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September 16 - November 21, 2020
What I am suggesting here is that there is no ‘culture war’ as such with regard to the fundamental beliefs that underpin the status quo and sow discontent. Both the political right and left exist within a flawed system. This system is one that will periodically revert to its basest fears and hatreds, voiding all that went before it.
Every day, women are giving up rights involuntarily to live in an order which is not optimised for the pursuit of their individual or collective happiness. It is not even optimised for their safety. As hard-won abortion rights in the US are rolled back, as the gender pay gap continues to persist and even widen, and as cyber sexual harassment and online abuse becomes an everyday part of a woman’s life, women are told not only that things are fine, but that they have in fact, never been better.
The same myths horizontally throughout time and vertically throughout space are thrown at women: you are not unequal, you are complementary. You are not subjugated, you are ungrateful. You are not excluded, you are entitled.
These arguments are then reinforced by an argumentative tool I call ‘the set up’, a way of constantly killing the question for more rights by indulging in comparative deflection; are things not better today? Do you not see how others elsewhere are faring?
Complementarity is the belief that much of what women complain about cannot be legislated away because it is human nature.
The regressive gender roles that we think we have left behind as society has secularised are still present in academia and science. They are hiding in plain sight in popular culture and our social mores and they inform our political legislation.
Malcolm X, faced with his own version of the progress roadblock in the race debate (where the argument was that American negroes were not being lynched anymore), said, ‘If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound …’
it would appear that progress does not have its own momentum. It is not fuelled by the principles of the Enlightenment and oiled by the invisible hand of capitalism.
The interview is more than twenty years old but could have been aired today, so much does it chime with contemporary themes; accusations of ingratitude for how good things already are, trivialising of complaint as indulgence, down even to campus moral outrages and the pathetic victim culture of students.
meritocracy, the belief that people’s chances in life are influenced only by their ability and work ethic, rather than gender, class, race or sexual orientation.
Give women privilege over another group and the impulse to be complicit in their own oppression will be even stronger because they can reach for the comfort of relative status.
It also found that women’s choices politically have a more ‘ego protective’ function than those of men, and so they align themselves with men, the dominant group, as a self-preservation strategy.
Marketplace feminism is also less threatening and more palatable to men. It provides the ‘woke’ among them, the extremely self-identifying ‘feminists’ on social media, with basic tokens of feminist support that they can then wave in women’s faces as evidence of their virtue, while not making a dent in any systemic structures.
They are the female analogues of the good men, who cannot move beyond the individual and connect the dots to the structural.
This is not a crisis that receives much attention, that is reserved for another, largely imaginary one – that of a political correctness allegedly rendering everyone hesitant to express views that could be misconstrued as prejudiced.
Take the case of Lola Olufemi. All she and her fellow Cambridge students wanted to do was introduce some new writers into their syllabus. In June 2017, they wrote an open letter to the post-colonial literature faculty, requesting that non-white authors be added to the curriculum. Four months later, after precisely zero complaints from fellow students or members of the faculty, who were considering its response, the Telegraph newspaper published Lola’s picture on its front page with the headline ‘STUDENT FORCES CAMBRIDGE TO DROP WHITE AUTHORS’.
the open letter did not make any such request in the first place.
Reputable opinion makers weighed into the controversy, speaking witheringly about the new orthodoxy encroaching upon Britain’s universities.
It’s more about who gets to create the narrative about who I am and the work that I do and what I stand for.’
A very specific academic (and ongoing) discussion about post-colonial literature, which had been proceeding in a sophisticated and well-intentioned manner between the students and university staff, had been successfully repackaged and introduced into the public discourse as another exhibit in the case against political correctness.
The fact that today, a young woman like Lola can be savaged by the media and the public under the banner of political correctness, demonstrates both the mainstreaming of the myth and the failure in challenging it.
By the 1980s, the term was beginning to become perverted and take on the shape familiar today – a right-wing labelling of the left as totalitarian in its patrolling of language, thought and by extension ideology. In its current form, the political correctness crisis myth has leapfrogged from the right to the mainstream.
Once the backlash becomes widespread enough, it subsumes genuine problems, such as unequal rights for women or ethnic minorities, diverting attention to the phantom ‘legitimate concerns’ of those who have been convinced that there is an assault on their values, culture, livelihoods and even lives. When that view takes hold, it is sustained by an industry and a political establishment that thrives off feeding false narratives about the goals of political correctness, and fabricating stories to fit that narrative.
There has been a concerted attempt over the past fifty years or so to turn political correctness into a culture war weapon. Unlike other myths that develop in more organic ways, the political correctness myth came to be in a much more deliberate manner.
If the United States’ large fault line is race, in the UK it is immigration. The myth of a PC crisis was successful in toxifying an immigration debate that had been gathering momentum since the late 1970s, when Margaret Thatcher stated that British people ‘might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’
It became increasingly fashionable for politicians to declare that immigration was a threat to livelihoods, but that it was verboten to say so because of political correctness.
In campaigning for Brexit, the Conservative Party and the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) invoked the familiar themes of an out-of-touch elite sacrificing the safety of the country’s citizens because of its commitment to a liberal ideology that went weak at the knees at the sight of a grown man pretending to be a child so that he could seek asylum in the country.
What followed was the culmination of years of right-wing politicians and the media telling the British public that Islamic extremism, high immigration, diminishing access to social welfare and the failures of the National Health Service were down to the evils of political correctness. PC created an orthodoxy which had led to the indulgence of Muslims, refugees and fraudulent asylum seekers who did not have legitimate grounds for refuge.
Mild to strong discontents, from the personal to the political, could be projected on to the scapegoat of the EU and its liberal supporters in the UK. Even though these discontents could be traced to specific British political and economic failures, from regional marginalisation to the biting effects of Conservative fiscal austerity.
‘Making America great again’ was the US version of Brexit’s ‘taking back control’. Both campaigns heavily employed anti-elite and anti-intellectual rhetoric.
Since the 1970s, think tanks, books, pamphlets and strategically placed stories in the media pumped the idea of political correctness as a scourge into the public consciousness. MIT professor Ruth Perry, who was a student and activist in the 1960s and 1970s, told me that the majority of these stories were simply ‘a pack of lies’. But these lies were disseminated by a machine that had considerable funding and therefore, profound reach.
When TV or radio hosts discussed a topic such as feminism for example, they would ask a normal academic type and a funded guest, who was only there to promote policy in line with their funders.’
But a culture war was brewing around immigration, identity and class, one that deepened during the near decade of economic austerity preceding the UK’s Brexit referendum.
The PC media fabrication arm of myth-making depends on three strands – branding minor updates to language/public discourse as political correctness, taking true fragments of a story and spinning them into a larger fake one, and then simply making stuff up.
The reason these consumers return to media outlets, such as Fox News in the US or the Daily Mail in the UK, is to have their world view validated. Or to feel some frisson of something – jealousy, schadenfreude, anger. It is a business model.
At the Daily Mail and its online subsidiary Mailonline.com, in the last ten years, there has been an entire genre of PC stories, covering a wide range of topics, written in heavily editorialised outrage speak. According to this publication, the website of which is the most read in the English-speaking world, political correctness is responsible for, among other horrors, the clandestine leaking of halal meat into British schools, the incubation of Islamic terrorism and the watering down of criminal penal law to a state of near anarchy.
The Sun, the Express and the Daily Mail have issued upwards of twenty corrections and apologies over the past two years to stories such as schools in the UK being banned from singing Christmas songs and the new £5 note potentially being banned as it is not ‘halal’.
This is Frequency Scrambling. What this technique achieves effectively is to divert us away from a genuine grievance by raising a false one. So much time is consequently spent on rebutting the false grievance, for example that curricula in elite British universities are being forcibly changed to include more black or female writers, that no time at all is then spent on the original grievance, which is that some elite universities’ syllabuses are out of date, ethnocentric and not sufficiently inclusive. The time that I have spent writing these words is, ironically, a triumph of Frequency
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It is a diversion tool that depends on couching demands in terms of their impact on others, rather than their inherent merit.
This is the final stage of PC as sanction, to make those who are anti-PC feel not only that they have been victimised, but that they are, in fact, courageous to go against this imaginary tide.
The allure of the PC warrior is sometimes too strong to resist for those who view themselves as brave arbiters of truth.
Much of the language around political correctness is expressed in terms of strength and weakness. Those who care about abusive language, racial and sexist slurs and so on, are weak, thin-skinned, demanding that we go against nature by over legislating and policing innocent and inevitable human behaviour. The implication is that to indulge political correctness is to create a sort of artificial state of oppression, where humans cannot exercise discretion or shrug things off.
Such liberals have succumbed to Frequency Scrambling, in that they dedicate their time to hyperventilating about trivial or made up PC issues, rather than the context in which they occur.
The branding of PC as a rarefied thing has been so successful, that it has meant that defending it is toxic for the left because it suggests elitism and inauthenticity.
when Hillary Clinton was interviewed by the Guardian newspaper in November 2018 on the topic of how to combat populism, her first suggestion was to curb immigration, because that is what ‘lit the flame’. Her view was not that immigration was bad, rather that it was helping the right and must be jettisoned if the left is to be seen as on the side of the man on the street. Clinton’s frequency was well and truly scrambled if her solution to populism is playing into the hands of the right by mimicking its tactics, rather than challenging it because they are objectively wrong.
The journalist Arwa Mahdawi calls this ‘populist correctness’, which she describes as ‘the smearing and silencing of points of view by labelling them “elitist” – and therefore at odds with the will of the people and the good of the country’. She cites as examples the rhetoric around ‘remoaners’ (British people who voted to remain in the EU and ‘moan’ about the result), which can be summed up as ‘the people have spoken, so the rest of you should shut up’.
political correctness crisis mythology is used as ‘coded cover’ for those who ‘still want to say Paki, spastic, or queer.’
The Prospect magazine–YouGov 2018 poll notes: ‘Despite Brexit voters winning the referendum and having a government committed to Brexit, they are more likely to think that people are not free to speak their mind on important issues. Their views have the political upper hand at the moment, yet it seems they still feel culturally embattled.’
This is the cornerstone of myth perpetuation, to convince those at the top of the totem pole, enabled and empowered, that they are weak and threatened by those with far less political capital. And so Trump voters must continue to fear Mexicans and Muslims, and the (in reality weak and inchoate) forces of the left. Brexit voters must continue to worry about the ‘saboteurs’ that the Daily Mail believes include Members of Parliament, and the British Supreme Court. The entire industrial complex of myth-making is in the business of creating sore winners.
The forces that gave Brexit and Trump momentum coalesced around grievance rather than vision. There was no agenda, no genuinely thought-out project that the winners could soberly set about executing, just resentment. ...
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