behavior, very primitive stuff. Deep in the human mind is the
need to order, control, set bounds. Art, the arts in general, are always
unpredictable, maverick, and tend at their best to be uncomfortable. Lit–
erature in particular has always inspired the house committees, the Zh–
danovs, the vigilantes into, at best, fits of moralizing, and at worst into
persecution. It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to
know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me a good deal
more that they may know and do not care.
Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes
us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, as
with all popular movement, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a
fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is
quietly and sensibly using the idea to look carefully at our assumptions,
there are twenty rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power
over others. The fact that they see themselves as anti racists, or feminists,
or whatever does not make them any less rabble-rousers.
Political correctness did not invent intolerance in universities, which
is an evident child of Communism. If intolerance, not to say despotism,
governed universities in Communist countries, then the same attitude of
mind has infected areas in the West and often sets the tone in a univer–
sity. We have all seen it. For instance, a professor friend of mine describes
how when students kept walking out of classes on genetics and boy–
cotting visiting lecturers whose points of view did not coincide with
their ideology, he invited them to his study for discussion and the view–
ing of a video that factually refuted such ideology. Half a dozen young–
sters in their uniform of jeans and T-shirts filed in, sat down, kept silent
while he reasoned with them, kept their eyes down while the video was
shown and then, as one, walked out. The students might very well have
been shocked to hear that their behavior was a visual representation of
the closed minds of young Communist activists.
Again and again in Britain, we see in town councils and in school
councils, that headmistresses or headmasters or teachers are being
hounded by groups and cabals of witch-hunters, using the most dirty and
often cruel tactics. They claim their victims are racist or in some way re–
actionary. Again and again, an appeal to higher authorities proves that
the campaign tactics have been unfair. This happened to a young friend
of mine in Cape Town, whom the fanatical Moslems and the hardline
Communists joined forces to expel. They had done the same to her pre–
decessor, and doubtless they are now at work on her successor. The vic–
tims were white. Were they racists? They were not. Unlikely bedfellows?
