When I saw Dan Moller’s chapter on “Dilemmas of Political Correctness,” I thought I knew what he was going to say. I thought he was going to say something like, “We should all have good manners, but the demands of so-called ‘social justice’ are unreasonable and unfair.” Indeed, I half-expected him to offer another imaginary speech echoing those in his first chapter. Something along the lines of:
Imagine calling a town hall meeting and delivering the following speech:
My dear assembled citizens: I know most of us are strangers, but for many centuries people in this society have treated my group disrespectfully – if not brutally. You’ve improved of late, but it is nowhere near sufficient. Thus, I’m here now to insist that you (yes you, Emma, and you, John) owe me special deference as a matter of justice. From now on, you have to go out of your way to make me feel especially loved and prized. You should discuss my troubles several times per day, and never suggest that members of my group are in any way responsible for our current misfortunes. To do the latter is now officially called “Blaming the Victim,” and is the height of injustice.
Moreover, calling this an injustice means that it’s not enough that you comply with your obligations by working on my behalf. No, I insist that you monitor your fellow citizens for the slightest sign of disrespect toward my group – and my group is the final arbiter of what counts at disrespect. To the extent you care about justice, you must heap scorn and anger on anyone that we deem to have disrespected us, since that is what is owed me in light of our society’s legacy of disrespect toward my group.
Could you bring yourself to make this speech?
But Governing Least contains nothing like this speech. Instead, despite his contrarian political philosophy, Moller defends political correctness:
This much theorists of political correctness get right— political correctness is not a myth. But they neglect the perfectly good reasons for cultivating and enforcing various politically correct norms. In the case of race, the root concern is clearly that there exists a horrific record of violence and injustice directed toward African Americans and other minorities, as well as a record of promoting
such violence by superficially respectable means (including racial pseudoscience), and enlightened moral thinking has thus converged on a default norm against advancing ideas associated with the oppression or marginalization of minorities. A similar story applies to gender and occupation. Political correctness thus represents the evolution of public standards with the praiseworthy tendency to protect and promote the interests of historically oppressed groups. These standards work by introducing a high barrier of entry to those wishing to enter public discourse in a way that that threatens to undermine moral progress. By maintaining the norms, we acknowledge that such threats exist and that it is important to us collectively to signal to new entrants into public discourse that they must observe the norms carved out to protect the status of groups potentially under threat. And what is true in this case is true of many other examples of political correctness, such as censoring stereotyped depiction of Asians, the German anxiety over displays of sympathy for National Socialism, calls for including more women and other groups on syllabi, or suggestions that the poor are to blame for their plight.
Moller admittedly qualifies his position, but so mildly that only a political correctness fanatic would demur:
There is nothing wrong with promoting a presumption that historically oppressed or marginalized groups should not be insulted or subjected to discourse threatening to undermine their status, and it is puzzling that critics of political correctness seem frequently unwilling to acknowledge its legitimate ends. That leaves the door open to a second kind of criticism, the misguided application of the relevant norms.
Why makes Moller’s position so surprising? Because the rest of Governing Least argues for the moral impropriety of issuing strong positive moral demands against strangers. If you question the right of the poor to taxpayer support, how can you blithely accept norms “carved out to protect the status of groups potentially under threat”? Unless the threat is imminent, this is a truly extravagant demand. Furthermore, it seems engineered to deny any obligation of reciprocity. Conventional norms of good manners, for example, tell you that you’re entitled to respectful treatment as long as you treat others respectfully. Political correctness, in contrast, doesn’t just tell us to treat historically low-status groups with sensitivity; it also tacitly warns us not to judge the way that members of low-status groups treat others. As a practical matter, for example, feminism means that women may harshly criticize male behavior, but not vice versa. Even if you think that racist violence is just a few hate speeches away, Moller should remind the fans of political correctness about what he calls their “residual obligations.” (Start with #NotAllMen).
Stepping back, I would have expected Moller to pay more attention to the practice of political correctness. When I look at modern discourse, I don’t see political correctness as an effort to ward off “threats to undermine moral progress.” Rather, political correctness is such a threat. As I’ve said before, my view is that it’s largely an effort to dehumanize and demoralize people who question the highly questionable “social justice” worldview. And while I don’t think political correctness is the most important threat to undermine moral progress – or even the fourth-most-important threat – it’s still deplorable. I agree with Moller that proponents of political correctness highlight some genuine social problems. The best remedy, though, is not an exotic public religion, but good manners.
P.S. If I were Moller, I would also lament the way that extravagant but trendy moral claims drown out modest but non-trendy moral claims. Above all, would-be and illegal immigrants aren’t just an “historically oppressed group.” They are a currently oppressed group, denied the fundamental human rights to work for willing employers and rent from willing landlords. But Moller seems to think that concern for their oppression is political correctness run amok:
Another example is the increasing tendency to reject official government terms like “illegal alien” in favor of “undocumented immigrant” or “undocumented citizen,” with the implication that refusing to do so implies reactionary or hateful views. These campaigns aren’t just the one-off ideas of random individuals; the phrase “undocumented citizen” is encouraged by administrators at universities in the United States, and others urge that the statement “America is a melting pot” constitutes a form of “microaggression.” Regardless of what the right immigration policy is, and notwithstanding the legitimate interest in avoiding various forms of marginalization, this kind of discourse once again “impairs analysis.” “Undocumented immigrant” is meant to make it harder to focus on the fact that there are laws and procedures governing entry to the country that were flouted by the persons in question, while the Orwellian “undocumented citizen” seeks to present a political aspiration as a fait accompli.
READER COMMENTS
Phil H
Apr 24 2019 at 11:30am
A couple of points about PC.
(1) “Political correctness…tacitly warns us not to judge the way that members of low-status groups treat others.”
PC definitely can’t do anything tacitly. That makes no sense. People can do things tacitly (i.e. without speaking). Ideas either say a thing or they don’t. If an idea doesn’t say something, but you imagine that it *tacitly* says something… that’s just you!
(2) Caplan points out very nicely what I think may be the big difference of opinion between pro-PC and anti-PC people: whether they perceive PC as constraining the content of what can be said, as opposed to just the form.
I’m literally rethinking my position as I type this, I was just about to argue that it’s all about the form, but on reflection, it’s clear that there are certain claims which PC wouldn’t allow you to make, no matter how polite you’re language… They’re mostly claims that are wrong or offensive, but yeah, you can’t make them. As Caplan says, if you write off a very violent woman as “just a monster” without making at least some effort to understand what might have caused her violence, that would probably violate the rules of PC; doing the same for a man wouldn’t.
Huh. I’m generally pro-PC, but I’ll have to think through it again. Thank you for the thought-provoking post!
KevinDC
Apr 24 2019 at 1:18pm
Hello Phil!
Well, for one, it’s fair enough to say that PC can’t tacitly say or do anything, only people can do that. But I think a pretty plausible and far more more charitable interpretation is that Bryan was saying that as a shorthand for “advocates of PC tacitly” etc etc.
However, I’m more interested by your description that the statements PC “wouldn’t allow” you to make are “mostly claims that are wrong or offensive.” There’s a lot to unpack there. I’m glad your wording acknowledges that “wrong” and “offensive” are separate categories. But I’ve long been puzzled by the attitude of “X might be true, but it’s still offensive.” I might be able to see that statement making sense in response to a comment like “Bob has a major facial deformity and is really ugly,” maybe. But it seems to me that the attitude of “I don’t care if it’s true, it offends me” gets invoked way more often than just edge cases.
Suppose I hold controversial and politically incorrect belief X. And I want to give a lecture arguing that X is true. To the extent that PC is about preventing people from saying things that are “wrong or offensive,” it has two major problems. For one, if people say that I can’t state my arguments for X because X is wrong, then PC is simply stifling debate by begging the question – the truth of X is the very subject under discussion! The proper response to a wrong argument is rebuttal or refutation, not silencing or shouting down. And to say I shouldn’t be allowed to say it because it’s “offensive,” has problems of both yielding any discussion to the hecklers veto, and it the fact that a feeling of offense simply isn’t a reliable guide to evaluating ideas. In the 1950s, if someone wanted to advocate for the idea that gays should be allowed to marry and adopt kids, that would have been almost universally considered wrong, and also been considered deeply, shockingly offensive to almost everyone. But it still would have been wrong to not allow someone to make the case for gay marriage and adoption on that basis. Obviously we can’t wiggle out of this by saying “Well people in the 50s were just mistaken about what ideas are wrong and offensive, so PC wouldn’t have been a good idea then, but our definition of wrong and offensive today are better so we need PC to keep people from talking about ideas that are considered wrong or offensive by today’s standards.” That would just be a textbook case of special pleading.
A crystal clear case of these ideas run amok seems to be the Rebecca Tuvel controversy. When she published an article arguing that transracial identities deserve to be respected just as much as transgender identities, the response was striking. There was nobody in the opposition saying “Her arguments are wrong, and here’s a rebuttal article detailing her mistakes.” It was just an overwhelming torrent of people insisting that Tuvel should be condemned as a bad and immoral person and her arguments should be stricken from the record. And the journal caved and retracted her article. Not because it was found to be flawed and refuted, in the way the Lancet retracted Wakefield’s article. It was retracted just because people were offended by it. Do you believe this was an appropriate reaction? And if not, why not, and does your answer about this case specifically have any implications about PC in general?
Phil H
Apr 24 2019 at 8:52pm
Hi, Kevin.
Funny, I was just reading about Rebecca Tuvel and Hypatia the other day. Perhaps it is a good example… I’ll try to write this out and see if it makes sense.
First, there’s a sense in which you’re obviously right that we can’t just say “anything not generally accepted today is not politically correct.” We’d never have any new ideas!
But I think there is a way in which PC emerges from the intersection of three things. (1) We (feel the) need to exercise some control over mainstream discourse, just for the sake of keeping everyone on the same page, so that conversations are possible. (2) That “page” that we all want to be on is grounded in facts and reality. (3) In a way that was never true before the second half of the 20th century, underprivileged groups now sometimes discover new facts, or make social claims that we treat as facts.
I think (1) is probably where the big problem is – life will be much better when everyone realises it’s fine to have fundamental disagreements with the people around you and not sweat it. But group alignment is definitely a big thing in most human societies.
(2) is what I think is distinctive about the modern age: in theory we care more about truth than about tradition, so we accepted Galileo, then Einstein, then Bohr, and universal suffrage, and communism, then not-communism, as more facts became available.
(3) is where it gets complicated, because we have small groups of not-particularly-rich-and-powerful people (academics) telling us the new stuff. In the past, truth was what the king & church said it was. Now, our truth-finding mechanisms are no longer aligned with our social power mechanisms.
Classic examples: dangers of smoking and climate change. Scientists discover them, big business strongly opposes the scientists and tries to co-opt the public. PC is the response to business propaganda. Because the messages “smoking is fine” and “climate change isn’t a problem” were obviously being pushed by mainstream groups with no respect for truth and reality, any associated view became non-PC, tainted by association. Even those who sincerely held truth-based opinions (e.g. those who noticed that secondhand smoke evidence was very weak) ended up being non-PC, because PC is inevitably a blunt instrument.
More difficult examples: minority social norms. In the modern age, we’ve decided to allow underprivileged groups to tell us what their norms are, and to respect them. Thank goodness. That means that these groups will develop non-mainstream norms, and those norms become social fact. Here are a few that I don’t feel deeply, but accept because I’ve been told them: frequent casual joking by men about rape is not OK; never out a person you know to be gay; never use the name a trans person had before they transitioned. These rules are important to the people directly involved; no one else gets to set them; and in an era when we believe respect for all is important, they are a form of social fact. Just as in earlier times, it was a social fact that you should not blaspheme, I’d say that in 2019, it is a social fact that no man should joke casually about rape, no one should out a gay person, and no one should deadname a trans person.
But these norms are also opposed by more powerful groups: misogynists, homophobes, trans denialists. So a PC rule emerges in the same way as with smoking: the rule is, to be PC, avoid expressing views that seem to issue from those groups, who are incorrect about how women/LGBT people should be treated.
Tuvel’s mistake was that she crossed over into an academic discipline she didn’t know, and didn’t respect its norms. That is a bad mistake, because academic norms exist for a reason. But I think it was the journal that was at fault, because it’s explicitly interdisciplinary, and the editors must realise that when you cross discipline, you will inevitably, deliberately and accidentally, violate disciplinary norms. That’s kinda the point. They should have known that and had ways to deal with it. All the criticism that followed badly confused several different things: criticism of the norms of trans studies (basically I regard those criticisms as pointless: academic subdisciplines have a right to set their own norms); criticism of tone (important in academia, probably fair); criticism of procedure (the most important, IMO).
So… I’m reevaluating, like I said. At the moment, I’m still mostly pleased that PC exists. It seems to play a valuable function in protecting truth and minorities (though anti-vax is a big problem for my rosy view!).
MarkW
Apr 25 2019 at 8:02am
So much to take issue with here, but let’s start with this:
<i> because we have small groups of not-particularly-rich-and-powerful people (academics) telling us the new stuff</i>
And
<i>But these norms are also opposed by more powerful groups: misogynists, homophobes, trans denialists. </i>
My reaction is — wait, What!!? The people who run universities (and media organizations and fortune 500 companies — think of Google vs James Damore) are very powerful. But I’m truly scratching my head to think of powerful groups of ‘misogynists and homophobes’ — could you provide some examples?
Phil H
Apr 25 2019 at 10:36am
The Republican Party.
Phil H
Apr 25 2019 at 10:39am
Most of the Christian establishment.
The armed forces.
Hollywood.
Donald Trump.
Wall Street.
Phil H
Apr 25 2019 at 11:12am
But much more fundamentally, that deeply ignorant comment marks you out as someone who just doesn’t think about the people around you. Really, directly around you. Think about your own mother. I don’t know how old you are, but my mother turned 70 this year. She grew up in a world where only a third as many women as men got degrees (and the vast majority in gender segregated subjects).
If you want to know about homophobic institutions, how about parents? Take a look at Dan Savage’s It Gets Better project, inspired by a spate of teen suicides caused by children’s own parents rejecting them. This wasn’t in the 1960s – though please remember that about a third of the people alive in the 1960s are still alive today – this was less than a decade ago.
Things are improving rapidly in the USA, which is the world leader in this kind of progress. But all of those people who were massively discriminated against and scarred by the prejudice of the past – they’re still around! They didn’t just go away! And many of them are still suffering – all those women who didn’t get to go to college in the 1960s and 1970s are earning much, much less today as a result. That harm is ongoing.
Now, it’s important to recognise progress where it’s happened, but the idea that all those powerful institutions just “went away” in the last decade is insane. Do you think that since Weinstein got caught, the casting couch has been folded up and put in deep storage? Do you imagine that on the day DADT ended, life became a bed of roses for gay people in the military? If these observations are news to you, I suggest that you read the news a little more.
MarkW
Apr 25 2019 at 1:04pm
But much more fundamentally, that deeply ignorant comment marks you out as someone who just doesn’t think about the people around you.
Ooops. I mistook you for that rare SJW with whom it was possible to have a productive conversation. By this point, I should have known better. My mistake.
Phil H
Apr 25 2019 at 1:13pm
The conversation is right there if you want it. If you prefer to be upset over the tone, that is a valid lifestyle choice for you to make.
Mark
Apr 25 2019 at 4:12pm
If you prefer to be upset over the tone, that is a valid lifestyle choice for you to make.
I’m not upset (over the tone or anything else). Just making the judgement call that time is limited and this is really unlikely to be a productive exchange. The sky appears not to be the same color in your world as it is in mine.
Cliff
May 13 2019 at 2:15pm
“She grew up in a world where only a third as many women as men got degrees”
I believe it has been well over a hundred years since such a world existed. It looks like that threshold was crossed around 1910 for bachelor’s degrees (the number of higher degrees being very low). Can you provide any support or basis for your claim? Historical gender parity in higher education is much greater than most people think. Going back to 1870 it doesn’t appear that men ever had more than twice the higher education enrollment of women (search for “120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait”). The slight lower rate of degree grant might be due to choosing to drop out and start a family.
For what it’s worth I also think it’s pretty bizarre to call any of the groups you list (i.e. excluding Trump) misogynistic or homophobic. I also think it is self-evident from the way this phenomenon has grown that the more powerful groups are on the “progressive” side.
Phil H
Apr 25 2019 at 2:52am
On the question of what you should do about someone who wants to give a lecture:
First, the idea that we can’t declare a topic to be wrong without debating it is not right. There is no need for flat earthers, intelligent design supporters, or ISIS recruiters on campus. We don’t need to hear them out, those questions are closed. There is a danger here that radicals will be shut out, and in general I think universities should make an effort to keep themselves open to radicals. But given how PC mainly targets regressive ideas, I don’t think there’s much of a worry there.
Questions of offense actually often break down into questions of fact. Lecturer claims, “I’m saying nothing offensive!” Gay person points out: You’re literally claiming that I don’t have human rights… I don’t see much problem with excluding crypto-bigots, who create theories to justify their political views – like intelligent design. There are facts of the matter: ID was never an actual theory, it was a smokescreen for creationism. Similarly, “men’s rights” is not an actual movement, it’s a smokescreen for misogyny. There is no censorship involved in pointing out “fake viewpoints.”
Once the above two categories are weeded out, the “problems” that PC in theory causes are… very rare. Not non-existent, but rare.
Here’s a nice current example: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/24/depaul-university-professor-criticized-nature-his-pro-israeli-anti-palestinian-views
(Even here, note the hypocrisy of Hill mentioned at the end. He doesn’t actually believe in academic freedom, he just wants to use it when convenient. But that’s not the main issue.) In this case, the students do appear to be going OTT. But I would note that, that’s kinda OK. They’re students. They’re supposed to! The university is maintaining it’s correct position… So this is an example of friction, but not a problem. No one has acted incorrectly – there is speech and counterspeech.
Given that this is how 99.9% of PC-related clashes pan out, I struggle to see anything to be worried about in PC.
Kevin_DC
Apr 25 2019 at 4:28pm
[I’ve tried to post this comment a couple of times now, but for some reason it’s not going through, so I’m giving it one more try. Hopefully it works this time!]
Hi Phil!
There’s an awful lot in your responses – I suspect if I attempt to go through all of it point by point this conversation will just become too unwieldy – blog comments are a limited forum. So I’ll just respond just give a broad, general purpose response that doesn’t focus too much on specific points – time is limited!
First, a brief digression that will seem irrelevant but trust me – there’s a point 😛 Just setting some background.
When I was much younger, and much dumber (there may be a correlation there) I was a believer in something like creationism. There were a number of reasons I changed my mind. But the thing that first got the ball rolling was that I noticed how creationists weren’t being honest about what the arguments for evolution actually are. I’m sure you’re aware that creationists present horribly and laughably distorted views on what the theory of evolution actually says. Eventually, I noticed the misrepresentations, and that was what got me started towards my current views. But that first step was key.
So why do I bring this up? Because it seems to me that currently, the pro-PC crowd is uniquely bad at actually understanding or accurately describing the views of the people they disagree with. Take one example – Jordan Peterson. I’ve read his recent book, a bunch of his essays, and listened to various speeches and podcasts with him. I think he’s right about 10% of the time, wrong but interesting and thought provoking about 20% of the time, flat out wrong about 40% of the time, and the other 30% I think he’s so off base he’s not even wrong. In short, I’m not a fan. And the pro-PC crowd isn’t a fan of his either. The problem is, I’ve yet to encounter even a single example of someone in the pro-PC crowd who’s criticized Peterson and came within a light-year of accurately describing what Peterson’s actual views are. And Peterson benefits from this! When people try to argue against him by saying “Peterson is bad because he thinks [insert a litany of things totally unrelated to anything Peterson has ever actually said, or are the exact opposite of what Peterson has actually said, or are obviously spliced and decontextualized quotes that Peterson’s fans will instantly recognize as such because they’ve actually read him in full context],” well…it’s not like his fans don’t notice this. On the contrary, it just reinforces the idea in their head that not only is Peterson right, but he’s speaking forbidden truths that those in power don’t want to admit and are not merely unwilling to engage, but incapable of engaging. There’s a semi-famous case where Peterson was interviewed by a journalist about his views, and there were a few dozen instances where he would say something and the journalist would interrupt him with some version of “So what you’re really saying is [insert obvious distortion here].” Peterson’s fans absolutely love this interview. One example: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/putting-monsterpaint-onjordan-peterson/550859/ What’s noteworthy about this article is that it was the first introduction to Peterson by the author, and how the interviewer’s obvious use of “you say you believe X but obviously that’s a smokescreen to cover for the fact that you really think these other things that you’ve never actually said” just made Peterson seem like the more reasonable party. To his fans, this interview serves as perfect confirmation of everything the anti-PC narrative says – that PC is made up of people who are unwilling to engage in debate and who willfully distort the positions of anyone who thinks differently from them. And I have no doubt there are plenty of people who are edge cases, on the borderline of accepting Peterson’s world view, and who get pushed over the edge specifically because they can see plain as day that the PC crowd is blatantly misrepresenting his actual views and refusing to engage in anything like a real discussion with those views. I’m not saying “open conversation will forever banish bad views.” But I am saying that either explicitly or implicitly banning discussion of certain views will inevitably have the effect of making those views far more popular than they otherwise would be.
And my concern that the PC crowd is particularly bad at this isn’t just a hypothetical worry. There has actually been research on this, where you take right wing people and left wing people, and ask them a bunch of questions, then ask them how they think the other side would answer. And the research shows that right wing people actually do a pretty good job of accurately describing left wing views. But the typical left winger has no earthly idea what right wingers actually believe – but the thing is, they don’t realize it. Their attempts to accurately describe conservative views are a total swing-and-miss, but at the same time they’re absolutely certain they knocked it out of the park. This is a bad thing. And I think the PC urge to decide what people should be “allowed” to say, and to rule out certain points of view as not even being worth discussing, has something to do with this.
Anyway, a couple of additional things I’d like to drop – I don’t fully and 100% agree with these, but I think they make useful points!
First, this post by Scott Alexander. Fair warning – this guy is almost constitutionally incapable of being terse, so don’t start reading this unless you have a good amount of free time.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
This other one is a YouTuber whose videos I’ve found interesting and thought provoking, talking about the value of offensive ideas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UeJzbx1iu0
Happy Thursday!
Thaomas
Apr 24 2019 at 11:31am
It that Moller’s contention? He’s OK if taxpayer representatives redistribute income from high income people to lower income people so long as it’s not justified as a “right” of the poor to receive such transfers?
Thaomas
Apr 24 2019 at 11:41am
The problem with “illegal alien/immigrant” is that “illegal” is the kind of adjective that is properly applied to acts, not to people. I think everyone understands that immigrants are undocumented because they have legally crossed the border without a visa or illegally have overstayed their visas.
John Thacker
Apr 24 2019 at 2:44pm
“Undocumented” is also the sort of thing that is properly applied to acts, not people. In particular, people who have overstayed their visa are not “undocumented.” Their entry into the country was documented; their subsequent behavior violated the original document and may in a certain sense be “undocumented,” but you can no more or less argue that the person is “undocumented” than the person is “illegal.” If “undocumented immigrant” is ok to describe those people, then so is “illegal immigrant.” If, OTOH, you wish to restrict “undocumented immigrant” to only people who had no documentation whatsoever for their act of immigration (ignoring that many of these people do have all sorts of other types of documentation, just not about the one act), then you need a new term that covers everyone who has immigrated illegally.
To put it another way, it’s simply a form of shorthand, just like another recent ridiculous PC controversy, that of using “Easter worshipers” to mean “Christians attending Easter worship services,” something that of course should not be taken with extreme umbrage to literally mean “you worship the concept of Easter.”
KevinDC
Apr 24 2019 at 11:57am
Hey Bryan –
I think you might be overstating your case, specifically by invoking Moller’s general issue with the “moral impropriety of issuing strong positive moral demands against strangers.” Moller’s definition of PC here seems more like saying “We should all be nice to each other. However, group X has been extremely picked on for a very long time, so in light of that we should make an extra effort to be nice to them and pay extra attention to what we say to/about them.” It really seems like a stretch say that’s issuing a “strong positive moral demand.” It seems more like something you once said about how you would view act around polygamists:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2006/06/are_you_big_eno.html
That doesn’t seem to be too different to me than what Moller is actually advocating.
You might say something like “Sure, if that really was all political correctness was really asking of people it wouldn’t be so bad, but in practice it goes much further,” I’m right there with you. Or if you said “Advocates of political correctness often say they just want people to be nicer to each other, but it’s usually in the context of a pretty blatant motte-and-bailey strategy,” I’m also on board with that. But I still think it’s unfair to characterize the case Moller actually made as making “strong positive moral demands against strangers.”
Floccina
Apr 24 2019 at 1:17pm
One might make this speech:
My dear assembled citizens: I know most of us are strangers, but for many centuries people in this society have treated my group disrespectfully – if not brutally. You’ve improved of late, but not enough. Thus, I’m here now to insist that you (yes you, Emma, and you, John) show special deference. From now on, you should go out of your way to make me feel especially loved and prized. You should always question yourself considering if members of my group are not responsible for our current misfortunes because of our history. To be careful to not “Blaming the Victim,”.
Moreover, calling this an injustice means that it’s not enough that you comply with your obligations by working on my behalf. No, I insist that you talk to your fellow citizens about their signs of disrespect toward my group. To the extent you care about justice, you must make reasonable efforts to correct anyone that we deem to have disrespected us, since that is what is owed me to balance society’s legacy of disrespect toward my group.
John Thacker
Apr 24 2019 at 2:52pm
Who is “we,” here? That’s all well and good when talking to an individual, by all means politeness and respect demands that you adopt the term that person prefers. It offers much less of a guide in those cases where not all members of whatever group come close to agreeing about the relevant term, when the preferred term changes (sometimes quite rapidly) due to the euphemism treadmill (a sign of the underlying issues in society that are not being balanced by the shifting of terms), and in cases where one is publishing an article, book, or other form of media intended for mass consumption.
Those latter conditions create situations where people do make reasonable efforts to avoid signs of disrespect, yet will face extreme insistence on “correction” no matter which alternative they choose, sometimes from quite small and unanticipated niche groups. It’s a muddle that demands patience and respect on both sides, which is not always given.
Floccina
Apr 25 2019 at 11:09am
BTW this seems to be close to the norm today among nice people in the USA, including conservatives and even among Trump supporters.
Mark Z
Apr 26 2019 at 1:59am
So, there’s a big problem here (and with ‘political correctness’, ‘social justice’ ideology, whatever one calls it): we’re being asked to entrust someone to determine whether or to what extent they’ve been mistreated, and how it ought to be remedied. This is infeasible. One cannot, as a matter of course, trust the plantiff to decide the verdict and determine how he should be compensated. This is essentially what ‘political correctness’ requires us to do. People are not unbiased observers of their own lives; even someone has not suffered (or even benefited) from belonging to some group will probably take advantage of any psychological framework that permits or encourages them to believe they have suffered. It’s just natural for people to prefer to think of themselves as victims of injustice than as beneficiaries of good luck or, worse, of oppression. This has practical implications: it’s nearly impossible to convince an entire race or ethnic group that they are the antagonists of history. The most successful attempt was with the Germans during the postwar era, and even that’s arguably crumbling as we speak. People tire of self-flagellation and will generally not long put up with the expectation of doing penance for things their long dead ancestors (or just people who kind of looked like them) did to someone else’s long dead ancestors.
Floccina
Apr 26 2019 at 10:38am
Good point the speech would be better coming from someone in the group who did the past harm.
Another weakness in my version of the speech is not enough universality, all groups should realize that they are human and in the some circumstances they could be the persecutor.
Weir
Apr 25 2019 at 3:09am
Hate crime hoaxes are pretty conclusive evidence of what PC is for.
So if you hate lacrosse players, it follows that Crystal Mangum could not have lied.
If you hate fraternities, then you’ll defend Sabrina Erdely, the way Sarah Jeong defended her.
Jussie Smollett hates people who wear red hats, and if you’re Kamala Harris or Cory Booker or Kirsten Gillibrand it’s an instant, handy campaign issue.
Andrew McClinton burns down his own church. Nikki Joly burns down his own house.
Nathan Phillips. Yasmin Seweid. Eleesha Long.
At Gustavus Adolphus College it was the Diversity Leadership Council itself that printed out and posted racist signs “in an effort to help educate our peers and campus community about issues of bias, and the importance of being an active bystander.”
Historians and journalists have their own version of this. Nancy MacLean hates James Buchanan. George Eaton hates Roger Scruton. You target your victim, you make him suffer, get him fired, destroy him, erase him, eliminate him, whatever you need to do. And at the same time you get to smear entire groups of people by association.
Mark Z
Apr 26 2019 at 1:33am
There are some dubious assumptions in Moller’s defense of ‘political correctness.’ For example: that the legacy of past oppression plays a major role in modern inequities. My ancestors were oppressed – they were serfs – but it has had zero effect on me. The distant past – even just from a few generations ago – is not nearly as influential as people think, especially in modernity. Socially, culturally, and economically, the world is moving very fast. I don’t think anyone has ever offered convincing evidence that the legacy of our horrid past exerts nearly as much influence on us as is assumed. In fact, economic historians like Fogel have largely undermined that belief.
In fact, people’s belief that we are constantly reliving the past, imo, likely exerts greater influence on us than the past itself. In other words, people who identify with their oppressed ancestors are influenced in how they live by their identification with the past than by the actual past. This is much of what ‘political correctness’ is about. It hinges on the frivilous – often spurious – notion of ‘we,’ ‘us,’, ‘them.’ But the fact that the children of Holocaust survivors and the grandchildren of serfs are lumped in with English-American slave owners, or Latinos who are mostly of Spanish ancestry are identified with native American victims of Spanish colonialism illustrates some of the absurdity of modern identities.
Not only is this sort of identification with history logically absurd and morally collectivist (which makes them bad in my opinion, and not legitimate, as Moller contends), but pernicious for everyone. Individuals and groups that are less burdened by this fixation with historical identity do better than those that are, perhaps because they are less likely to excuse deleterious habits in themselves, their children, and their communities as mere legacies of the past, or perhaps because they focus less on politics – which is a huge time dump – and more on personal professional and economic success.
Finally, an inherent flaw in this sort of ‘affirmative action’ mentality: to the extent that a group of people is disproportionately afflicted by discrimination today as a legacy of the oppression of their forebears, the imposition of a single, consistent standard will disproportionately benefit them. It is not necessary to consciously impose a double standard. It’s actually likely harmful as it holds that group to lower expectations; it is also unfair to members of other groups. An unfortunate myth of privilege-based thinking is that everyone benefits from belonging to a privileged class. A descendant of a rich slave owner who is today poor because prior generations lost the wealth does not benefit from his past. A well-off child of wealthy black person is not suffering the after-effects of slavery. It is positively unfair that we should adopt standards that favor the latter at the expense of former. Even to the extent that racial privilege exists (Moller and many others greatly exaggerate this extent I’d day by ignoring most of the relevant confounding variables), it is not evenly distributed, and therefore the imposition of broad double standards is necessarily unfair to many people who belong to the putatively privileged groups but lost the ‘privilege lottery.’
Phil H
Apr 26 2019 at 3:03am
It would help me if you could explain what you think the burden of PC is. Because you seem to think there is on, but on an emotional and personal level, I’ve never felt it, so I think I genuinely don’t understand.
I feel constrained in my communication with every person; learning a couple of extra rules, like the right terminology for someone on the spectrum, or that it’s no longer OK to have male-only discussion panels… is a thing, but it’s not a terribly onerous thing. And it feels to me very much part and parcel of being a polite member of society.
In a post above, you use terms like verdict and plaintiff. But PC isn’t law. It’s just being polite, in a way that goes beyond what your parents taught you.
So all these differing standards… yeah, but the standards are light. They’re not oppressive (or they don’t seem so to me). Can you say why you perceive them as heav?
Mark Z
Apr 26 2019 at 3:57pm
But it is decidedly not just politeness. It’s a highly asymmetric standard. I’d use my interactions with women as an example. I am expected to be very polite, respectful, and encouraging toward a woman, to avoid making any jokes related to sex; to avoid even being too critical of an individual woman, to ‘walk on eggshells’ so to speak. A woman could (and I’m using an actual example) jokingly suggest to me that men ought to be enslaved or eradicated. In other words, my interlocutor can speak as freely, frankly, and offensively (as long as it’s with respect to my maleness or whiteness) with impunity, while I must be very proper. This asymmetry is of course rather annoying and has social perils of its own: even the failure to agree with some statement – and just silently ignore it – that may serve as an ideological litmus test with which I disagree (e.g., “aren’t white people just terrible?”) can out one as being ‘not one of us.’
Political correctness renders reasonable discussions on anything related to race or gender impossible. Contending – however politely – that some racial and gender disparities aren’t primarily caused by discrimination- not an extreme position imo – can be regarded as extremely ‘problematic.’ I think this is a harmful rather than helpful norm.
Some will say, ‘that’s a small burden,’ but that’s beside the point. Not eating meat on Fridays is also a small burden, but that doesn’t justify ruining someone’s career over failing to do so. I hate that excuse. The ease of following a nonsensical rule is not a good argument for its harsh enforcement.
I may speculate your views cohere much more with what is considered politically correct than mine do, so I’d expect you wouldn’t chafe under the standards as much as those of us do whose views are more at odds with those who craft the standards.
An analogy: if a bunch of Catholics get to decide what constitutes blasphemy in a multi-religious society, it’s liable to bother (and be unfair to) Protestants, Jews, Muslims, etc.
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