STEVEN MARCUS
631
associated with those two incomparable tyrants no longer prevails as an
immediate threat to the world, or to large portions of it, some of the
qualities and attributes that characterized the cultural life of the age of
totalitarianism linger on and remain with us yet, in modulated, mitigated
or attenuated forms, a kind of soft totalitarianism - along with a residual
totalitarianoid sensibility. In particular the corrupted language that em–
anates nowadays from our institutions of culture and intellect expresses at
point after point its affiliation with the historic experience of totalitari–
anism out of which we are still emerging - or from which, one might
more austerely suggest, we have not yet fully emerged. Totalitarianism is,
after all, the twentieth century's contribution to the forms of extreme
orthodoxy. Orthodoxies of one kind or another have enjoyed a long
and sustained existence among human societies. Sometimes they act to
create order and hold groups of people together. As a rule they also
tend to muzzle, stifle or suppress dissent, and create anxiety and fear in
those whose thinking deviates from their prescriptions. The situation as it
exists today represents a continuation of the state of things represented
by Orwell, but by other means and in other dimensions.
The orthodoxies in question are chiefly those that are loosely associ–
ated with the liberal left in a variety of areas and discourses and are or–
ganized around a variety of causes or projects. One major difference that
has occurred since Orwell published his indictments of the political abuses
of language and intelligence is that there is at present no single party or
group of sub- parties or shadow parties with a unified, centrally-con–
trolled party line and apparatus of propaganda to which believers and
adherents can refer their allegiances. Another difference is that the focus
of such cultural-political goings-on has, at least in America and some
other parts of the West, shifted from the region of politics at large to
the more confined though still spacious precincts of our institutions of
higher education, our colleges and universities, our learned societies and
professional organizations, our philanthropic foundations, museums and
other centers of cultural activity. What this transposed location registers,
among much else, is the immensely increased importance of higher edu–
cation in Western societies - an importance that touches almost every
locus of human enterprise - scientific, technical, technological, eco–
J1OITlic, social, cultural. Universities as institutions have become central to
the workings of our societies in a wholesale variety of new senses. And as
a matter of course, many of the conflicts, inequities, injustices and abuses
of those same societies have found new registries and appeared in novel
but recognizable forms within these institutions. The ideological ortho–
doxies referred to by the term political correctness and its variations have
largely to do with attitudes and movements that have arisen in opposi–
tion to such inequities and injustices and have as their purpose the coun-
