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PARTISAN REVIEW
equipment.
Even more, orthodoxies tend to be aggrieved by and resentful of
humor, jokes and comedy, and regularly respond with clamorous hostil–
ity to all three, as if they were exclusively enjoyed at their expense. To
be sure, cruel and offensive humor is often used by dominant groups
to
diminish and render ineligible the claims of those whom they exclude
from membership. But jokes and comedy can also be anarchic, aggressive,
lawless and individualistic repudiations of the normative assertions made
by any group; they can and have been regularly used to resist and expose
the pieties that group all egiances are likely to express themselves in.
Hence the formidable humorlessness of much politically correct language
is in part an understandable counterpart to the aggressive, individualistic
resistance of irony, comedy and humor to collective claims.
The reader will also have noticed, as Orwell himself had noted be–
fore, that there is a tendency in this kind of language toward euphemism.
Insincerity breeds contempt. Vague and blurred language permits one to
ignore the gap between "one's real and one's declared aims." It also
permits one to express malice in an ostensibly neutral manner. I recently
was indirectly a witness to a minor incident that illustrates this last point.
It was reported to me that a male colleague had been guilty of making a
sexist remark to a younger female colleague and that he had done this
while committing substance abuse. What happened was that a senior
male had indeed said something both unpleasant and disrespectful to a
younger female after he had had too much to drink. What I want
to
call attention to is the use in this situation of "substance abuse ."
Scientific in provenance, dispassionate in tone, Latinate in derivation, it is
supposed on the surface to supply us with an appropriately impersonal
and non-moralistic descriptive context for the behavior in question. But
what it does in fact is to assimilate several glasses too many of wine (the
substance in question) to lines of cocaine, to the drug trade, Alcoholics
Anonymous, potential violence and heaven knows what else. And "sub–
stance abuse" becomes itself, in the course of this politically adaptive re–
contextualization, a term of abuse.
An ana logous fate seems to have overtaken such a word as
"diversity," which has mutated from a general term referring to formal
ideas about the desirablity of what used to be thought of as pluralisms of
goals, ideas and representatives of groups to certain specific and even
quantifiable results. In this setting, diversity can come to be compatible
with - if not the same thing as - separatism, isolation, and bureaucrati–
cally mandated quotas. From the relatively safe and insulated perspective
of the American campus, one can see the further playing out on the
larger international scene of such ideas in the atrocities that are being
committed in the name of "ethnic cleansing." And as part of this latter
