It’s in our very nature, says Robert Weissberg over at NRO’s Phi Beta Cons blog:
Conservatives are forever complaining about campus PC, i.e., the
forceful imposition an unreal political orthodoxy. Regardless of
proposed cure, it is always assumed that the disorder is curable. While
anti-PC efforts are admirable, I am unconvinced that the battle is
winnable. In a nutshell, the desire to be surrounded by like-thinking people
and ostracizing deviants is undoubtedly human nature. It thrives in
everything from grade-school cliques to college English departments. We
barely notice it when we are herd members in good standing; groupthink
is far more odious when one is seeking admission to a different herd.
This is not to argue that all groups uniformly march in lockstep;
rather, if the value is central, powerful norms are inescapable. Group
solidarity is perfectly Darwinian: Help fellow believers but not
outsiders.
This is a profoundly remarkable insight and seems on the face of it to be also profoundly lamentable, but I think it reveals a tremendous opportunity for the defenders of the traditional moral order. If we look into the not-too-distant past, it’s clear that the current hypersensitivity to everything racial did not exist. Instead, there was a hypersensitivity to sexual deviancy. Shelby Steele mentions an example of it at the outset of his book White Guilt.
President Eisenhower once made an off-hand remark to a golf buddy that
involved the term “negro” or some slang variation thereof and… nothing happened! If he would have had
sex with an intern like Bill Clinton did, however, one can well imagine
that the righteous condemnation of the then-politically correct
establishment would have rained down upon him. Today, the reverse is
true: a majority of people doesn’t care if the president has intimate relations with an
intern, but uttering “negro” or some such in a derogatory way would rouse holy hell.
I think Weissberg is right about political correctness being a part of our nature. The important thing to remember, though, is that it once was and hopefully can be used again to discourage behavior profoundly more destructive than off-handed racial slang.
