Understanding the times is always important. Ideas and cultural trends are extremely powerful, and the less we’re aware of them, the greater the likelihood they’ll capture our thinking and shape our lives. Moreover, the ability of ideas to unwittingly shape us is intensified by the contemporary sense that what is, ought to be. In other words, if society’s ‘collective wisdom’ has adopted a certain way to think, it must be better than other ideas and certainly better than what’s gone before. One lady I talk to embodies this exactly: she says to me, “You can’t stand against the times you know”. For her ‘the times’ are absolute; they know best.
For those of us who stand implacably against the whole secular project we must find ways to avoid being captured by the cherished ideas of today and diminish their power over us. There are various ways that the power of an idea can be diluted. One is by digging out the source, perhaps some school of philosophy that’s tipped its theory into the stream of western thinking. Once we locate the source and discover the agenda of the thinkers responsible, often the power of their idea is drained away. Another way to dilute an idea is to unpack the method that gives it power. I want to try and do that for what is commonly called political correctness.
Political correctness is a kind of ideological game which seeks to empower certain groups and silence others. It has achieved a massive amount of traction in the West over the last thirty years and it’s done so by embedding powerful and often unexamined assumptions into the minds of people. These assumptions have been transmitted by – amongst other things – educational curricula, the liberal media, Hollywood and increasingly, government policies. In short, they’ve been carried by the cultural wind that’s blown through the West, a wind that’s swept away previous modes of thought.
Political correctness works like this: it assumes that there are two categories of people in the world, the oppressors and the oppressed. At the risk of generalising, the oppressors are invariably a combination of the following: heterosexual, white, men of European descent, able bodied, sometimes Christian. The oppressed usually fall in one or more of these categories: homosexual, transgender, non-white, women, non-European, disabled. I would unhesitatingly suggest that this oppressor/oppressed model controls virtually all discourse and decision making today in the public arena.
Following on from the identification of these two groups, another assumption is made, that historically the oppressor group has built a society that favours them and exploits the oppressed. For those wedded to this worldview, this realisation demands action. Outraged by a massive imbalance of power, the oppressors must be emasculated, leaving the victims to find their voice and be empowered to remake the world so that it’s equal and fair. Hence women must be empowered, and men marginalised; history must be rewritten to include the value of non-European nations; the homosexual life must be celebrated and so on. In a nutshell, that’s political correctness.
Let me make five comments:
(1) This model of seeing the world through the lens of oppressor/oppressed, is really a Marxist paradigm. Historically in Marxism the oppressors were the capitalists and the oppressed the workers. With the collapse of economic communism in 1989, western intellectuals reinvented their creed into what is sometimes called Cultural Marxism. The oppressor/oppressed paradigm lives on but in another – much more subtle – form. We need to be careful when we say that Marxism is dead.
(2) As with all controversial theories, there is of course some truth in the politically correct narrative. Sin has made us highly irrational and easily open to manipulation, but we tend not to believe things that have no basis in truth. Historically, the world has been Eurocentric; women and non-white people have been badly treated. Accordingly, we Christians should work to put right what has been wrong. The problem – it seems to me – is that the politically correct method is an overly simplistic system with which to assess the world and because of that, it makes constant errors of judgment. Let me offer a few examples: (a) Today’s men are not responsible for injustices against women committed in the past and campaigns like “Me too” run the risk of demonising all men as sexual predators. Too often, being included in an oppressor category means that you can do no right. (b) The opposite is also true; being in victim category means that you can do no wrong and you become immune from criticism. Today, so-called transgender people currently sit at the top of the victimhood hierarchy and effectively this makes them immune from any comment, let alone critique. This is in spite of the fact that people switching genders are likely storing up for themselves profound problems in their futures as they cut themselves off from the hard facts of biological reality. People need to tell them this, but few dare. (c) The continual focusing on skin colour and ethnicity adds to divisions in society; we’re getting further and further away from a situation where we can see beyond someone’s skin colour to the humanness we all share. (d) Women demanding the right to abortion often say that others – especially men – have no right to comment upon whether they should keep their baby. It’s the same argument as was used by American slave-owners before the Civil War: since slaves were on their property, they had a right to do what they wanted with them and no one had the right to comment. Here’s the problem: since when have issues of right and wrong in a society been reduced to the preferences of one group? This is identity politics at its worst.
(3) The doctrine of political correctness is laden with duplicity. Promoting itself as a tolerant and open creed, in reality it is high intolerant of dissenters. Dissenters are instantly classified as bigots or homophobic or sexist or transphobic (whatever the context) and this affords them the power to trump opponents and shape the world on their terms. The duplicity in the system is that the politically correct creed comes with the assumption that it has a better understanding of reality than anyone else. Hence the cultural arrogance it supposedly exposes and rejects is ironically at the heart of its system. To us the language of postmodernism: political correctness is a metanarrative that forbids the right of all other metanarratives to exist.
(4) Worryingly, all the evidence seems to suggest that the Millennial Generation and Generation Z behind them are so deeply dyed in political correctness that they can’t imagine any other way of understanding the world. The price which will increasingly be paid is in the realm of liberty. Across the western world, freedom of expression is being eroded as politically incorrect speakers are denied the right to speak by often aggressive protestors. Christian unions on university campuses in the UK have in recent years fallen foul of these people. One can’t but help think that many secular students on university campuses – drunk on the creed of political correctness – get a kick out of feeling that they’re part of the ‘good crowd’ as they hound the ‘bad guys’ of the world. It’s a very low-cost way of thinking you’re making a contribution to ‘a better world’. Watch any YouTube clip showing anti-Trump demonstrations: you can smell the moral superiority even through your computer screen.
(5) From a Christian perspective, political correctness is mostly bad news. Contained within the narrative of political correctness is the assumption that Christianity is a toxic creed, responsible for many of the injustices found in the world today. Very often, the blame for slavery, the oppression of women and people with same-sex attraction, a cultural superiority promoted by missionaries etc is firmly placed at the door of Christians. Much of this is reductionistic at best and incorrect at worst. Moreover, the contributions of Christianity to society are ignored: the birth of modern science, the rule of law, the value of all people regardless of gender or colour, care for the weak, and ironically, the abolition of slavery.
Finally, it’s no small undertaking for us Christians to help secular people develop a healthy perspective on the ideas that control our thinking today. But hard as it is, we must do our best, believing that God will use our efforts for good. This will require that Christians find courage and work hard to think and explain well. We’re reminded again of the importance of raising up serious Christian engagers in this generation, especially amongst young people. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work!
First published on Challenging Thinking on 2018-11-30. Reproduced here in the CWT essay archive without style or semantic changes.