My working assumption about "political correctness" is that it aggregates a set of behaviors and awarenesses that stem from one common motivation: to relate to the world in a way that doesn't preclude anyone from wanting to join you. Basically, you're being genuinely "PC" if you want to speak in a way that eliminates the need for worrying if someone in your conversation group will take your statement the wrong way. It's not a bad thing, or even really a muted thing, so much as it is a conscientious decision to intentionally not alienate anyone based on an identity they bring to the table. Another way to put it would be, solving for everything but opinions when you engage in discussion with a stranger.
I see the motivation of PC as simply not wanting to be an asshole. I also emphasize that "correctness" is the operative word more than "political." Accuracy is an important element of PC. Even if a term's usage shifts over time, it is imperative that at this point in time one could find a specific mix of vocabulary and sensitivities that would "solve for" those identity factors and lead to rewarding exchange. And that by solving for those sensitivities, one also walks into a more accurate way of speaking / relating to the world. You're granting that others' sensitivities reflect their realities; and by aligning with the most realities, your speech is grounded in the most truth possible. It's like a kind of Esperanto, allowing you to interact with as much of the world as possible.
Accuracy is indispensable to the utility and validity of political correctness. It's when accuracy suffers, and preferred terms begin to confuse rather than clarify their objects, that PC stops and a more power-hungry pettiness begins.
I just wanted to say that to lay out my stance on our policing of vocabulary. What I actually wanted to write here was a point, maybe obvious, that occurred to me recently.
I was just home for Thanksgiving. While there, my dad read me an idiotic op-ed from the WSJ that (obviously) laid out an "intelligent" citizen's reason for supporting Trump. Predictably, it blamed the "excesses" of the Left on cultural issues (PC shit) for Trump's appeal.
To quickly reply to the article, I question anyone's politics if the priority they find most urgent is stymieing efforts to include people in society. And I question how intelligent they really are if they consume that many salacious identity stories; chances are they're watching Fox News, which is categorically not something intelligent people do. Here among the liberals, it is much more common and couth to see trans people integrated seamlessly into society. Nobody's freaking out about this but cultural guardians.
And maybe that thought process is all-consuming in the feverishly misanthropic conservative mind, but there's a big difference between being frustrated with the bathroom bill and voting for a hateful Alzheimer's ogre whose express purpose is to tear down the United States. So I don't find any cultural anxiety a compelling defense of Trump.
What I wanted to record here, though, was my feeling on how we got to the point of such bitterness towards those social movements, and how they contributed to our present crisis.
The most pressing thing to figure out, to me, is epistemic. Policy could probably fix the wage gap and even the climate, but on the eve of the era of deepfakes and fresh into an era of social pubescence, where we've finally been lied to by institutions one too many times to believe it the next time, what we really gotta figure out is how we can re-establish a source of truth in this world.
I don't know what the answer is, but this op-ed made me think about where the problem comes from.
We are a prosperous, stable society the likes of which the world has only ever dreamed. Having conquered the structural violence of nature — the bottom of the Maslow pyramid — we have proceeded to conquer the structural violence of man. This is the cutting edge of human social evolution, and it's a good fight to have.
But let's understand the nature of this fight. There's nothing inevitable about it. There is no long arc of the universe. There is no natural bend towards justice. The inevitability of "being on the right side of history" is liberal auto-mythopoeia that happens to have been correct so long as our material circumstances have continued to improve. But the effort of lifting ourselves out of racism and tribalism is anything but preordained. It is a visionary project, one that relies on imagination and superhuman solidarity, one that has more in common with the Zionist effort to revive Hebrew than with technology improving.
The project requires us to train ourselves out of old ways, which means redefining a lot of comfortable elements of life. It's this idea of re-definition that I'm focusing on here.
Think about the effort it takes to get a white nationalist to see a black person as their genuine countryman. It's essentially a re-definition of what their country is. It's redefining "fag" and "slut" and lots of other words. It's changing your idea of what sex a doctor is, to allude to that famous riddle.
The swirl of all these redefinitions alienate a lot of people from their epistemic bedrock. Having access to reliable definitions is important. You may not know how exactly the economy works, but if you at least know what you do know, you don't mind letting social elites run the economy if they have a more educated idea. It's not about ignorance; it's about ontology, about psychic stability.
Suddenly, most of the people that were the main targets of social upheaval heard one message: you actually don't know what you think you know. Those definitions of yours are wrong. The world's parameters are new, and larger, and controlled far away from you. Your bedrock is a sin.
Just look at the most frequent fights of political correctness: they're all over vocabulary. You can't say this word; this one has a new meaning; the preferred term over here has actually changed. "To what? 'Person of color?' Weren't we supposed to not say "color" anymore?" "You weren't, but we decided." Definitions are power. Changing definitions robs power.
Is it any wonder that a critical mass of the non-cognoscenti gravitate towards any dumbass who can lead them back to their old definitions? That's the thing that liberals generally aren't understanding right now about Trump's mendacity. It is total, yes. But the thing he's right on, to his audience and even people pretty far adjacent to his audience, is his power to restore old definitions.
Actually, it is right for us to deal with agitators with old-school violence. It is a rigged game we've succumbed to, and who would know better than someone who wields as much bullshit as me?
A lot of Trumpism is overt racism, sure, but racism doesn't really explain why people don't trust anything written over a seventh grade reading level. I think this angle holds more of an explanation to the epistemic crisis. Trump's credibility is founded on his ability to restore order not to the nation, but to the disordering influence of political correctness. Words like "American" and "man" and "borders" and "politics," meaning the purveyance of bullshit, are reverted to their rightful definitions.
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