ROGER KIMBALL
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and Saint-Just, too, were against tyranny and for "virtue" - so much so
that they saw no problem employing tyranny to enforce virtue. The
French Republic, Robespierre chillingly wrote, was to be founded on
"virtue and its emanation, terror."
In
his view, the stroke of the guillo–
tine kept track of the Republic's level of virtue. How much twentieth–
century despots have learned from Robespierre! How much he could
have learned from the sober wisdom of
The Federalist Papers,
which re–
peatedly warned against attempting to legislate virtue.
The history of political correctness to date has presented us with
several crossroads. So far, most challenges to established standards of be–
havior have been met by capitulation and pusillanimity. We are now at
another crossroads, one at which the intolerance of political correctness
threatens to spill over into our daily lives. Many people involved in the
debate seem to be inured to the outrages the partisans of political cor–
rectness perpetrate: what's one more student expelled because he took
the wrong line on feminism or race or homosexuality? Why should they
get involved, rock the boat, put their careers on the line? There are
plenty of principled reasons, but there are practical reasons, too. Winston
Churchill mentioned one when, in 1938, he wrote that the British peo–
ple had before them the choice of shame or war. He feared that they
would choose shame - and have war nevertheless. He was right.
HILTON KRAMER
Confronting the Monolith
The
essential thing to remember about the political correctness move–
ment at this point in our history is that in the realm of education, cul–
ture , and the arts the champions of
PC
have already achieved a decisive
victory. They have succeeded in changing the way books, ideas, and ev–
ery intellectual and artistic endeavor are discussed and assessed.
In
the
classroom and in the media , in foundations and government agencies, in
arts organizations, critical journals, and public intellectual forums, the
consequences of censorship (and the wider phenomenon of self-censor–
ship) in the service of
PC
are now so fully established that an entire gen–
eration of younger artists, writers, intellectuals, academics, and cultural
bureaucrats takes the rhetoric and indeed the philosophical premises of
political COrrectness for granted and conducts its affairs according
to
its
