Willblake, Arlo, Marsha, Platt and All --
I don't know what Joseph Campbell's musings on religion and mythology have
to do with political correctness, so I'm going with a new thread title.
No doubt you will regard my take on PC as hypocritical and naive. But if
you will bear with me I'll show you why this form of thought control is
detrimental to value sensibility in general and to a value-based
philosophy, such as the MoQ, in particular.
When USA finalist Carrie Prejean was asked about her position on same sex
marriage by one of the judges, she candidly replied: "We live in a land
where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite. And you know what, I
think in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage
should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but
that's how I was raised." It was an honest answer to a trick question from
an openly gay inquisitor who had his own political agenda. The next day
that judge excoriated Miss California for her response, calling her a "dumb
bitch", and she was forthwith disqualified for the crown.
Gentlemen, that's "political correctness" gone mad.
Another version of PC is the use of language to alter the public's concepton
of social policy, such as the label "affirmative action" in place of
"minority preference", or "overseas contingency operation" instead of
"global war on terrorism". If you've read Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
you'll recognize this kind of verbal obfuscation as a propaganda device to
promote "Doublethink". Words definitely change the way we think, and with
an insidious choice of words a politician can persuade the public that war
is peace or that evil is goodness. Joseph Goebbels made effective use of
Doublethink in his support of Hitler's campaign for power in Nazi Germany.
In "The Historical Roots of 'Political Correctness'," Raymond Raehn wrote:
"America is today dominated by an alien system of beliefs, attitudes and
values that .seeks to impose a uniformity of thought and behavior on all
Americans and is therefore totalitarian in nature. Its roots lie in a
version of Marxism which seeks a radical inversion of the traditional
culture in order to create a social revolution."
In fact, political correctness is the postmodern world's form of thought
control. What it does is blind
the public's discriminative sense of value in an attempt to justify a
political agenda, such as "social equality" or governmental redistribution
of wealth.
The reason Doublethink works as a method of thought control is lucidly
explained in a short essay I discovered last week by the author of an
Australian quarterly. Here's a seminal excerpt from that essay:
"A common response to modern moral confusion is to blame the decline of
religion, which no doubt has weakened the hold of traditional morality. But
it is a mistake to think that morality, to be valid, must rest on
unquestionable foundations.
"Another view of morality sees it as consisting of conventions or rules of
conduct that have evolved to make social co-operation possible. Perhaps we
cannot prove that the rule of keeping promises is absolutely morally right
but we know that if we break it then the benefits we all receive from
society are much reduced. This conservative notion of morality is
relativist in that it recognises that different conventions suit different
societies, but it's also true that most societies share some basic,
necessary rules, like truth telling and rights to property.
"The trouble is that, for many people, good behaviour is not enough; they
want morality to do the job that religion used to do, by teaching them how
to save their souls. Nowadays, we are encouraged to judge people's moral
credentials in terms of how "concerned" and "caring" they are rather than
whether they can be relied on to fulfil their humble duties. But
professions of contempt for "mere" rules and conventions, and sentimental
emphasis on good intentions and motives rather than actual conduct and
outcomes, can mask a lot of moral vanity and fecklessness.
"Doublethink in public debate is a reflection of the moral confusions and
doubts that afflict modern Western society. Exposing it is the first step
towards bringing people back into contact with their own true values."
-- [Michael James: Intolerable Level of Doublethink, from 'The
Thinking Man's CDROM']
For anyone interested, I'll be running the entire essay in my Values Page
column all next week. Check it out at www.essentialism.net/balance.htm
starting Sunday, May 10.
Happy Mother's Day,
Ham
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