Political Correctness: A Sociocultural Black Hole

165 Pages·2020·6.213 MB·English

by  Thomas Tsakalakis

Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS:
A SOCIOCULTURAL BLACK HOLE
Thomas Tsakalakis
Political Correctness: A Sociocultural
Black Hole
This book explores the nature of political correctness as but one of the faces of
today’s widespread sociocultural hypocrisy; it is a critique of a phenomenon
that constitutes a threat to the Enlightenment hope that humanity might one day
achieve maturity. The author identifies political correctness as a drive towards
shallowness, anti-intellectualism and self-flagellation – and a culture in which
perception is everything. With attention to the emergence and growth of political
correctness in a country, Greece, where it can be observed from a bottom-up
perspective, this volume demonstrates that although at first glance it appears as a
well-intentioned social movement informed by values with which no moral and
judicious person could disagree, political correctness actually represents, at best,
a distraction from graver concerns; at worst, a manifestation of human foolishness
and malevolence. A study of the destruction of honest and rational debate,
characterized by trials of intention, often by social media, Political Correctness:
A Sociocultural Black Hole will appeal to scholars of sociology and media studies
with interests in contemporary political culture.
Thomas Tsakalakis is Adjunct Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of
Athens, Greece.
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Political Correctness:
A Sociocultural Black Hole
Thomas Tsakalakis
First published 2021
by Routledge
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© 2021 Thomas Tsakalakis
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tsakalakis, Thomas, author.
Title: Political correctness: a sociocultural black hole/Thomas Tsakalakis.
Description: 1 Edition. | New York: Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge
studies in social and political thought | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020020721 (print) | LCCN 2020020722 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367528072 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003058489 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Political correctness. | Social media–Political aspects. |
Political culture.
Classification: LCC HM1216 .T73 2020 (print) | LCC HM1216 (ebook) |
DDC 302.23/1–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020721
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020722
ISBN: 978-0-367-52807-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-05848-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents
1 Introduction: A Lannister Always Dates His Pets 1
2 PC in Greece: An Atypical, yet Revealing, Case Study 15
3 A Culture of Hypocrisy 44
4 The Story Thus Far: A Critical Review of the Literature on PC 80
5 Alceste . . . and the Rest: A Misanthropic Pessimist’s
Outlook on PC 119
6 [In Lieu of a] Conclusion 136
Works Cited 147
Index 156

1 Introduction: A Lannister
Always Dates His Pets
The subtitle of this introductory chapter is a play on words I came up with, an
intentional spoonerism based on one of the catch-phrases, “A Lannister always
pays his debts,” from the all-too-popular HBO series Game of Thrones. Be it
clever or gay, and I use the latter adjective in its colloquial sense of “stupid,” this
jeu d’esprit was intended to provoke the ineluctable, and more or less rhetorical,
question: Could it (and, by extension, the one who thought of it) be regarded as
politically incorrect? The answer is a resounding “yes,” perhaps even raised to
the power of three, in view of what this pun was followed by as well: (i) my joke
indubitably incurred the wrath of some of the animal rights warriors; (ii) I perpe-
trated the “microaggression” of proposing the word “gay” as one of the ways my
play on words might be described; and (iii) I keep committing the academic faux
pas of employing the singular first-person pronoun instead of displaying false
modesty by conforming to the long-established norm whereby it is highly recom-
mended that either the supposedly impartial third-person perspective or the plural
first-person pronoun be used in scholarly texts. [Nonetheless, as the aphorism for-
mulated by the peerless satirist Georg Lichtenberg goes: “All impartiality is arti-
ficial. Man is always partial and is quite right to be” (82).] Furthermore, even the
die-hard fans of the aforementioned TV show may be affronted (or “triggered”)
by my playful transposition of two of the phonemes in the Lannisters’ unofficial
motto. Incidentally, if these fans happen to be proponents of political correct-
ness – hereafter abbreviated as PC – as well, should they not also take issue with
the fact that, due to the generic use of the masculine pronoun (“pays his debts”)
in the show’s popular saying, it appears as if only male Lannisters were reputed
to be reliable debtors?
It may well be argued that the fact that I am not a US citizen precludes my take
on the matter at hand from consideration, given that PC is deemed a primarily
American phenomenon. [Ironically, my study may be regarded as a case in which
an “outsider,” a “barbarian,” is “carrying owls to Athens,” to borrow a phrase
from Aristophanes; an equivalent metaphor used by the English is “bringing coals
to Newcastle.” Yet it is an Athenian who offers his perspective on a subject that is
perhaps already exhausted by the Americans, who have plenty of figurative owls
of their own.] Conversely, it would also stand to reason that precisely because
I come from Greece, and therefore not only am I afforded the opportunity to
2 Introduction
examine this phenomenon at a distance, ergo from a more objective angle, but I
am also a member of a “minority group,” in the sense that my birthplace is a small
and almost impoverished country that has been flirting with default and threatened
with “Grexit” for more than a decade, I am somehow more entitled to voice an
opinion on this issue than, say, a privileged American would be. If the advocates
of PC – henceforth: PCers – who have read up to this point have already taken it
for granted that I must be opposed to everything PC stands for, they will conveni-
ently disregard my “minority status” and agree with the former argument; they
may also feel that they ought to quit reading any further, irrespective of what irre-
fragable arguments I might be putting forward later on. Nevertheless, if a person
is indeed anti-PC, this does not mean that said person should be neatly categorized
as a downright bigoted reactionary (i.e., a heterosexist, a racist, a promoter of
hate speech, a misogynist, and an evolution denier), a misinformed centrist, or a
believer in stale Marxist dogmas that do not vigorously endorse the postmodern
wide array of disparate idealistic causes – instead of common economic inter-
ests – such as multiculturalism, environmentalism, ethnic-racial identity affirma-
tion, anti-sexism, LGBTQIAPD rights, and the umbrella term “social justice.”
The abovementioned initialism stands for: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual,
Queer (or Questioning), Intersex, Asexual, Pansexual and Demisexual; however,
by the time this book is published, it may have already been extended consider-
ably, perhaps even to the point of a reordering of the complete English alphabet.
How about an “F” for foot fetishists, an “O” for objectum sexuals (people who are
attracted to, and seek to have relationships with, inanimate objects), or an “E” for
ecosexuals (those who engage in erotic encounters with various components of a
natural ecosystem, such as the soil, a vegetable, or a waterfall)? Of course, many
of the letters could appear more than once; for instance, why not an extra “I” for
“incels,” a term coined by males who self-identify as “involuntary celibates” and
who feel equally marginalized as those who belong to the established LGBT+
community, or a second “D” for digisexuals, that is, persons who forego erotic
encounters with other humans because they prefer to have their sexual desires ful-
filled exclusively by means of digital technologies and interactive media (online
porn, sexting, robotic sex dolls equipped with artificial intelligence, virtual reality
sex, and so forth)? The above could easily result in a new Orwellian “Newspeak,”
while the incessant emergence of new sociocultural entities (or “tribes”), based
either on often illegitimate grievances or on a legion of peculiarities, may lead
Western democracies to consider designing a new social contract. If so, what
exactly should this entail? These are a few of the controversial issues I shall be
addressing in the following chapters.
PC does not have to be associated with factional strife, internecine fault lines,
or interparty conflicts. In the words of the nonpareil stand-up comedian and social
critic George Carlin: “The impulse behind political correctness is a good one.
But like every good impulse in America it has been grotesquely distorted beyond
usefulness,” and the people responsible for this are “liberal language vandals”
and “failed campus revolutionaries” who, if “they’re not busy curtailing freedom
of speech, they’re running around inventing absurd hyphenated names designed
Introduction 3
to make people feel better” (173). With this in mind, it is quite within the bounds
of possibility for someone to be favorably disposed toward several of the ethical
values [not principles] and underlying premises [not actualities] that inform PC,
but in disagreement with its discourse, as well as with virtually all the tactics or
practices adopted by doctrinaire PCers, and, at the same time, to be above the fray
of paltry ideological wars and located outside the orbit of the traditional political
framework, in the sense that s/he – I willfully play the “pronoun game” to mol-
lify the PCers – does not have, or want to have, a dog in this fight. Accordingly,
neither does this hypothetical someone engage in motivated reasoning (which,
in a nutshell, is a confirmatory bias whereby you get to eat your heuristic cake
and have it too: you look for, retain, and process only the kind of information
that seems to buttress your deeply held assumptions and to satisfy your “feel-
ings” as regards a particular problem), nor does s/he cling to unreasonable beliefs
and prejudiced emotions strictly because they are in consonance with her/his in-
group’s views, which is exactly what all the intransigent PCers do, as I shall try
to demonstrate in this book. Otherwise stated, the polarizing topic of PC does
not necessarily pertain to the constantly shifting ideological groupings within the
political spectrum; instead, it could be explored through a lens that is, on the one
hand, supra-political, to wit, focused on panhuman realities and universal verities
that transcend the immediacy of specific ideologico-political investments, myths,
battlegrounds, constellations, or conflicts of opinions (which are purportedly sub-
lated so that a general consensus may eventually emerge) and, on the other, meta-
ethical and metaepistemological, i.e., engaged with a second-order philosophical
interrogation of both the normative bases and the practical applications of moral-
ity and knowledge.
More significantly, but still following the same line of reasoning as before,
when it comes to PC (although it should be noted that the same applies to a whole
series of equally challenging questions or highly charged subjects), why ought one
to classify oneself in advance, sociopolitically, metaphysically, probably even in
regard to one’s sexual orientation as well, in order to be “permitted” to enter the
arena of public discourse and to make one’s assertions with respect to this topic?
[Let us be forthright; the answer is clear: because virtually every book is aimed at
a very specific target audience, one which the author is anxious to win over right
off the bat.] One does not have to be familiar with Michel Foucault’s The History
of Sexuality in order to have awakened to the fact that “Western societies have
established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the produc-
tion of truth” (56), and that this “obligation to confess is now relayed through so
many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it
as the effect of a power that constrains us” (60). Indeed, there are many people
who, wittingly or unwittingly, perform self-evaluations, exhaustively examine
their emotions, their intentions, as well as their likes or dislikes, and then disclose
their “findings” to the public under the illusion that this constitutes a “liberating”
experience. What currently transpires in the realm of social media is a poignant
case in point. The kicker is that this “transparency” is merely a simulation exer-
cise conducted in an environment far removed from truth or from actual reality,