Coerced Empathy

Several weeks ago, Jonathan Chait, an author and columnist for New York magazine, penned an interesting yet much-panned lament about the rise of “political correctness.”  In brief, Chait is upset that “PC” has returned, after a brief hiatus, and is ravaging political discourse – on campus, online, and throughout the political world, particularly on the Left.  “[T]he new political correctness,” Chait complains, “has bludgeoned even many of its own supporters into despondent silence. . . ” This, he claims, is both unfair, in a constitutional republic, and unhealthy in a nominal democracy, where the point of politics “is still based on getting people to agree with you, not making them afraid to disagree.”  He continues:

[I]t would be a mistake to categorize today’s p.c. culture as only an academic phenomenon.  Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate.  Two decades ago, the only communities where the left could exert such hegemonic control lay within academia, which gave it an influence on intellectual life far out of proportion to its numeric size.  Today’s political correctness flourishes most consequentially on social media, where it enjoys a frisson of cool and vast new cultural reach.  And since social media is also now the milieu that hosts most political debate, the new p.c. has attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old. . . .

In a short period of time, the p.c. movement has assumed a towering presence in the psychic space of politically active people in general and the left in particular.  “All over social media, there dwell armies of unpaid but widely read commentators, ready to launch hashtag campaigns and circulate Change.org petitions in response to the slightest of identity-politics missteps,” Rebecca Traister wrote recently in The New Republic.

For his trouble, Chait has been roundly mocked, both on the Left, as a “sad white man” who can’t deal with the fact that he and his ilk are growing ever-more irrelevant; and on the Right, as a hypocrite who has perennially used PC tactics to silence critics but who finds those same tactics abhorrent when they’re used against him and his ideological allies.  The hypocrisy charge, we think, is fairly damning, in that Chait’s complaint does ring hollow and is incredibly self-unaware.  Chait, after all, is probably best known for his 2003 Leftist cri de coeur, “Why I Hate George W. Bush.”  For him to whine now about a lack of civility in political discourse is both rich and patently insincere.

At the same time, the more interesting and edifying critique of Chait’s anti-PC rant is that which comes from the Left.  Chait is yesterday’s news, they say, a shallow man, every bit as reflexively protective of his own privileges as those he attacked for theirs in an earlier era, and every bit as ignorant of the real struggles in society and the real moral outrages as any right-wing, reactionary hack of old.  Chait’s inability to remain politically relevant and politically correct is symptomatic of his own shortcomings, not those of the broader leftist political orthodoxy.

In this sense – the politically correct sense – both Chait and his leftist critics are right.  Political correctness is indeed “back” and more stifling than ever.  And yet Chait only notices now because he and others like him now find themselves the targets of those who seek to enforce this correctness.  All of this, we think, is perfectly emblematic of American politics over the last century or so.

The phrase “political correctness” is, more than anything, a term of art.  There is no clear-cut, indisputable definition, only a general sense of obligatory suspicion and circumspection with respect to behavior and, especially, language.  To act or speak in a manner that is considered offensive by another, that makes another self-conscious, upset, or feel “demeaned” is to be politically “incorrect.”  As Chait suggests, political correctness is often thought of as extreme politeness, in social and political settings, an unwillingness to use any term or to engage in any behavior that might be provocative to any person or group, particularly those who believe themselves to be or to have been oppressed.

In practice, then, “political correctness” is little more than coerced “empathy.”  One is expected, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, to feel another’s pain, to be compassionate and understanding with respect to any words or actions that might hurt another’s feelings or make him or her unhappy.  To do otherwise is to prove oneself unworthy of social standing and unfit for polite company.

The first problem with all of this is that there is no way of knowing what might be found offensive or by whom.

What, one might rightly wonder, is an “offense?”  Who defines it?  How severe must an offense be for it to compel restrictions on free expression?  Unfortunately, there are no objective standards, no established quantitative measures by which these questions might be answered.  All that matters are feelings, which are perhaps the most tenderly subjective measure imaginable.  What is offensive?  Anything that offends anyone, anywhere.

As noted before in these pages, all of this calls to mind Alasdair MacIntyre’s criticism of contemporary morality and especially its reliance on a heavily emotive disposition.  MacIntyre, recall, argued that the Enlightenment mission of destroying the traditional, religiously-based moral scheme and replacing it with one based exclusively on reason was doomed from its inception and left the very notion of morality shattered.

Without the pre-Enlightenment, pre-Modern teleological framework, MacIntyre argued, “the whole project of morality becomes unintelligible,” and moral philosophy becomes nothing more than an arena for competing notions that have no basis other than “logic,” which is, of course, subjective.

The ultimate end of all of this is a civil order in which the traditional moral order has been eroded but has been replaced by nothing of any substance or meaning, which, in turn, breeds moral chaos. The modern, liberal society, in turn, is one in which the meanings of such words as right, wrong, moral, immoral, truth, lie, justice and injustice are entirely capricious and contextual.  In such a society, MacIntyre notes, the statement “This is good” comes to mean nothing more than “Hurrah for this!”  Likewise, “this is offensive” comes to mean nothing more than “I don’t like this.”

The second problem – triggered by the first – is that the definition of offense and offensive are constantly changing.  With no fixed morality, no objective definition of right or wrong, good or evil, oppressed or oppressive, there is also no fixed victim class, no fixed description of offense, offender, or offendee.

The history of the Left in this country over the last century or more, indeed the entire history of the Progressive movement, is the story of politics removed from moral absolutes.  At the beginning of the 20th Century, for example, the Progressives were ardently and evangelically religious, the devotees of the “social gospel.”  By the end of World War I, however, that religious sentiment had begun to wane.  And by the end of World War II, it was dismissed altogether.  Religious men and women were considered REgressive, rather than progressive.  For the first six or seven decades of the last century, the American Left was pro-Jewish, and, in return, most Jewish voters were pro-Left.  The Democratic party provided a bulwark of sorts against the traditional anti-Semitism of the American upper classes, while Jewish intellectuals formed much of the Left’s political brain trust.  By the 1970s, however, the Left’s support for the Jews had begun to wane.  The erstwhile oppressed Jewish minority was replaced by a “better,” more empathetic oppressed minority, the “persecuted,” non-Western Palestinians.

For most of the half century after the so-called “sexual revolution,” the Left favored a feminism that argued that all people are equal, men and women sharing the same virtues and vices, the same strengths and weaknesses, and the same “right” to unlimited sensual license.  Today, however, the Left advocates a feminism that echoes the reactionary values of old.  Women are weak; men are strong and seek nothing more than to inflict that strength upon women.  All women are victims.  All men are rapists.  For nearly its entire history, the Left has considered Karl Marx as a revolutionary genius whose theories would transform the world into an egalitarian utopia.  Today, he is nothing more than another in a long line of dead white males.

And so on. . . .

Jonathan Chait finds the “new” political correctness far more tiresome and oppressive, largely because he also finds himself on the outside looking in at the current iteration of the ever-malleable leftist moral code.  He doesn’t understand that code, but then Woodrow Wilson wouldn’t understand it either.  And neither would FDR, LBJ, or countless others who once dominated the political Left but who would be outside of the Left’s moral realm today.  Jimmy Carter, once the darling of the post-Vietnam Left would be a political pariah today – a white, Southern, erstwhile segregationist sympathizer and fervent Baptist.

The values embraced by the Left have changed a great deal since Carter’s presidency.  They’ve changed a great deal since Jonathan Chait was a young, idealistic left-ish journalist.  And they will change again before the metaphorical ink is dry on this essay.  Such is the nature of political discourse in light of moral relativism, which is to say such is the nature of political correctness.