A week ago I commented on the case of Naomi Schaeffer Riley who was fired from her position as blog writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education because she offended a number of readers in the academy by stating the obvious, i.e. that much of black studies scholarship isn't scholarship at all.Political correctness came to mind again recently as I was contemplating allegations that President Trump is responsible for the social alienation and estrangement we're experiencing in our national life.
Riley has leveled similar criticisms at other academic fields as well, but that didn't matter. You can say what you want about other disciplines, but if you say anything critical about black studies it's a thought crime - ipso facto proof of racism. Any criticism of the quality of any scholarship associated with any approved minority, whether racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation, is heresy and must be expunged lest thoughtful people be impressed by the truth of it.
So I thought it amusing the other night watching a talk show on which Riley appeared as a guest describing her encounter with liberals who no doubt perceive themselves as deeply committed to tolerance and the diversity of speech and ideas. It was amusing because the host of the show, recounting the allegations of racism made against her by her detractors, invited her husband, a Wall Street Journal editor who was sitting in the audience, to join them on the stage to defend her against the indictment.
The audience laughed as her husband made his way to the stage. The racist Ms Riley was married to a black man and has two biracial children.
Liberal political correctness isn't just insufferable. It's stupid. It's a form of holier-than-thou self-righteousness embraced by people who substitute formulas for thought because thinking is too taxing, who latch on to the slightest deviation from orthodox speech and behavior as proof that someone is a heretic.
They're people so filled with their own prejudices that they just assume everyone else is also, and proof is just a matter of catching the other guy saying something that could be twisted by the witless to indicate a deviation from orthodoxy.
They're the modern descendants of those who burned witches at the stake in the fourteenth century because the hapless women made some innocuous but careless remark. They're kin to those self-righteous prigs in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter who, though filled with their own sins, nevertheless sternly punished anyone who gave them the merest warrant for doing so. They're cut from the same cloth as the communist totalitarians who use mind-numbing reeducation camps and "snitches" to eradicate "deviationism" among the people.
They are stereotypical ideological puritans and if given enough power they'll eventually deaden all thought and discourse, which is doubtless their goal.
Well, perhaps he is responsible for some of it, though I doubt it's much. I think the bulk of responsibility lies with the left's penchant for identity politics, two significant and related constituents of which are political correctness and victimhood.
In their pursuit of power the left seeks to persuade everyone, or at least every minority, that they're a victim, but as Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has said, "As soon as you see yourself as a victim that breeds thoughts of anger and revenge."
By encouraging everyone to see themselves as a victim of some sort of oppression the left fosters bitterness and resentment toward whomever the oppressors are alleged to be (usually straight white Christian males).
It's that hostility, conceived in a perceived victimhood, that's tearing us apart from each other, that's making dialogue between opposing viewpoints extremely difficult and which is spawning an incivility in our public life that's unprecedented since the Civil War.
Just ask Naomi and Jason Riley.