Res Publica Simon Carr
Political correctness is all about making you feel uncomfortable
We were writing a book based on the Wykehamist motto, which we had conjugated as ‘Manners makyth money’.
In the course of constructing the introduction, my collaborator – Craig Brown, the great humourist – came up with, ‘Good manners is the art of making other people feel uncomfortable.’ Then we had a row about something or other and the book, along with the insight, was lost to posterity.
There are examples of good manners making others uncomfortable. I once saw the Queen – at a press reception a decade ago – inflict a swingeing stripe on one of our cleverest journalists, simply by smiling at her and turning gently away. Oo, we winced!
The comic inversion of ‘Manners makyth man’ was what made the ‘uncomfortable’ joke. Putting one another at ease – that is what old-style manners are about. Reaching across social and cultural divides, establishing common ground, making both parties feel better by establishing a benevolent sense of contact.
That approach was overtaken in the Eighties and Nineties by the muchmaligned cultural innovation known as political correctness. The old system had been blown away by the Sixties and Seventies practice of truth-telling, satire and personal revelation. Blithe Spirit was superseded by The Vagina Monologues. And PC was promoted as modern manners. It’s still billed as such in some quarters, against opposition.
Apart from its bouts of temporary insanity, what actually is wrong with political correctness? It stops ethnic minorities being marginalised, disabled people being taunted, and gay people being ostracised. It allows diverse populations to live together and, by doing so, it brings down the price of labour (for which the Right shows scant gratitude). For traditionalists, PC has a venerable history. A 14th-century regulation at Oxford University forbade students making ‘odious comparisons’ between countries and classes of people. It’s a nation-building system that gives us time to get used to our distant cousins, to tolerate them for long enough so that we stop wanting to kill them. So, what is wrong with it? Deep in its foundation, political correctness is more than a system of manners; it’s a weapon of cultural power – it really is the art of making others feel uncomfortable. Its founding principle is the proposition that all structures are power structures and that any hierarchy is a system of oppression. To me, this sounds paranoid. Hierarchy is order. Hierarchy is what most people see as an opportunity to get on in the world – people enjoy hierarchies because they are something to climb.
But anyone who isn’t white, male and heterosexual is assigned an inescapably low position and is a victim of those above them.
So the primary sense in any PC conversation is unease. Blame and shame are its drivers. Our villainous ancestors – whose crimes we still benefit from – are present everywhere. We must atone for their crimes because we are guilty. Very well – maybe I am guilty. But under intersectional theory, so are you, whoever you are. There is also a hierarchy of victimhood and any advantage you enjoy in life is built on the suffering of nameless others. Somewhere at the bottom of humanity is some wholly innocent individual but you really wouldn’t want to be that person.
This guilt infects any social relationship between the races, the sexes and the gender identities. Unease is essential, to keep the dominant group on the back foot. That may be why the rules keep changing. To say ‘Afro-caribbean’ or ‘coloured people’ – the politeness of previous generations – is now to inflict violence on all minorities.
When Hugh Quarshie played Hotspur in the Eighties, the approved reaction was, ‘Is he black? I honestly didn’t notice.’ Erasing his ethnic identity like that would be classified as a most heinous hate crime today. Twitter would be very unforgiving.
PC isn’t about manners at all, it is an exercise of moral imperialism. Proponents might say it is the essence of civilisation; it is how progress is made. But it’s creating practical damages that are increasingly apparent. If we can’t look at controversial questions from odd angles, the chances are we’ll never get a solution to the problem they pose.
Are all cultures equally worthy of respect? Are most of Africa’s problems really the result of colonialism? Is Koranic teaching compatible with democracy? In what way can a person with a beard and a penis who likes having sex with women be a woman? How much of racism is actually a relatively innocent birds-of-a-feather impulse?
Such questions prompt the most important question: when can we consider questions like this without being denounced as white supremacist Nazis agitating for the return of death camps?