To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Wednesday, December 05, 2018
 
Political correctness…gone mad?

I enjoy reading Facebook comments sections on interesting news headlines more than the actual articles. Commenters seem to compete amongst themselves to come up with the wittiest of comments no doubt in the hope of getting likes/reactions. I must admit I feel a bit guilty at having a laugh at what cannot but be sad and sometimes downright macabre happenings such as the lady who apparently killed her husband and was found out because her husband’s brother found a human tooth in the blender! The comments were a riot—missing family member, let’s check the blender kind—but as you would agree this was no laughing matter.
Apart from the dose of humour, what interests me about the comments is the window they offer to what and how people really think about any issue. What with the political atmosphere getting hotter by the minute, comments seem to have a way of spiralling down the political hole pretty quick. Words like ‘snowflake’, ‘libtard’, ‘leftie so and so’, ‘Trumpster’, ‘rightwing something’ depending on which side of the fence you’re on are bandied about all over the place. One such word is ‘PC’ or ‘Politically Correct’ which is made to sound like a curse as bad as any other. I have been recently thinking about how this word came to achieve such notoriety and whether there is something to it.
In terms of my personal leanings, I need to declare that I am more to the left than to the right… I wouldn’t want to say anything stronger than that because I have a distaste for adopting labels wholesale but in the present discussion not stating this could be rather misleading as to my intentions. I also feel that your chosen values make you identify with either side but sometimes not all of the values espoused on one or the other side might fit with your own position in which case it’s a bit uncomfortable to represent the entire territory. Which is why I often wonder that people are able to locate themselves on this spectrum easily.
Now, one of the values that is very important and dear to me is freedom of thought and expression. What I mean is that you should be able to freely hold any thought or express any opinion under the sun, keeping in mind that ‘your freedom ends where my nose begins’. It is of course not quite simple to figure out where another person’s nose might begin when it comes to expressing my views but I guess if the intention is to air an honest opinion or view rather than to insult or be disrespectful or to diminish another person’s rights, then probably I am not touching another person’s nose. It can always be argued that there is no way to judge someone’s intention and if someone is hurt or offended by what a person says then he shouldn’t have said it…but carried too far this would effectively mean that everyone should simply shut up because there is no telling what could offend or hurt someone or anyone. Even the truth for that matter could be hurtful! The point I am making is that it is important to have the right conditions for freedom of thought and expression; if people are not allowed to say what they want to say because it doesn’t agree with my opinions, it is not a freedom… freedom of thought and expression is essentially so only when I am able to voice the most outrageous of opinions without fear of being gagged…though I must be completely open for people to voice their own opinions against mine because that is where their nose starts.
To give a rather simplistic example, if someone were to suggest that ‘women are biologically suited only for certain occupations’, the reaction is rarely an argument countering this view. This and many other views that may seem conservative or small-minded or traditional or orthodox usually get shut down as if the author committed a heresy. One is not allowed to think such an opinion much less express it. My question is how can we limit freedom of thought and expression to ideas and opinions that we agree with and dismiss those that are contrary even if they are outlandish by our standards? Granted that one could say that ‘women’ as a group are being diminished by such an opinion but again if this opinion is being honestly suggested rather than with the intention to be disrespectful (a difficult distinction to make sometimes but let’s assume it is not for the sake of this argument), wouldn’t it serve our position better to call for the evidence and then to systematically argue against it rather than to pull down the author, in the process doing what we suspect him or her of doing to us?
I sometimes feel that there is some truth to the charge of ‘political correctness gone mad’ levelled at the left because it seems to me that we do expect people to be ‘politically correct’ when talking about certain topics, ideas, notions, opinions rather than honestly state what they think. I think so because I have noticed that if people were to say anything contradicting the dominant ‘politically correct’ point of view they are not given the benefit of an argument—they are immediately labelled to be something or the other. I wonder what good it does to shame a person to subscribe to a view publicly that he or she does not hold privately. In fact, I wonder if this isn’t the sort of thing that has made people like Trump appear on the world stage. People who are unable to voice what are seen as unsavoury views far from being converted to a different point of view have now found in Trump a leader who will fearlessly speak on their behalf, political correctness be damned. I increasingly see people in comments sections speaking out freely and even brazenly without any worry about how they may be perceived for their non-politically correct opinions likely because they feel emboldened by Trump’s actions. They can even say that climate change isn’t real without fear of being laughed at because the joke’s not on them anymore!
My point quite obviously isn’t that their views have merit but that whether they do or do not have merit, they need to be argued with rather than shut down because that to me is what free speech is about. I also feel that it is better to argue against an argument rather than the arguer because the argument has some chance of going away albeit a miniscule one but the arguer will not. I wonder if it isn’t better in the long run to actually know what’s simmering under the surface of people rather than it blowing in our faces in a Trump-like shape?
Simply put, to me, political correctness is antithetical to free speech. It makes people say things that they may not actually believe and it makes people not say things that they actually believe. The whole point of free speech is for people to be able to feel free to say what they really believe and an atmosphere that encourages ‘political correctness’ does the opposite of that. If the idea was for everyone to think the same views because those have been accepted as the correct kind of views by a certain section of the population, it certainly doesn’t achieve that. It achieves even less because while these views in their own right might have been credible, they are now merely ‘political correctness gone mad’.

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 4:34 am 0 comments
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