I'm all in favor of acid wit and barbed satire. But too many partisans on
both sides sound like Beavis and Butt-Head, tittering over trivia. More
important, if political correctness is as absurd as so many people think it
is, why is it so successful? This newspaper, your local schools, police and
fire departments, city hall, your church and workplace all likely subscribe
to vast swaths of what was once called a politically correct agenda, from
rules barring sexual harassment to the language you can use in casual
conversation or e-mails. Surely if PC is the Orwellian imposition so many
conservatives claim it is, Americans would reject it the way they resisted
other alien impositions, such as the metric system, bidets or David
Hasselhoff's Germanic personality cult.
The reality is that much of political correctness - the successful part - is
a necessary attempt to redefine good manners in a sexually and racially
integrated society. Good manners are simply those things you do to
demonstrate respect to others and contribute to social decorum. Aren't
conservatives the natural defenders of proper manners?
Remember that D.C. bureaucrat who lost his job for using the word
"niggardly" correctly in a sentence? That was outrageous overkill, but I
don't know that many well-mannered white people who would use "niggardly" in
a room full of black people either, for fear of offending. The problem with
political correctness resides in the demand that new manners be created from
scratch, which is bound to turn people off. I mean, did we really need to
replace "old" with "senior" or purge "Dutch treat" from the vernacular?
PC's problems become even more acute when the left insists on smuggling
larger agendas into what should be a polite conversation about what
constitutes politeness. There's remarkable overlap between conservative and
liberal complaints about the culture. But when traditionalists talk the
language of decency and morality, the left hears bigotry and theocracy. And
when liberals talk about sensitivity and white privilege, the right hears
something totalitarian. The result is that the two sides hold separate
conversations. And when they do talk to each other, each side is listening
for hidden agendas.
Perhaps the reason the national conversations always sputter out is that
they start off too ambitious. Rather than tackling America's fundamental
problems, we could start by talking about how we should talk.