The ‘language police’ wish to persuade the public that the use of a word should disenfranchise some group or another. To preserve the freedom of speech, the language policers should either be just ignored, or better still ridiculed for their attempt to stifle free speech. If their fatuous thinking was accepted, the rich English language would be increasingly deprived of metaphor, and we would be left speaking in some kind of prescribed code. At an institutional level, that has already happened. The ‘language police’ will claim that the use of a word or phrase is either racist or sexist. If they are going for the first tactic, it will be alleged that the word discriminates against what they perceive to be a disadvantaged group. If the objective is to invalidate a statement on the grounds of sexism, they may criticise the use of ‘objectifying’ language which is perceived to be degrading to women, but women only.
The fear of ‘enforcing stereotypes’ and the fear of being caught using objectifying language has brought about what one might call a new ‘way of speaking’ where personal descriptions in their entirety are shunned. Describing a girl as ‘gorgeous’ is very likely to be seen to be a sexist, chauvinistic statement even if it is objectively correct and agreed upon by everybody. With such developments, we in the West have retreated behind a linguistic veil, tip-toed behind the curtain of reality to a backroom of stagnant bureaucratese.
Suddenly, every other comment made by a male is ‘sexist’, and any reference to somebody from another culture is ‘racist’. The constant linguistic scrutiny and social engineering of these delusional social justice warriors threatens to rid well-intentioned people of their sense of humour. The atmosphere of conformism has become stifling, and threatens to leave us stranded in a heavy and inert world bereft of the slightest whiff of mischief that might manifest itself in a wry grin or a raised eyebrow. What ever happened to Platonic lightness, or even a soupçon of occasional silliness? Unchallenged self-censorship and a politically correct consensus will make England a country as boring as Germany.
Oversensitised nihilists risk turning society into a factioned group of mindless robots living in a culturally impoverished world where irony and banter have been reduced to the strictly private realm. That would be a tremendously sad day, but is a process underway on American university campuses where it would seem it is just a question of time before jokes are banned altogether, as jokes tend to play off the cultural differences that the linguistic cleansers are trying to expunge. Not so many years ago, one of my university professors used to take great pleasure in citing limericks to his students. But, presumably, regaling one’s students with a limerick beginning with ‘There was a nun in Peru…’ might today get one sacked.
Objectification and stereotype enforcement is a notion central to feminists, and is another component of the liberal groupthink. A feminist would argue that it is humiliating that a woman might be lowered to the status of an object. It is oversimplistic and pandering once again to some kind of spurious victimhood to assume that men’s speech necessarily ‘objectifies’ women, and that this supposed objectification has to be something negative and dehumanising. Women talk about the sexual organs of men in explicitly ‘objectifying’ terms, but surely no man would find that offensive. We use each other as objects of emotion, knowledge, conversation etc. all the time. In the most romantic and gratifying of monogamous relationships, a couple will use each other as sex objects even if they do no think of it in those terms. Providing of course that it is always consensual, this is not something negative. It should be obvious that speaking in a way that curtails any kind of language that might somehow be perceived to be objectifying is an unnatural way of being. Beyond the West, the sight of a beautiful woman would always be commented on. Men laugh and grin (but not before staring a great deal); women roll their eyes. That is the ‘natural’, non-ideologised way of being. In the West, we have been forced through artificial means to drift away from our senses.
Nor does ‘objectifying’ and using ‘objectifying language’ have to imply a loss of respect or autonomy. It is another case of feminists being hypersensitive to language to the point that people assume unthinkingly that any act of ‘objectifying’ is extremely negative. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with objectification. Any man that considers it demeaning for a woman to be the object of his polar attraction has been swept away by the androgynous, gender-free ideology and has lost his masculine core. He is adrift in a turbulent, feminist sea. The sight of a beautiful woman is absolutely electric, brings happiness, energy and makes the day complete. The problem is that we have become too embedded in the all-embracing anti-fascist worldview of alleged oppression, hanging on to any word or concept that may somehow be perceived as degrading to some group or another. It is important to realise that the new social norms that this lead to are detached from our ‘natural’ way of being.
We have become inculcated in a pseudo-world of fake values where people sign up to discrimination because everybody wants to be the victim, and ideally belong to a group of victims that have ideological currency in a context of cultural repudiation. This is not to say that there are not bona fide victims in society. Of course, there are. The wife that is being beaten up by her drunk husband, the short-sighted boy that is being bullied at school, the person rendered homeless after a domestic dispute. These are all individually victims, undeniably so. But, there is an important distinction to be drawn between genuine victims, who are individuals, and minority or ‘marginalised’ groups, who believe they are, by definition of their minority status, victims in a racist society of white supremacist capitalism. Scruton (2015: 61) has shown how the Left has a tendency to always transfer the concept of a right from an individual to a group to the extent that individuals are no longer considered as individuals when it comes to assessing their rights.
This constant language policing that we witness with so-called ‘objectifying language’ is a form of linguistic corruption and linguistic sterilisation; an attempt at homogenising our language into pre-packaged labels and slogans that conform with the supposed moral sensitivity and compassion of the liberal psyche. To escape from this, to travel to Eastern Europe, Russia, Africa or South America, is nowadays unbelievably refreshing, because one realises that the world has not yet drowned in universal sameness and victimless crimes that violate moral taboos. It is to discover again a refuge of sanity, a place where minds are open, where traditional values are respected, where language has not been hijacked, where thinking is free and not conditioned, where men are admired for their masculinity, where women are worshipped for their femininity, where feminism is laughed at or may even be a form of insult. But most significantly, it is to walk free from the liberalist groupthink and the psychological angst that increasingly characterises our apparently free and open societies.
The only way to beat repressive liberal groupthink is for the shy conservatives, the heterodox dissidents, the intellectual exiles to speak out against this orthodoxy which supposes always that its own values are superior, even if they wrap themselves up in the doublespeak of ‘equality’. Liberalism does not have a monopoly over principles of liberality. Conservative academics who have been on the receiving end of intimidation, harassment, discrimination and denial of tenure (and indeed employment) should group together (as they are now finally doing with the Heterodox Academy) and expose the intolerance of liberalism, which is increasingly prevalent in our universities. This is now beginning to happen. Forgive me for being a gadfly, but principles really ought to come before careers. There is an obligation for intellectuals to challenge the tyrannical regimes enveloping us. Surely, nobody would want to work in an environment where only one opinion counts. That would after all be an affront to diversity. Groupthink opponents must break out of the mental prison, the Kafkaesque scenario that is unfolding. People in the West have been socialised to use a speech code that is perverse; perverse because the notions that it packages as ‘progressive’ are culturally nihilistic. They are teleologies that disband established
social and cultural categories, and leave one with nothing except for a repudiating discourse and the canons of tragic memory.
In large parts of the West, we have become neurotically insecure to such a degree that people are being accused of ‘sexist’ behaviour for referring to a woman by her husband’s surname. Others resign instantly for a slight slip of the tongue; victims of the ideological witch-hunt. These resignations intimidate people to the point that nobody feels as if they can speak their mind for fear of having their career destroyed. Such intimidation is happening in the context of the emergence of a ‘mass society’ without borders and with all its echoes of totalitarian bodies that disregard national sovereignties, with waning freedom of speech and with mass surveillance on a scale never known before. And now we have mega-tech companies that collect vast amounts of data on every aspect of our lives. Ultimately, such a society through legislation, totalising notions and an intrusive cultural grammar may become closed to the freedom of thought. We should be concerned.
II. The Political Correctness Folly
Political correctness never rears its ugly head independently. It always shows up as a series of actions designed, to this observer, to crush the souls of those blessed with common sense.
— Milo Yiannopoulos
Named after an Offenbach operetta, the multi-tiered Chinese pagoda-like building might look more at home in urban Vietnam. Its citrine and rouge coloured façades bring a splash colour to the wide boulevards of the 11th arrondissement. Here, late Haussmann apartments overlook busy streets where French cars wrestle aux heures de pointe. The nineteenth-century Bataclan theatre plays to crowds of young rock fans who throng the stalls at the weekends. That is until one winter evening when the theatre was turned into a coliseum of Domitian sadism, an arena for a kind of savagery that even Commodus might have baulked at.
With such events, it is clear that we are living at a time of crisis when there urgently needs to be open debate and discussion, but we are also living at a time when an open discussion has become impossible because of the pervasiveness of political correctness. Political correctness is not a trivial matter. It can be dangerous, as we saw when Islamist terrorism entered the agora of Western cities. Jesse Hughes of Eagle Death Metal was playing that night at the Bataclan theatre in Paris in November 2015 when Islamists massacred eighty-nine of his fans. He has repeatedly told the Press what he saw, the fact that there were insiders (the security staff were Muslims), the fact that it took an eternity for police to enter the building, the fact that he saw Muslims dancing in the Parisian streets afterwards, the fact that Muslims were booing during the minute’s silence that were held, the fact that the Paris police closed down 450 mosques and found recruitment material in every single one of them. But, the Press insisted on contorting his message, sometimes relaying the exact opposite from what he told them.5
These inconvenient truths cannot be reported, not from a white Christian male at least, because they are deemed to be politically incorrect as they criticise Muslims. This is even the case when Muslims slaughter Westerners as happened here. What happened on that terrible night, and more importantly the response to it, is a metaphor for Western civilisation. As we will come on to see, we do not live in an open and free society, but instead we live in a falsified proxy of it. The society you live in is not the one you think it is. Appearance is not the same as reality: the sun ‘rises’, but in fact it is the Earth which turns.
Political correctness has moved far away from its original good intentions and has become an attempt at manipulating language and thought in order to prevent people talking about the things that matter. It is a mental and moral trap that attempts to stop people thinking for themselves. Say the wrong thing, and one drowns in the waters of moral fear. Seen in this light, political correctness is the scourge of our times. It operates as a form of emotional coercion where it is imperative to accept the manufactured appeal to ideologised group victimhood, and to pander to minorities. It serves up pre-packaged, oven-ready opinions that chime with all-encompassing and apparently friendly slogans to do with equality, diversity and openness. But the institutions that do most to promote these empty slogans have little interest in these values beyond mere discourse; for example the academy, which at least politically and ideologically speaking is totally un-diverse and promotes a closed system of thinking. As we have seen, diversity is one-dimensional. Public institutions are more focused on discriminating against anybody that refuses to follow their politically correct regime. These speech codes are rhetorical devices to ensure that those who do not adhere to the ‘liberal’ ideology can be labelled as heretics because they fall foul of the tenets of their illiberal dogma.
It is difficult to formulate a response to political correctness because any response will be simply labelled ‘politically incorrect’ and thus illegitimate. Political correctness is a zero-sum game with the suppression of rational thought as its objective. Ironically, it is the number one enemy of tolerance, and represents little more than linguistic fundamentalism in ritual fashion — the intellectual fundamentalism in which language is caught. It is also difficult to respond to because it is packaged as a ‘form of enforced niceness’ (Žižek, Big Think presentation), and an opponent would therefore appear ‘cruel’ or ‘wicked’ in his questioning the moral high ground.6 By definition, moral superiority can only be achieved by one party. As a discourse strategy, it is therefore rather effective.
Political correctness leads to a culture of over-labelling where suddenly every statement or opinion has to be qualified adjectivally. Everything is -ist; nothing can escape description. An example of this is the insistence of people on the Left to label Trump a ‘misogynist’. Judging by his reported actions, one could in fact claim that he was the exact opposite. Once a point or comment can be described as ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’, then it has been deemed illegitimate and the discussion is ‘dead’. If one can call somebody a ‘racist’ or a ‘fascist’, then one no longer needs to give them the time of day. This is an overused and anti-democratic conversation strategy. It is a means of closing down debate on false grounds, and playing into the anti-communication of manufactured liberal groupthink. Those who wish to prevent discussion do so by racialising disagreements which are not even ‘racial’ in nature.
We are faced with a dangerous combination of rampant extremism and a culture of fear, a fear of speaking out because the speaker does not want to be labelled negatively. Such an environment can only lead to escalating social tensions as the pressure in the ‘verbal pressure cooker’ becomes too much, and the gasket explodes. It is a ‘verbal’ pressure cooker because the disenfranchised groupthink sceptic has been biting his proverbial tongue for so long, railing to himself at how flawed the ideology of the Left has become. Either that, or the power of liberal groupthink has rendered perfectly intelligent people into mindless sheep, just following the herd without being able to think for themselves. It is a refutation on a grand scale of the Cartesian principle cogito ergo sum. Speaking to university students, the sense of herd morality is clearly apparent. Many are wholly unwilling to challenge or deconstruct the panoply of contemporary social truths regarding diversity, free speech, feminism, equality, tolerance etc. Instead, they try to shoe-horn them into conversations. For students in the West, these have become the supreme moral principles, and by employing this coded language, they have unthinkingly become parties to these grinders of ideological axes.
It is as if their education coupled with significant exposure to social media amounts to an extended diversity training session. In short, they have been ideologised by authoritarian liberalism. Increasingly, they have been told what to believe, and the secularist, anti-particularist liberalism that they have been indoctrinated with extends to every aspect of social life. Instead, their minds should be open, totally open. They should be free to entertain the idea that rejecting the primacy of spiritual life is to abandon the entire basis of Western humanism. They need to be ideologically libera
ted of an intellectual pollution that has made so many of our words and ideas unfit for rational discourse, and then they will be able to reflect on the arguments being made and speak freely. Our students must have the freedom to question dogma, whatever it may be.
This issue of control will resurface many times throughout these essays. Authoritarian liberalism is unsurprisingly first and foremost about control and power. If this authoritarian liberalism is allowed to disseminate across Europe, then frankly the future of the West is bleak, as the metaphorical herdsman is an ‘enemy of the open society’ in the Popperian sense of the phrase. But the situation is a ‘pressure cooker’ for another reason: political correctness creates conflicting groups, the so-called ‘persecuted’ minorities, the victims and those who pledge support to this totalitarian ideology, and the remainder of the population who cower in silence, overwhelmed by the slogans. It is an ideology which is divisive and thoroughly alienating. We are living again in the age of ideological censorship: agree with our ‘liberal’ values or be quiet. We might be creating an atmosphere where everybody (unless one can claim minority status) is a potential ‘thought criminal’ in need of sensitivity training, where each can be inducted with the latest politically correct dogma. These tensions of psychological warfare in our society are part of the dialectics of the tragedy of modernity, and will surely become intolerable.
The Ideology of Failure Page 5
