Civilization ....
Complaints about political correctness are generally crap. The truth of the matter is that if we leave the impolite to figure out what constitutes polite speech, we'd be left with the sort of tit-for-tat that comes about when people are angry.
• • •
Deficients°, for instance, by the grace of being better killers, have always considered themselves intellectually and morally superior than the evolutionarily-gifted°. As a result, deficients have sought to expand their empire the world over. In Africa, the deficients tempted the gifted in order to foster a trade in human flesh that was so severe that those gifted who sold out and traded their neighbors to the deficients would later regret their failure to understand that they were not sending their continental brethren to serve a familiar system, but rather to be destroyed in a hideous, exploitative system. The deficients, in turn, got tired of paying taxes, and decided that "all men" were "created equal". After fighting a war to prove their point, the deficients decided to argue about taxes again, and in order to settle the dispute for the time being, the deficients decided that the evolutionarily gifted equaled only three-fifths of a man, and therefore should not be treated equal. Over time, this idea became so prevalent and persuasive among those deficients whose wealth absolutely depended on the suffering of the gifted, that they came to believe some absolutely absurd ideas, such as the notions that illiteracy, violence, and child abduction were actually kindnesses bestowed upon the imprisoned and enslaved gifted. These ideas helped the deficients feel better about their shortcomings. Nobody needed to accuse the deficients of moral lack; the deficients knew that what they were doing was incompatible with their professed beliefs. The only way around this was to pretend that the gifted were not, in fact, human ....
• • •
The preceding section simply discusses the American slave trade. It's not meant to actually
go anywhere, but rather to demonstrate a point.
The terms involved are based on the ideas of a black professor in the 1980s and '90s who managed to assert some absolutely mind-boggling standards:
• A black man cannot be racist because he is not empowered to be effectively racist.
• The space-shuttle Challenger disaster ought to be applauded, as it slowed white men in spreading their moral filth across the Universe.
• White skin is a form of disruptive mutation, leaving the individual less-prepared to deal directly with nature; e.g., white people are, by virtue of genetic mutation, less evolved.
The professor was so effective at these sorts of arguments that he actually won a settlement when his university tried to fire him for such outrageous speech.
• • •
The problem is that people who resented not being able to use words like "bitch", "nigger", "kike", "wetback", &c., in formal communication (e.g., company memo, government press release, university study) tried to link their fetishes for hateful speech to such bizarre notions as "ableism" (any building with stairs is an "ableism", a deliberate attempt to oppress the "differently-abled"), "femstruation" (striking the syllable "men" from "menstruation"), and other silliness put forward in the name of being polite. Here's the thing, though: the people who invented words like "ableism" were attempting to accomplish something specific, such as identifying the ways in which facilities were inherently hostile to the handicapped; words like "femstruation" were invented at least in part tongue-in-cheek.
Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf (yes,
that Chris Cerf) wrote, in the 1990s,
The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook. I recommend this volume for anyone who is actually troubled about political correctness. The book also contains a section on BS language, which nobody ever talks about. BS is the "bureaucratically suitable", and in their rush to condemn PC, many include BS in their definition of PC.
BS is more a problem in people's lives. Consider how often you actually experience the following terms:
Politically Correct terms
term - definition (page number)
• ambigenic - nonsexist (5)
• overdetermined - boring (45)
• prewoman - young girl (51)
• rectocentrism - right-handed supremacist idea (53)
• fatherencloser - motherfucker (84)
Really, how many times have you used
any of those words? How many times have you
heard any of those words?
Now then:
Bureaucratically Suitable terms
term - definition (page nubmer)
• air support - bombing (115)
• anomaly - accident (116)
• collateral damage - civilian death or injury (117)
• downsizing - layoffs (119)
• festival seating - no seats (120)
• neutralize - kill (124)
• nonrenew - to lay off or fire (125)
• preemptive strike - sneak attack (125)
• right-to-work laws - union-busting legislation (127)
• service (a target) - to bomb (128)
• single-use - disposable (128)
• soft (ordinance/target) - humans (weapons to destroy/as a target) (128)
• streamlining - see "downsizing" (129)
• wildlife management - killing, hunting (131)
Now ... how many of
those words do you encounter from time to time? The only people these words were intended to put at ease were the people speaking them.
• • •
In the end, "political correctness" is a bureaucratically-suitable phrase that substitutes for "polite speech". Not all PC is intended to avoid offending someone; much of it comes about in order to break the taboos of what has been referred to as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which says "that all human culture is fabricated by language, and that therefore, before we can change a pattern of behavior, we must change the terms which relate to it". (Beard & Cerf, 53)
Consider a quote I recycle from time to time:
The members of all communities, including nations and whole civilisations, are infused with the prevailing ideologies of those communities. These, in turn, create attitueds of mind which include certain copacities and equally positively exclude others.
The ideologies may be so ancient, so deep-seated or so subtle that they are not identified as such by the people at large. In this case they are often discerned only through a method of challenging them, asking questions about them or by comparing them with other communities.
Such challenge, description, or questioning, often the questioning of assumptions, is what frequently enables a culture or a number of people from that culture to think in ways that have been closed to most of their fellows.
(Emir Ali Khan)
The idea of using a polite word instead of "nigger" ought to be rather quite obvious. But identifying ideas like phallocentrism, logocentrism, &c., have a definite purpose in academia. If we never stepped outside our prevailing ideologies, progress would be considerably slower.
Additionally, much reaction to PC is overstated. How many of us have even encountered, much less used, the phrase, "receptive noninitiator"? The phrase refers to a man whose justification for having sex with a woman is that she asked, suggested, or otherwise initiated. Such a term would only arise in the context in which it does. The term came about at a time when, socially, a woman faced great prejudice inasmuch as such a justification would not be accepted. In other words, it's only an important term within the context of its original discussion, and it's only a big deal if some thumb-sucking twit decides to have a problem with PC.
Really. Just think about the receptive noninitiator. It's only these last few years, maybe the last decade and a half at
most, that a woman could justify casual sexual intercourse through receptive noninitiation without being branded a slut.
• • •
There are other PC standards that, when people encounter them, they blame the idiot believing such things, and not politically-correct language. To use a couple complete definitions from Beard and Cerf:
• privileges - Defined by Lewis Lapham, in Harper's Magazine, as "monocultural advantages belonging to people whom one doesn't like." See: rights (51)
• rights - Defined by Lewis Lapham, in Harper's Magazine, as "monocultural advantages belonging to oneself or one's friends." See: privileges (53)
• quota - Any "artificial" means of adjusting racial, ethnic, gender, or cultural balance in American society, except for the privileged consideration the children of prominent European-American alumni receive when applying for college. (126)
We still see these definitions today.
Privilege has largely been replaced by "special rights"; in an effort to hold certain groups--e.g., homosexuals--as separate from the rest of American culture, homophobes accuse that equal and civil rights for homosexuals within the American monoculture would constitute "special rights", or an unfair
privilege. In the meantime, holding that the American monoculture is exclusively defined by "middle American" or otherwise conservative political values, gender discrimination is insisted upon by homophobes and traditionalists as a "right". Why blame PC for this? Why not just blame the bigots?
And the same with quotas. People complaining that blacks are given too much attention in the U.S. ought to consider a public school like the University of Oregon. When I was a student at UO, there were approximately 160 students from Singapore, which equaled about 1% of the student population. (Undergrad population? Whichever.) Why
Singapore? Why not Filipinos? Why not Malays? Why not some of the fifty American states with fewer students? The reality is that students from Singapore tended to have more money than Malaysian recruits, or a kid from West Virginia. People worry about quotas, but when American minorities have the economic standing to buy influence the way others do, we can stop worrying about quotas and start worrying about corruption, which is probably what we should have been worrying about all along.
• • •
To give away polite speech just because the rude and hateful resent the obligation is a silly idea at best. It's kind of like the argument that homosexuals should not be allowed to raise children because the children will face discrimination in school. There is a natural conflict of interest when the people making the argument are also those who would discriminate in the first place. Giving over to the bullies and hatemongers is a
dangerous idea.
Equality does not include the right to supremacy.
Justice does not include oppression.
Peace does not include open strife.
Empowerment does not include disenfranchisement.
The truth of the matter is that PC mostly annoys the people it reproaches. And well it should.
• • •
Who has kids? Perhaps we should take it easy on our kids. Asking them to use formal terms like "Dad" is just so PC. Life will get along much better when my daughter learns to address her mother by saying, "Hey, bitch!" or get my attention by saying, "Yo, dumbass faggot!"
And why not? What the anti-PC crowd wants is nothing different. Why shouldn't a boss be able to address his employees as "nigger" and "bitch"? After all, history contains no suggestion whatsoever that those employees would be treated otherwise unfairly. Right?
Er ... right?
After all, it would be much easier if, instead of documenting his history of failure and deception, we could have dismissed President Bush as just another fucking Christian.
Seriously ... do the anti-PC folks realize what would happen to the majority if we removed all of these "unfair" constraints on conduct that lend toward the notion of "civilization"?
There are reasons for behavioral correctness. If you don't want to be part of civilization, fine, take your chances. Just remember, when you're given a free lawyer and a fair trial, with hundreds if not thousands protesting on your behalf, that it's our unfair constraints on individual freedom that prevented people from flaying the skin from your still-living bones.
It's like a bad bumper sticker, I guess:
Get civilized ... or at least get over yourselves!
____________________
Notes:
° deficient - melanin-deficient; e.g., white people
° evolutionarily-gifted - not melanin-deficient; e.g., black people
Beard, Henry and Christopher Cerf. The Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook. New York: Villard, 1992.
Ali Khan, Emir. "Sufi Activity." From Sufi Thought and Action. Idries Shah, ed. London: Octagon, 1990.