Saturday, February 14th, 2004
PC - Politically Correct, or Pain in the Can
It really annoys me when we start tinkering with historical documents still in use today, purging them of "offensive" language. From here:It is somewhat more disturbing, however, when it becomes a matter of "correcting" historical artefacts: historical documents or pieces of literature that now give offence, notwithstanding the different cultural contexts in which they were originally written. (One interesting recent example, of course, is the bible itself, which in a contemporary version has been carefully purged of its sexist cast.) In such cases, the emotional comfort and so-called "self-esteem" of a group is seen to take precedence over historical authenticity.What's behind all this? Postmodernistic attitudes about relatism in regards to truth. This quote from the same site does a good job at illustrating the logical (if you can call it logic!) steps we have taken as a culture to get here:
In the minds of the critics, then, political correctness reflected a process by which the historical norms and assumptions of the academy, and its ways of doing things, were dismissed as relativistic and built on sand. The notion of hiring and promoting staff, and grading students, on the basis of objective, competitive merit was dismissed as a kind of self-serving delusion which simply protected the interests and values of a dominant group. But if universally agreed-upon criteria and standards were no longer possible, how then were decisions about such things as performance to be made? The positivistic or rationalistic process of the old order was seen to be tragically flawed; but no other generally agreed-upon alternative could be found. So the process of decision-making - in hiring, in admissions, in curriculum design, and so on - would have to move to a different category altogether: from what was argued at least to be a scholarly or intellectual process, to a blatantly political process, wherein the various "stake-holders" would bargain on the basis of group interest for different kinds of hiring practice, student evaluation, and the like. From the traditionalist perspective, this sort of forced contract and lack of mutual trust effectively meant the end of what the uni-versity was all about. Without a generally agreed-upon intellectual or scholarly process for deciding what should be studied, or without shared cultural understanding of what the enterprise was all about, the institution seemed to dissolve into a holding company of separate tribes. Post-modern theory had become contemporary practice.
This is an excellent essay on the positive and negative aspects of political correctness: the real need to not be cruel with words, and the ramification of pushing this too far.
~Jason
Tags:politics
0 likes
↑