532
PARTISAN REVIEW
African-Americans entering the middle class through law, business, educa–
tion, and medicine has increased dramatically. The number of black, fe–
male, and Latino artists has also been multiplying exponentially, and
while many insist their work can be judged only by black, female, and
Latino critics (more evidence of narcissism), some are impressive by any
standards. One hopes, as their number and standing increase, that minor–
ity artists will come to be regarded as belonging to a fraternity of cre–
ative people rather than to any special class, gender, race, or group.
A similar hope is that the more superfluous of the new university de–
partments will eventually wither away when their social work is done -
as Marx foresaw the withering away of the state after the fulfillment of
the revolution. But even this hope is daunted by the fact that Marx's
utopian prophecy was never fulfilled. All that withered away was the
Soviet Union, leaving a swarm of balkanized nations menacing each
other over bristling borders.
This resembles our present condition under political correctness - a
series of hostile self-absorbed enclaves in a disunited America. I first wrote
about this in 1978, while observing the balkanization of theater audi–
ences, and things have gotten much worse in the intervening years. Few
Americans share or pursue a common good, and Martin Luther King's
majestic vision of an integrated nation is still far from realization.
Although our treatment of minorities, though far from perfect, is as
good or better than that of any nation in the world, there is more
protest and complaint here than in any nation in the world. You cannot
clear your throat without hurting people's feelings or cough without
wounding their self-esteem. This accounts for the spread of vigilante or–
ganizations, not just monitoring hateful actions , but vetting speech for
evidence of anti-Semitism, sexism, racism, ageism, lookism, or homo–
phobia. Are our skins so paper-thin that words and names have power to
inflict such lasting damage? Yes, judging from campus speech restrictions
and farcical episodes like the "water buffalo" incident at the University
of Pennsylvania. Friedrich Nietzsche's advice is still relevant today: "Life is
hard to bear, but do not affect to be so sensitive ."
One of the worst side effects of political correctness is the way it
chokes the aesthetic atmosphere. Simply put, it's boring. The politically
correct are invariably humor-impaired, finding racist or sexist insults even
in the most innocuous jokes. The phrases they use to describe these
imagined slights eventually have a numbing effect on everybody's senses,
but they are so contagious that they become a substitute for thinking.
Left-wing scholars and journalists, quick enough to charge other people
with racial stereotyping, riddle their own prose with PC stereotypes and
cliches. Language is used as a form of incantation by people who respond
to any original idea as a dangerous form of deviance.
