FRED
SIEGEL
723
der, the product of a capitalist conspiracy. Much as m1l10ntles are now
said to be kept in their place by "white male" rationality, mental illness,
it was argued by the likes of Laing, was designed by bourgeois psychia–
trists to keep society's natural rebels in their place. The upshot has been
disastrous, as anti-psychiatry managed to move the mentally ill from the
back wards to the back alleys of our cities. I bring up this ancient history
because political correctness is so often dated from some point in the
mid-1980s. But in fact almost all of its basic stances were well-established
a quarter of a century ago.
It was Stokely Carmichael who denounced integration as a
"subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy"; it was Susan
Sontag who pronounced the white race a "cancer"; it was the student
strikers at Columbia who disparaged science as "white," and the student
strikers at San Francisco State who called for "black science." And there
is little in the way of curriculum revisionism that goes beyond Justice
Douglas's pronouncement, "The guarantees expressed in the Bill of
Rights are no monopoly of the West.... their roots are deep in
Eastern philosophy."
Today's passion for political correctness is the pale bureaucratic off–
spring of the passions produced by the antiwar, black power, and femi–
nist movements. The "enthusiasms," to use Locke's phrase for religious
passions, produced both a total rejection of the liberal regime and a
search for a new faith to live by. For deep-dyed '68-ers, the little Luthers
of the New Left, people whose parataxic moment came at the Chicago
Convention, America's evil was none less than revealed truth. Out of
that revealed truth was born what might be called leftist fundamentalism,
the assumption that the '68-ers, having achieved veridical truth, were
then required to impose that truth on the unbelievers. Enter Marcuse
and his 1969 left-wing attack on free speech:
Liberating tolerance would then mean intolerance against movements
frol11 the right and tolerance of 1110vements from the left. As
to
the
scope of this tolerance and intolerance ... it would extend to the
stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as
well as word.
None of this necessarily seemed indefensible at the time.
Richard Hofstadter, who once described the sixties as "the age of
rubbish," saw where all this might lead for the life of the mind. Writing
after the end of McCarthyism but before the sixties took off, he saw that
"if anti-intellectualism" has so often gained wide currency, it is "because
it has often been linked to at least defensible causes," our "humane and
