Complicating the Virtues of Political Correctness

What is political correctness? To some it is a key reason why the Democrats lost their way and the 2016 election. Others argue that it is a right-wing fiction, a means to rile up the base against an imaginary enemy. Political correctness hasn’t featured prominently in discussions thus far, but as the Democratic primary progresses, it is fairly likely that it will make a reappearance in pundit discussions of 2020, especially if the Democrats lose again. Within Harvard at least, political correctness is more than a phantasmic foe. It is how, despite the diverse backgrounds and ambitions of the greater Harvard community, most come to abide by a consensus view about what is acceptable, especially in public conversation.

In fact, taking Harvard as its own miniature society with a distinct culture, political correctness is a testament to Edmund Burke’s arguments about the positive power of prejudice, whereby our unconscious and instantaneous acts are really a reflection of accumulated societal wisdom and virtue. The ability to immediately recognize politically “incorrect” phrases and react to them, even with humor, presupposes the existence of common norms and beliefs about what is correct.

Yet our miniature society is not completely separate from the outside world. I believe that political correctness has become a needlessly charged topic in society outside of the Harvard bubble partially because of the values that belie the state of political correctness within it. We promote a divisive emphasis on retributive justice and neglect the value of dignity rooted in common humanity.

Within the framework of retributive justice, individuals see themselves as moral agents obligated to restore or create a moral equilibrium. This justice encourages a Manichean conception of moral action: corruption of the moral equilibrium is attributed to the deliberate actions of evil groups (the billionaires, the WASPs, the privileged) and institutions (Immigration and Customs Enforcement and now The Crimson). Individualized examples of actual wrongdoing only typify this mentality. Jeffrey E. Epstein and Harvey Weinstein are not viewed as flawed individuals but as manifestations of latent, structural injustice.

Crucially, this sense of justice is not limited to political correctness. If anything, other examples of societies motivated primarily by a sense of justice — such as the one which animated multiple generations of Christian crusades — provide a worrisome model of how an overemphasis on justice promotes a virtue of zealotry. If the world is divided into “us” and “them'', virtue is calling out and challenging the injustices perpetrated by “them”, especially where injustice is least obvious. The overall culture, however, especially among the apathetic, is one of reluctance or even fearful compliance to an ever-expanding set of norms of what is politically correct. Thus a culture of political correctness rooted only in justice, that attempts to address fundamental societal issues of inequality, will fail on its own terms. The more that one describes a looming threat and berates others for their insensitivity and lack of acknowledgment, the more one alienates potential allies to combat this very threat of an all-consuming, immoral “them”.

The more persuasive grounding for a culture of political correctness is one which recognizes a dignity in each individual. This dignity is not dependent on the status of the individual as a moral agent who identifies and combats evil, but stems from a mutual recognition of human weakness. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a victim of some of the greatest acts of institutional oppression perpetrated against an entire people, still wrote after his experiences that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” This conception of humanity is not a coping mechanism nor an idealistic fantasy, but a necessity for change. “The really terrible thing,” writes James Baldwin to his nephew, is that “you must accept them and accept them with love. For these ‘innocent’ people have no other hope.”

One might argue that this degree of love expects too much out of victims or detracts from the original impetus of justice, but I disagree. Solzhenitsyn and Baldwin were writing even as they lived under institutions of oppression, and still were capable of critiquing these dehumanizing, oppressive institutions while acknowledging the humanity of their oppressors. The recognition of the dignity of others is the best display of one’s own. This moral standard set by Solzhenitsyn and Baldwin is high, but that is where Burke’s prejudice works to make up for our deficiencies. The mechanics of prejudice work to transform an ideal of virtue into a reality of action as we are both agents and objects of change.

A politically correct society can still strive towards retributive justice, but this justice ought to be dependent on and tempered by a conception of individual dignity. If virtue within this society is acknowledging the dignity of others, then culture is one of constant mutual encouragement and self-examination, because no one's virtue is guaranteed.

To the reader eminently concerned with social justice, I thank you for reading this far. I also challenge you to take Baldwin and recognize the flawed individual humanity of not just those most downtrodden and oppressed by society, but also of its most powerful and privileged members.

Eric Yang ’22, is a History concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.