GLENN
C.
LOURY
609
politics - without provoking extreme, stifling reactions from activists
seeking to make their opinions into an enforced orthodoxy. Liberals call
these charges overblown, and they insist that their efforts to hold people
accountable for what they say and write are justified by legitimate moral
concen1S.
Unlike much that has been written on this topic, I will not spend
time telling "horror stories" about the excesses of PC zealots or
lamenting their influence on the campuses. (This ground has been well
covered by Dinesh D'Souza in his book,
Illiberal Education.)
Rather, my
aim is to "lay bare" the underlying logic of political correctness - to ex–
pose the social forces which create and sustain movements of this sort.
Though PC is often seen as a threat to free speech on the campuses
(which is indeed the case when it leads to legal restrictions on open ex–
pression, as with formal speech codes), the more subtle threat is the vol–
untary limitation on speech which a climate of social conformity en–
courages.
It
is not the iron fist of repression but the velvet glove of se–
duction that is the real problem. Accordingly, I treat the PC phe–
nomenon as an implicit social convention of restraint on public expres–
sion, operating within a given community. Conventions like this often
arise because:
1)
the community needs to assess whether the beliefs of its
members are consistent with its collective and formally avowed purposes;
and 2) scrutiny of their public statements is an efficient way to determine
if members' beliefs cohere with communal norms. The need to police
group members' beliefs in order to ferret out deviants, along with the
fact that the expression of heretical opinion may be the best available
evidence of deviance, creates the possibility for self-censorship: Members
whose beliefs are sound but who nevertheless differ about some aspect of
communal wisdom are induced by fear of ostracism to avoid the candid
expression of their opinions.
Despite the attention given recent campus developments, the PC
phenomenon, understood as an implicit convention of restrained public
speech, is neither new nor unusual. Pressuring speakers and writers to af–
firm acceptable beliefs and to suppress unacceptable views is one of the
constants of political experience. All social groups have norms about the
values and beliefs appropriate for members to hold on the most sensitive
issues. Those thought not to share the consensus suffer low social esteem
and are sanctioned by their colleagues in various ways for their apostasy:
Heretics are unwelcome within the councils of the faithful. Communists
Editor's Note: "Self-censorship" is excerpted from a longer and more complete
analysis, "Self-censorship and Public Discourse: A Theory of Political
Correctness and Related Phenomena."
