It’s time to retire “Political Correctness”
Political Correctness (PC) is a term that currently means two completely different things. What you think it means depend on your position on the left-right political spectrum. The term itself only serves to muddle the already stiff conversation around social justice, and it may have played an instrumental role in the election of Donald Trump.
On the left, PC mostly means keeping up with the euphemism treadmill. New designations for groups of people are created in a perpetual effort to escape negative connotations. A replacement term emerges as soon as the current term becomes a slur. This substitution can happen ridiculously fast, which annoys comedians endlessly. It is well-known that failing to keep up with the treadmill can draw the ire of the Internet, especially if you yourself have been identified as a progressive in the past. PC in this form is mostly pointless since it never succeeds in dissolving the stigma that caused the negative connotation to arise in the first place. This is one thing that angers a lot of liberals about PC.
The other thing has to do with distinguishing hate-speech from free speech. Almost everyone (except a few free speech purists) agree that there should be a line between the two. However, nobody agrees where that line should be. The result is this very visible controversy that’s been happening in a few elite college campuses, where you’ve heard terms like safe spaces, micro-aggressions and trigger warnings flung around.
On the right, PC means the refusal to say certain things about certain groups of people in order not to offend. On the surface, it sounds pretty much the same as on the left, but there’s a massive difference. Many think that these things that should not be said are actually true. Even worse, some people on the right think that deep down, liberals actually agree with them on women, blacks, gays, immigrants and other minorities they like to pass judgment on. However, they think elites refuse to pass such judgments out loud for fear of offending said minorities. They think that political correctness is a social pact to bottle up offensive truths in order to keep minorities in good favor (and achieve things like getting their votes). In other words, social justice is a self-serving, pandering lie, the pinnacle of hypocrisy. The possibility that politicians, celebrities and other public figures genuinely believe in equality and social justice doesn’t seem to compute for them. The only possibility they can fathom is that elites cave in to peer-pressure. They’re liars and they don’t stand up for their own. They’re weak. They’re traitors.
The left and the right need realize that they mean different things by PC. There’s a false bi-partisan consensus that PC is a bad thing. But the thing is, they couldn’t disagree more on why it’s bad. If recognition of this would take place in public discourse, maybe we’ll have a chance to move the conversation along. And maybe we would have been more effective at delegitimizing Trump. So let’s reiterate what the difference is.
From the perspective of the left, PC is about maintaining civil discourse. It’s an attempt, however misguided, to stay ahead of the slurs. From the perspective of the right, PC is a pandering lie.
The thing that annoys me the most about how the right has been using PC is that they keep referring to it as a bad thing without giving actual examples. They think we all agree on what it means, and by refusing to give examples (probably by fear of social reprimand by being accused of racism and sexism), they keep the left believing that they agree on something.
On the other hand, the thing that annoys me the most about how the left uses PC is that the arguments we have about it nearly vanish if you start phrasing them without ever using terms like free speech, safe spaces, privilege or trigger warning. We’re confused about these concepts. We don’t give them all the same meanings, which is why we can’t reach a consensus on these topics.
We’re all complaining about how the conversation between the left and the right is at a standstill. We’re blaming it for the rise of Trump. The first step necessary to have a civil and constructive argument is to agree on the definition of concepts. Blanket terms like PC are useful because they allow us to move the conversation along without having to redefine a very complex topic every time. But that’s precisely what the problem is. When a concept is so complex that the term that designates it cannot possibly evoke the subtleties involved, people tend to make up their own interpretations. A good example of this dynamic is how “irony” is used. People get irony wrong a lot.
I found the term “privilege” incredibly useful to describe social dynamics when I discovered it. So much in fact that I started using the term in almost every conversation I had about social justice. Encapsulating complex concepts in one appropriate word can feel very empowering. What I forgot is that it took me a while to even understand the concept before I found it so useful, and that most people I interacted with probably didn’t do the same legwork. Realizing how misunderstood the concept of privilege was made me want to stick with people who understood what it was, forfeiting opportunities to have discussions across the aisle. I’m sure I’m not the only one who felt this way. Thinking about it now, it feels like the term “privilege” itself ended up stopping the conversation in its tracks.
Maybe we should be dropping terms that have become muddled in this way. But maybe that will only complete the next lap on the euphemism treadmill. I don’t know. What I do know is that it’s futile to have a conversation while relying on terms we can’t even agree on what they mean.
Timelapses are back! Here’s a video that I shot during our last trip in the Swiss Alps last year. We only spent a week-end, so I didn’t get a lot of footage. It’s still the darkest sky I’ve ever got in Europe. Enjoy!
