This exploration
of political correctness, originally published in May 2001, could have been
made irrelevant by the attack on the
If their hatred
of our society is a passion that leaves the majority of us cold, it is still
important to recognize that their position at the fulcrum of our educational
and cultural systems provides leverage through which a great deal of damage can
be done. What is now clear is that by making the honest discussion of important
security issues impossible, and by subjecting us all to the unrelenting litany
of how bad we are, political correctness is making it difficult to mobilize the
realism, the positive feeling about ourselves, and indeed the aggression that
we will need in our defense. PC has revealed itself as being a matter of life
and death.
The understanding
of political correctness must first proceed through the recognition of how
strange it is. Nothing illustrates that strangeness better than the PC response
to September 11. From the immediacy of the response, from its total lack of
feeling for those who had been killed, from its shrillness and schadenfreude, from its bizarre assumption that the
willful murder of thousands represented a righteous response to the United
States, it had to be clear that the forces of political correctness have to be
understood in a different way than we typically understand political behavior.
How could they live in a country and have so little feeling for their
compatriots? How could the fact that Al Qaeda and its cousins were trying to
kill them have evaded their comprehension? How could they imagine that
providence would choose such an odious gang as an agent of moral retribution?
When one of them, a recent president of the American Historical Association, said "I'm not
sure which is more frightening, the horror that engulfed
It is this lack
of proportion that is the key to understanding here. As I argue later on, lack
of proportion suggests the presence of a transference:
a response to a present event from within a more primitive stage of our
development, when the proportions of things, as we experienced them, really
were different. If we want to understand the response of the PC crowd to the
attack on the
What does it have
to do with, then?
My book is an
attempt to answer this question. But it does so generally and abstractly. For
the present, I’d like to approach the matter in a more limited, but also more
personal way. I’ll begin by relating an incident.
During the
sixties, and continuing into the seventies, I was a graduate student in
philosophy at UCSD. Like many at the time, though not so many as you’d think
from hearing faculty talk about it now, I was a radical.
Conversations in
our radical community revolved around what we called The Revolution. But as the
period wore on, I began to have disturbing thoughts. Try as I might, I could
not figure out how there could be a revolution, given the realities of our
time. I began to pass those doubts around. Most of my friends simply ignored my
arguments, but one day I had a conversation that turned out to be different. It
was with a guy I’ll call Jack. Jack took what I was saying seriously and seemed
distressed by it. At some point he developed
a faraway look. “There has to be a revolution,” he said. “If there isn‘t a
revolution, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
I remember that
statement precisely because I felt much the same way. Even not believing that
there would be a revolution, I also did not know what, in the absence of a
revolution, I was going to do.
I believe Jack
was speaking for more than himself and me. I think we can generalize to the
radicals of our time. Our incapacity to imagine a future for ourselves without
the revolution was a feature of who we were, and it remains so for many. I
believe it is the place to look to understand the PC response to September 11.
In that time, and
carried forward until now, we radicals looked with scorn on anyone who was
thought to have “sold out.” The incapacity to imagine a future without the
revolution was deeply related to the injunction against selling out. That is
not to say that this failure of imagination was the ideological consequence of
the injunction against selling out. We were not standing on principle; we were
confused. We were not saying we would not imagine, but that we could
not.
But what was
selling out? What was sold? And who bought it? I have thought about this over
the years and have come to the conclusion that what was sold was our self, and
who bought it was everyone else, or rather the way in which everyone else
related to everyone else.
I base this
conclusion on the central image of my aversion to selling out, which was the
view I had of my father. That my father had sold out was a belief I came to early in life, and I early on resolved that I would never
be like him. He was a pharmacist. He
sold things, and I could tell that the person he was at work did not represent
who he was and how he really felt. For one thing, he did his job, not as
self-expression, but just in order to make money. That money was the price he
was paid for forsaking his desires, and for that reason I thought of it with
utter disdain. Moreover, his personality at work was geared to increase the
probability that customers would buy something. He had, in effect, put himself
up for sale, not just the things he sold. He had turned himself into a
commodity.
I would
sophisticate that now. I would say he put himself into the system of exchange
and of the interdependencies and obligations to which it gives rise, the system
of social norms, of shared meanings, ultimately of language and culture. He had
come to see himself in terms of meanings that could apply to anyone – as an
object rather than a subject. He had given up his identity to form part of the
system, and hence, so far as I could see, disappeared. To me, that was death
itself. “The letter,” Lacan’s term for the language
of which our shared meanings are made, “kills.” The problem was that shared
meaning only works if it works for everyone who shares it. It had no place for my absolute and cosmic
uniqueness. Narcissism and shared meaning do not cohabit very well.
My resolution
that I would not be like my father, then, represented my refusal to subordinate
my unique self to the system of exchange that he represented. The problem was
that the human world is made out of that system. Ordinarily, a father would
have represented an idea, a first approximation, of being a person in the
world. Rejecting him and what he represented left me without a sense of a
future identity that would help me chart a course into that future. Meaning, for me, could only come from my
impulses of the moment.
That was not a
bad deal, I thought at the time. I was certainly not alone in this. The mutual
life in our radical community was a celebration of those impulses, and of the
possibilities and realities that their mutual satisfaction could provide. Over
time, our lives even became a celebration of that celebration. Who would not
celebrate it? The sex was good. The food was good. The sense of community was
good. It was not clear to me that there was anything more, or at least anything
more worth having.
Yet one should
not conclude from this that I was a happy guy. Impulses are pretty unreliable
as a source of meaning, and after you’ve got them reasonably satisfied … what?
For me, the answer was quite a considerable depression, which is to say a
feeling of meaninglessness that was with me most of the time. The only form of
life I could manage that gave me a framework of meaning and relieved me of the
depression was to fight against the world of selling out, the nexus of exchange
that seemed to threaten me. “Life against death,” as Norman O. Brown had it.
I called that
political activity. I loved it and felt that it united me with everyone else
who felt, or could have been imagined to feel, threatened by the world of
exchange, of shared meaning, and by everyone who increased its power by
ordering their lives in accordance with it. Overcome that power and we would
banish death. Then we could all live our lives in spontaneity, like children at
perpetual play. That was what we meant by The Revolution.
For better or
worse, I couldn’t manage to stay in that condition. I think I had this form of
alienation in a more debilitating form than most. The professional discipline
of completing my PhD in philosophy was beyond me. Others managed it quite well.
Many of them were what we now call “red-diaper babies,” and therefore had their
own parents as models for a life based on alienation from the system. Others
solved the problem of not being able to imagine the future simply by living
from day to day, doing what they were doing, and growing older. In either case,
they got their degrees and took their professional positions. They created
whole philosophies, whole social theories expressing their alienation, finally
coming to serve as the models of scholarly work and integrity within a
university rededicated in their image.
Now, speaking in
the name of this university, they tell us that they are more frightened by
George Bush than by Osama bin Laden. They really are, and they always were. Bin
Laden’s rage doesn’t threaten their alienation. On
the contrary, his rage is directed against the very system that threatens to
subsume them. They share this rage and the rage defines them. He is not simply
the enemy of their enemy; he is their brother.
And their fellow
countrymen are not. The
The world of
political correctness is built out of paradoxes. The cry for resistance to
enculturation becomes a powerful cultural element. The corporations that
radicals saw thirty years ago, and see today, as the very organisms of “selling
out” line up solidly in the column of a political correctness whose politics
are set by those very radicals. The revolt of freedom against shared meaning
becomes, through the coercion of political correctness, the only meaning;
shared perhaps, but only by default. The revolt of life against death leads to
an orgiastic embrace of self-destruction. The social world comes to be held
together by a suicide pact.
I did not become
reconciled with my father while he was alive. I mourn him now and I try to
imagine what he might have said to me if I had ever asked him to defend the
world of exchange, of mutual obligation, of which he was a part.
He might have
said this in defense of the world of exchange: The world was not built to love
us. It is not our mother. We all need others to sustain us, and they will not
do it on our terms, but only on theirs. Yet entering into the world of exchange
does not mean the end of our lives, only an increment in our understanding of ourselves. The mutual connections, the commonalities, the
accommodations, the limitations that the world imposes increase the range of
our possibilities; they provide us with the dimensions of identity that the
world has spent its history in developing. Indeed, this would be so even if
they served only as patterns against which we could assert our difference.
Ultimately our exchanges, our interdependencies, our obligations, even our
subjugations, define us in the only ways in which we can be of interest, even
to ourselves.
The letter
kills, you say, but what does it kill? Who were you when you were so frightened
of death at its hand? Pretty paltry, if I may say: protoplasm, appetite, morbid
confusion, and a sense of your own cosmic importance that was anchored in nothing.
In truth, the letter threatened only your grandiosity, and that wasn’t much.
You can say the letter kills, if you like. It has a certain drama. But you
should also know that for humans only the letter gives life. We are with the
letter, whether we like it or not.
February, 2003