Is "Political Correctness" an Anti-Concept?
by Cameron Pritchard
Ayn Rand defined an anti-concept as "an unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to obliterate some legitimate concept" and "to obliterare certain concepts without public discussion". In her essay, 'Extremism, or The Art of Smearing' she noted that the term "extremism", employed as a pejorative in political discourse, is in fact conceptually meaningless since it attempts to lump together a variety of essentially different things: extreme liberalism, for example, is not the same as extreme Christian fundamentalism. Osama Bin Laden's extremism is not the same as, say, a libertarian's staunch commitment to the principle of voluntarism. To lump all of these things together as one class--"extremism" or "extremists"--is akin to grouping apples, chairs and Prince Charles together as one distinct class of things.
I have become suspicious of the concept of "political correctness" for the very reason that, as a term, it too seems to lump together disparate phenomena. PC is often a catch-all smear that includes both real silliness as well as defensible secular humanism. Too often we hear quite rational and legitimate objections to things such as the use of the word God in the US Pledge of Allegiance or calls to remove representations of religious imagery such as bibles and crosses from government buildings derided as "PC". Why then would a libertarian want to use a term that groups together a commitment to secularism with such things as state enforcement of cultural sensitivity? One is legitimate, the other illegitimate. Yet both, in common parlance, are considered examples of "PC".
We could just say, I suppose, that it's not PC to advocate the separation of church and state, or to disapprove of (note I did not say ban) racist, sexist or homophobic language that, in the spirit of collectivism, sees individuals as stereotypical members of a group. We could, but I think the term "politically correct" has been used too much now to malign such reasonable, liberal-minded (in the classical sense) viewpoints.
There may be other valid concepts that we can use to criticise the obviously stupid and downright dangerous elements of much of today's political discourse. We might complain that people get too hung-up on "cultural sensitivity", for example, that they refuse to make a distinction between the West's treatment of women and, say, the treatment women receive in Saudi Arabia. We might say, more precisely, that we are opposed to cultural relativism.
But should people who oppose--voluntarily, I might add--racist language and refuse to laugh at a racist joke or a joke about wife beating be dismissed out of turn as simply being "politically correct"? Might they not be onto something? For, after all, aren't such things as racism, sexism and homophobia examples of irrationalism and collectivism par excellence?
Better we address the issues at hand than smear people with an anti-concept like "political correctness".
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