Is Political Correctness Merely Niceness?

Commenter David mentioned the following in a recent post, in response to which I promised a later follow-up:

Left-wing political correctness embraces very simple values that were once conservative values as much as liberal ones: talk to people using respectful language whether you agree with their actions and attitudes or not. Do not stereotype the actions of a whole group by those of an individual.

I've actually heard this argument before. Suffice to say, I'm not convinced that political correctness is simply niceness. The best evidence for this is that we use two different words for them; if PC were merely niceness and nothing else, we'd have no reason to have invented a new phrase.

The context in which I referred to PC in the earlier post was the sense used by Bruce Charlton in his new book, Thought Prison: The Fundamental Nature of Political Correctness, by which he simply means leftism in general (or, perhaps more specifically, the leftist/modern philosophical project). David clearly means it in the sense in which it is more commonly understood today, to refer to a program of speech controls enforced by social sanction.

So what is PC if not identical to niceness? Is it deficient in some respect, or does it add something to niceness that niceness itself does not require? PC is similar to niceness in that it exists to limit respectable discourse and thus to protect the existing social order from excessively severe attacks. That is where the resemblance, I'm afraid, really ends.

For where niceness is concerned with protecting a social order concerned with community, PC is concerned with protecting a social order that is explicitly anti-community (indeed, one that parcels up community into competing and hostile groups, some of which are entitled to PC protection and others subject to explicitly PC nastiness). Both require conformity to socially-established norms but order these norms toward different ends. The order which niceness seeks is fundamentally cooperative, communitarian, and traditional; it is pious and humble. Political correctness seeks an order that is noncooperative, individualistic, and revolutionarily novel as a matter of principle. It regards desecration and shock as a means to that end.

PC is therefore a direct competitor to mere niceness; both seek the protection of a social order, but the social orders they envision are irreconcilable. Niceness has no interest in protecting the manifold absurdities of modern liberal society. Political correctness has no interest in what it sees as the stultifying, arbitrary, and suffocating rules of traditional society.

(In fact, in PC there are not even really "norms" in the strictest sense of the word. PC nominally proscribes racist speech or actions, yet these are officially PC-approved when the offender is a higher-status victim group than the race being slandered, as when California homosexuals exploded with savage racist rage following the passage of Proposition 8, banning homosexual marriage, with strong black support. The politically correct, being utilitarians and consequentialists all, see the end as universally superordinate to the means, so that grossly un-PC behavior is encouraged provided it culminates in a more broadly PC gestalt). There are plenty more examples of PC being not kind but still definitively PC in the strictest sense of the word; a casual Googling reveals many.

PC also reacts in comparatively more severe ways to violations of its sanctions than do the merely kind. Because kindness is simply a disposition whereas PC is an institutionalized ideology, violations of the former are treated with, at worst, coldness and avoidance where violations of the latter are subject to often quite devastating and disproportionate retaliation. PC is therefore far more overtly coercive than mere niceness.

In their respective extremes, PC and niceness differ again. Niceness taken too far is deficient: either in justice (e.g., allowing injustice to occur because one is too nice to intervene) or in charity (e.g., allowing a person to persist in bad habits because one is just too darn nice to correct them) or in courage (e.g., allowing oneself to be bullied by others because one is too nice to stand up for oneself). PC, taken too far, is excessive, ruining people's lives and pitting entire cultures against one another. It is the injustice, the uncharity, and the cowardice against which excessive niceness is too feckless to do anything.

It goes without saying that, while both niceness and PC proscribe certain behaviors and manners of speech, PC's scope is comparatively limited; it protects with greater intensity many fewer people (and does not because they are people but because they belong to the groups they do), where niceness protects everyone. Niceness prohibits meanness; PC prohibits insensitivity.

Comments

[The Continental Op]

Here is something Anthony Daniels (aka "Theodore Dalrymple") once said,

"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is...in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."

[SG]

I believe it was Solzenitzen who argued that political correctness, with loss of reputation and earning power as a consequence of breach, is merely a more evolved way of maintaining power than jailing or execution under communism or dictatorship. Even countries with comparatively good government, such as China or Singapore, prohibit freedom of assembly and keep an ironclad grip on power. When you suggest that political correctness is bad, are you suggesting that any society can do without it (in the absence of force)? If so, do you have examples? Or are you merely suggesting that political correctness _of this nature_ is bad, and that political correctness toward maintaining an order to your liking is preferred (such as a modified catholic church)?

[SG]

Also, your post reminded me of an old post by Mencius Moldbug (and you spurred me to write about it on my blog tonight).

His old post is really worth a read: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/antisingularity.html

Here's a couple snippets:

"Or even forget the wars. Imagine all the political, economic and cultural changes of Western civilization - the explosive growth of the centralized State, the rise of the criminal class and the destruction of legal clarity, the disappearance of craft training in the arts, the Dilbertian sclerosis of industry, the replacement of uniformed warfare by suicide bombing, the colonization of the First World by Third World peoples, and above all the tremendous narrowing of mind that has destroyed any intellectual tradition which dared to deviate by a millimeter from the chiliastic faith of the Allied victors, the moral catechism of the Baedeker raids, a robotic and crypto-Christian universalism, a disaster that still adorns itself with the Orwellian names of "diversity," "human rights," and "multiculturalism," but resembles nothing so much as the Catholic Church at her inquisitorial, Cathar-roasting worst. But without any 500-gig hard disks or HDTVs.

Let's call this the "weak Antisingularity hypothesis" - the idea that technical progress and social progress are uncorrelated, and may even run in opposite directions....

Unfortunately, there's also a "strong Antisingularity hypothesis." The strong Antisingularity hypothesis suggests that the coincidence of technical progress and social decay is not, in fact, a coincidence. It's actually a case of cause and effect."

[Bill]

James Watson was not even the least little bit rude to anyone in the incident for which he was publicly humiliated and fired.

Tom Burlington was not rude to anyone in the incident for which he was publicly humiliated and fired.

Virtually nobody ever gets fired for being rude. Outside of the strictures of PC, an enormous amount of personal nastiness is tolerated. In Canada and Europe, people are fined or put in jail for violating the strictures of PC. They are not similarly fined or put in jail for being rude or nasty.

David's ideas seem like those of a 14-year-old child living in a 95% white suburb. The son of a cultural anthropologist, perhaps.

[Proph]

"When you suggest that political correctness is bad, are you suggesting that any society can do without it (in the absence of force)? If so, do you have examples? Or are you merely suggesting that political correctness _of this nature_ is bad, and that political correctness toward maintaining an order to your liking is preferred (such as a modified catholic church)?"

All societies require censorship to some degree; they are the walls which protect the city from attack. Thus I am quite alright in principle with some program of speech controls.

My objection to PC is that it is in the service of falsehoods.