EUGENE GOODHEAR.T
SSl
in certain sections of the media and in the highest government circles.
The ferocious, often mean-spirited satire of
Heterodoxy,
directed against
the cultural left and liberalism in general, has its own standards of Pc. Its
language and animus are carryovers from the sixties (its editors David
Horowitz and Peter Collier were then editors of
Ramparts)
and are no
better than the worst instances that they take as their targets.
It is unfortunate that the idea of political correctness has been for–
mulated along a right-left axis. It surely is possible to be a liberal or even
a person of the left and be severely critical of the ethos of political cor–
rectness. A First Amendment advocate like Nat Hentoff, a man of the
left, is allergic to any code that tries to regulate expression. It is also
possible that persons of conservative persuasion in politics may find polit–
ical correctness congenial. Stanley Fish's conception of the authority of
the interpretive community (the current paradigm for PC) is a conserva–
tive idea. It does not provide a place for the rebel, the outsider, the in–
dividual who differs with the prevailing view. Political correctness is a
doctrine of opportunism. Since what constitutes the correct view
changes from time to time, the adjustment
to
it may have nothing to do
with principle. Such opportunism is not a matter of left or right.
The issue of political correctness has been trivialized by the debate
over speech codes, which mayor may not be enforced by penalties. It
has produced cultural comedy. Short people are vertically challenged,
handicapped people differently abled. The comedy lies in the euphemistic
solemnity of the phrases. The perniciousness of political correctness lies
elsewhere - in the timidity of academics who know better and are fearful
about expressing their convictions, or whose convictions are frozen by
an anxiety not to offend.
It is politically correct to say that political correctness is an invention
of conservatives, or a self-ironizing device of the sophisticated left, or the
excess of extremists, and hence a marginal phenomenon.
It
is not true
that conservatives have invented the term, though they have gleefully
pounced upon it in order to insinuate its Stalinist implications.
(Communist Party members were required to follow the party line,
whatever reservations or disagreements they had with it.) The phrase has
been spoken ironically and self-ironically to disarm those who object to
the idea of political correctness. I recall that the first time I heard the
phrase was from the lips of a person of the left. She was characterizing
someone as a prelude to a critical judgment. "Her attitudes may be po–
litically correct, but.... " The person who spoke the phrase was a
scholar of considerable intelligence and sophistication. She meant to say
that she had no objection to the attitudes of the person she was judging,
but that those attitudes were not enough
to
qualify that person.
