Today, the phrase “political correctness” is generally accompanied by a smile — an uneasy smile, but a smile nonetheless. The phrase describes some exaggerated bit of left-wing moralism — so exaggerated that it is hard to take seriously. We smile when we read about an elite American college that has enrolled the sin of “lookism” — the unacceptable belief that some people are more attractive than others–into its catalogue of punishable offenses. We laugh when hearing that a British academic has condemned Frosty the Snowman as a white “male icon” that helps “to substantiate an ideology upholding a gendered spatial/social system.” We scoff when we hear about the University of Michigan professor who complains that J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books “conventionally repeat much of the same sexist and white patriarchal biases of classical fairy tales.” We smile, we laugh, we scoff. But we do so uneasily.
Why the uneasiness? There are several reasons. In the first place we know that such strictures, though preposterous, are not without consequence. Indeed, the phenomenon of political correctness is a great teacher of the often overlooked fact that the preposterous and the malign can cohabit happily. The odor of thuggishness is never far from the lairs of political correctness. The student accused of lookism can be severely penalized for the offense, as can the student accused of racism, “homophobia,” or “mis-directed laughter.” In some cases, the academic thought police even attempt to regulate what is not said, as when an editor of a student newspaper was removed from his post because he had given “insufficient coverage” to minority events. We laugh when we read about poor Frosty, but the laughter dies when we consider that the professor who would have us melt Frosty is also someone responsible for the education of students. It is amusingly ludicrous to burden Mrs. Rowling’s entertainments with feminist rhetoric, but then we remember that books can be banned or slighted for less.
Milan Kundera’s novel The Joke traces the fortunes and amours of a young student, Ludvik, after his exasperatingly earnest girlfriend decides to show the authorities a postcard he had written to her as a joke: “Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!” As a result of this whimsy, Ludvik finds himself expelled from the Communist Party and the university, and is eventually conscripted to work in the mines for several years. Among other things, Kundera dramatizes the dynamics of political correctness. He is especially good at portraying one of its signal features: I mean humorlessness. One of the points of The Joke is that totalitarian societies cannot abide a joke; political correctness is a kind of geiger counter that registers deviations from the norm of earnestness. Any deviation is suspect, any humourous deviation is culpable.
The allergy to humor that is integral to political correctness is one reason the art of parody has suffered in recent years. Then, too, a parodist, to be successful, must be able to count on his audience’s ability to distinguish clearly between the parody and the reality being spoofed. The triumph of political correctness has long since blurred that distinction. Whose ideological antennae are sensitive enough to register accurately the shifting claims of victimhood and entitlement? A mayoral aide in Washington. D.C. uses the word “niggardly” in conversation with a black colleague; the colleague takes offense because he thinks “niggardly” is racist; the aide promptly offers his resignation, which is accepted. True? Or parodic exaggeration? True, all too true. Or what about the Obama administration’s directive that the global war on terror was henceforth to be renamed “global contingency operations,” or former British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s insistence that acts of terrorism perpetrated by Islamic radicals be rebaptized “anti-Islamic activity“? You really can’t make it up.
Read the whole thing here.
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