210
PARTISAN REVIEW
CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN
AND JOSEPH MORRISON SKELLY
William Phillips was acutely aware of the threat that political correctness
posed to free societies. In "Against Political Correctness," an essay writ–
ten in the early
I990S,
he ominously likened it to " ideological cleans–
ing," just as its ethnic variant was taking hold in Southeastern Europe.
Why did he perceive what so many others did not? He had been down
this road earlier on, when, for example, he broke with the harsh ortho–
doxies of Stalinism, as he recounts in his memoir,
A Partisan View .
In
the decade just past he once again discerned the emergence of an author–
itarian ideology, this time on American campuses, where political cor–
rectness had traveled "far beyond the rights of intellectual advocacy ...
to
dominate large sections of university life and
to
intimidate the rest of
the faculty and administrators ... to silence academics and students who
disagree with its premises and tactics."
William Phillips's wisdom, principles, and sustained opposition to the
repression of free intellectual expression retain their urgency today,
especially when we consider the nexus between political correctness and
political terrorism. Now, political correctness is not the father of politi–
cal terrorism, but the two can be considered distant relatives. They
share many traits; characteristics of one phenomenon reinforce features
of the other; propensities of one permit idiosyncrasies of the other
to
flourish. Both, for instance, are anti-Western in outlook. William
Phillips once described political correctness as
"to
a large extent anti–
American, in some quarters anti-capitalist" and antipathetic to "West–
ern cultural and political interests." Likewise, in an "Open Letter" to
the West, Osama bin Laden described the United States as "the worst
civilization witnessed by the history of mankind," a nation "without
principles or manners," a society marked by licentiousness and
immorality. The purveyors of political correctness generally echo this
disdain. William Phillips spoke of how they "equate Western civilization
with its faults, failing to concede or to recognize its achievements. They
seem to deny that what we are today is the culmination of our achieve–
ments in the past-unless of course we assume that ours is an evil civi–
lization." And this is precisely what the politically correct presuppose.
By the same token, anti-Westernism has been one of the working
Conor Cruise O'Brien, the Irish statesman and scholar, is currently working on
a study of George Washington's two presidential terms, entitled
First in Peace.
Joseph Morrison Skelly currently is writing a book on international terrorism.
