tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post2341002228533151721..comments2024-03-28T21:32:26.550+00:00Comments on Bruce Charlton's Notions: Can political correctness be stopped? If not, then what's the point?Bruce Charltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-14250464108033900902010-12-05T10:31:27.083+00:002010-12-05T10:31:27.083+00:00SonofMoses - Thanks. The outpourings have more or ...SonofMoses - Thanks. The outpourings have more or less stopped and I am starting to pull things together now. <br /><br />Karl Popper commented (in his autobiography Unended Quest) that definitions are of limited value; and can indeed serve to close off enquiry. <br /><br />I agree. Definitions come after enquiry, and serve merely as a convenient summary. <br /><br />My understanding of the nature of PC has developed as my ideas have clarified. I would now consider PC to be an evolutionary development of socialism/ communism - it is what the New Left of the sixties became. <br /><br />In particular, PC is post-communist in its anti-utopianism - and its principled anti-humanism. <br /><br />In its early ideal form communism was intended to liberate human individuals - after humans had been remade/ or had their false programming removed, then the state apparatus was supposed to wither away. <br /><br />Of course, when this showed no signs of happening then communism became hypocritical, careerist and corrupt - but PC has arrived at the corruption, careerism and cynicism of late communism. <br /><br />Yet there is much more to PC than this: PC is underpinned with an extraordinary anti-human kind of idealism, a state-ism, in which humans are regarded as the root of all evil and the abstract state embodies virtue (through its abstract processes, its procedures, laws, regulations, bureaucracies etc.)<br /><br />So ultimately the idealistic PC intellectual is something like the idealistic communist commissar who was working to make his own job unnecessary; the idealistic PC bureaucrat is acting to make human judgment and power not merely unnecessary but impossible: all important human decisions are to be done by abstract system - by the state. <br /><br />Thus PC is, in its aspiration, the only wholly and permanently totalitarian ideology to have gained any traction. <br /><br />PC aspires to an eternal and all powerful bureaucracy which assimilates all opposition: as I mentioned before, the Star Trek Next Generation 'Borg' is a fascinating metaphor for PC - and The Borg is, indeed, a much more morally-admirable entity for modern 'liberals' and leftists than is the collection of selfish and corruptible humans of the Starship Enterprise.Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-46574128432055140822010-12-05T08:26:36.550+00:002010-12-05T08:26:36.550+00:00Dear Bruce,
I have recently discovered your fascin...Dear Bruce,<br />I have recently discovered your fascinating blog, and immediately felt less lonely and hunted. In particular, your recent outpourings re: political correctness have warmed one part of my heart (while, of course, chilling another). <br />No doubt you will put it all together once the stream stops flowing. <br />What I have missed so far is a coherent explanation of exactly what it is you are calling PC, since you spread the term further than is generally the case. You carefully distinguish it from mere leftism, Marxism etc. Is it somewhere at the heart of liberalism? How does it relate to the so-called Enlightenment? A long article full of up to the moment examples would help and could probably be taken from no more than a week’s supply of newspapers.<br />Son of MosesSonofMoseshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00863806423273855526noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-5079616768090555532010-12-04T23:08:45.692+00:002010-12-04T23:08:45.692+00:00"Are the secular conservatives who write for ..."Are the secular conservatives who write for something like Alternative Right really semi-PC."<br /><br />Yes - that's exactly what I am saying. My own views were libertarian secular right (just like mainstream Alt Right) just a few years ago. e.g.<br /><br />http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/modernization-imperative.html<br /><br />Looking back I was indeed semi-PC without recognizing the fact: I did not realize that I had conceded key positions.<br /><br />To stand outside PC nowadays is, for an intellectual, an isolated and extremist position. <br /><br />The kind of stance suggested by your quote is not viable: complex politics is not viable. <br /><br />Politics always is and must be simple where is is not merely chaotic/ disorganized. <br /><br />My point is that complex/ organized politics is impossible; and if a strategy or policy depends upon being complex and organized then it will fail.Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-43040884430910084182010-12-04T19:21:50.567+00:002010-12-04T19:21:50.567+00:00All of the secular right is semi-PC
Not so sure a...<i>All of the secular right is semi-PC</i><br /><br />Not so sure about this. Are the secular conservatives who write for something like Alternative Right really semi-PC.<br /><br />As for whether PC can be defeated, it is likely. But by playing some of the contradictions of liberalism against itself, one can carve out smaller spheres of non-PC where one is relatively free to not live by lies.<br /><br />"There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."Thursdayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13002311410445623799noreply@blogger.com