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group loyalty. (However, as Albert Hirschman has noted in his influential
book,
Exit, Voice alld Loyalty,
the willingness to deviate in the face of
sanction for the sake of the group's welfare, as one understands it, might
be seen as an expression of true loyalty.) It is therefore not surprising that
these deviallts are oftell aCClIsed of beillJ? racially inallthelltic.
Breaking of the
no-group-criticism-in-mixed-company taboo raises in the minds of "blind
loyalists" the question of whether the critics are "genuinely" black. The
problem here, as Michael Walzer has observed in his study of social crit–
icism,
The Company of Critics,
is that serious political analysis in a
democracy cannot take place in private, among one group alone, out of
others' hearing. So, by making racial authenticity contingent on rhetori–
cal conformity, the "blind loyalists" succeed in diminishing the vitality of
the American political forum.
A final general feature of the PC climate which I will mention is the
notion of "forbidden (lctS." Jean-Franyois Revel, lamenting the difficulty
of keeping the truth about the Soviet Union before the West European
public, observed, "It is around the circulation of facts that the taboos are
strongest in the evolution of public information and debate into na–
tional policy.... As a rule, concern that a fact might influence public
opinion in a way we dislike overrides our curiosity about it and our
honesty in making it known."
If
some truth about the world is inconsis–
tent with a firmly held communal value, listeners may punish the messen–
ger who asserts that truth, reasoning that only someone who disdains the
value would act so as to undermine it. Anticipating this punishment, in–
vestigators will not only be dissuaded from saying what they know, but
also from asking questions which might have unpleasant answers. When
rhetoric about facts comes in this way to signal one's values on an im–
portant ethical matter, the identification and analysis of significant social
problems can be impeded. This is, to my mind, the most damaging con–
sequence of the development of a regime of political correctness in the
universities.
Thus, scientists looking into the genetic basis, if any, for gender or
racial differences in behavior have met with vocal opposition from
"women and minorites" who regard the very act of such speculation to
be evidence of bigotry. The search for biological (lctors influencing vio–
lent behavior has been denounced as racist, though this plausible hy–
pothesis has no evidently racial connotation. Yet the speculation that
sexual preference
is not
rooted in biology has been denounced as well,
and by the very same people! James Coleman, perhaps the world's lead–
ing scholar of educational policy, recalls that in 1976 the president and a
number of prominent members of the American Sociological Association
tried to have him censured for the "crime" of discovering, and announc-
