July 7, 1995
Jim Mannoia

I may have dated myself by adopting Horst Jankowski's song as the title of my remarks. But when I was asked to talk about political correctness, the first thing that came to mind was audience. And because I want to be politically correct, I must explain that I don't mean that as an insult to your age. Instead, I mean it as a compliment to your educational background. Depending on the group to which one speaks the same topic may require different approaches. To a left leaning group, I suppose I would want to critique political correctness, whereas to a right leaning group, I think its positive sides should be shown. It is a disease of our culture that we want to see things in "black and white," "right and wrong." Cognitive psychologists call it "dualistic thinking." But the real world is much more complex than that. Liberally educated people work hard all their lives to make distinctions, to recognize nuances--the shades of grey in virtually every issue. Their educated eyes try to see those complex details with greater resolution. If you permit me to switch metaphors, the "black and white" thinker sees only the top and bottom of life's slippery slopes never venturing from the top for fear it is actually like a cliff from which they will fall immediately to the bottom with no place to stand in between. Educated minds have learned to "hold an edge" on that slope. Since it is one of the primary purposes of Houghton College's liberal arts emphasis to "liberate" its graduates from narrow perspectives I am hopeful that as alums you have made it a deep part of your everyday thought patterns to hear all sides of an issue; especially the sides you may understand and sympathize with least.

In this spirit, I propose to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of political correctness. I want to reverse the order however, because I think we often remember best what we hear last. But I didn't alter the title because frankly, "The Ugly, the Bad, and the Good" just didn't have the same "ring."

What IS Political Correctness?
It is probably unnecessary, but please indulge my philosopher's obsession and let me start with a bit of definition. "Political Correctness" or "PC" is a label which has been attached to a broad range of viewpoints found largely on campuses and in the media around the United States but is now affecting the public at large. It describes those people who have embraced a very tolerant attitude on such issues as race, gender, sexuality, and the environment. They have urged that we all become much more sensitive to the ways in which we unconsciously stereo-type persons and even species different from ourselves. The politically correct point out the ways whereby we often subject such persons to both subtle and overt discrimination which degrades them as persons.

We must agree that such degradation is inconsistent even with mere civility and all the more inconsistent with Christian principles of respect for persons made in God's image. However, those who urge such tolerance do so with great passion and conviction. And that passion not only explains much of the "backlash" which has been created against PC but also the internal inconsistencies I will describe in a few minutes.

Ironically, some of those who are labelled "politically correct" have objected that the label itself was developed by those on the cultural and political right as an unfortunately blunt instrument for attack. To whatever extent the PC movement has been attacked merely by picking on its most extreme manifestations with the rhetoric of humor and ridicule this objection is probably legitimate.

The Ugly
Most of you are already probably too well acquainted with the ugly side of PC. But again I hope you will indulge me and I pray you will not be offended by these examples.

A colleage teaching at Santa Cruz tells me of a young Christian who was dismissed from the university for violating a rule prohibiting the display of posters on the public walls of dormitories. The gay community regularly violated this rule with impunity in this young man's own hallway. But he was dismissed when he put a poster on his own doorway stating, "I am heterosexual and proud of it."

Jerome Pinn, a grad student, returned to his dorm at U of Michigan to discover his new roommate had pinned up several pictures of nude men. When the young man confirmed that he was gay, Pinn approached the Michigan housing office and said he wanted to move. "They were outraged," Pinn says.

"They asked me what was wrong with me---what MY problem was. finally they agreed that I could move, but they warned me that if I told anyone the reason, I would face university charges of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation."

Just this week, a colleague from the Rochester area reported that students at Brockport who registered for a history course refused to attend class because the word 'history' in the course title contained the word 'his.' They argued that this title prejudiced the class from the beginning towards the story of dead white european males, and insisted the name be changed.

Stephen Carter, a black professor at Yale, was recently criticized for saying, "There is a fundamental difference between Asian and modern American cultures."

A Harvard student newspaper this spring objected to a required course Literature B-10 because it was ideological and doctrinaire rather than educational. Students were expected to comment on the merits of canned excrement as art and the professor openly admitted that his political opinions are part of his evaluative scheme for giving grades in the class.

In a manual distributed by the American Sociological Association, Becky Thompson, a sociologist agrees, acknowledging the ideological presuppositions of her teaching methodology. She says,

"I begin the course with the basic feminist principle....that it is not open to debate whether a white student is racist or a male student is sexist. He/she simply is."

In early April, Yale University celebrated BGLAD Week, the Bi-sexual, Gay, Lesbian Awareness Day. The theme was "We're here, we're queer, and proud of it." Among the seminars offered was one entitled Ethnicity in the Lesbian Gay Bi-sexual Community and another was on Gay and Lesbian Parenthood.

This spring I spoke at a Houghton Alumni gathering in Minneapolis and visited my son at his college nearby. I was startled to see the poster on the bulletin board outside his room advertising that college's gay and lesbian celebration day. The big print headline said, "Live Homosexual Acts Performed in the Quad at 4PM." I didn't stay around to see what that meant. Of course such political correctness has produced an equally ugly backlash. We have all heard the jokes which ridicule the extreme lengths to which PC requires us to modify our language to avoid offense. Many words do offend unnecessarily and should be avoided. "Nigger," "Wetback," and "Chick" have been tools of power and domination. And perhaps "Handicapped" or "Disabled" can be improved. But it is less clear that 'woman' needs to be spelled with a 'y,' or that short people would really rather be called "vertically challenged." Things get ugly when some on the politically correct side insist that certain labels are always either right or wrong. As a white male I try to be careful about where and how I use the word 'lady' because I think I understand how it might make some women feel. But I have made mistakes and the results have been ugly.

But the ugliness is only fueled further when some on the conservative side dismiss even legitimate concerns about language with ridicule. Cats become "Feline-Americans," the dead are "metabolically challenged," and yesterday I read a conservative jokster suggesting that mail-men should actually be called "person persons."

Historically black colleges have often advertised to raise funds by showing poor black children above the caption "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." At the University of Michigan, these advertisements have been parodied with posters plastered around campus stating, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste....especially on a nigger." The account of the ugliness of political correctness and it's backlash could tragically go on and on.

The Bad
But let me turn your attention to what is really bad about all this. For these ugly stories are merely the symptoms of the underlying disease. The politically correct emphasis on tolerance is based on an ethical theory called relativism. On this view, values are determined by each individual person, or at most by the "cultural subgroup" with which one identifies. If one person or ethnic group chooses to dress and speak in one way, or to adopt certain sexual standards, or to claim that kindness is good and murder wrong, that is entirely up to them. Others may choose differently. What is right for one is not necessarily right for another, or in the language of my former home state California, each person or group is entitled to "do their own thing."

Now of course in one sense this is exactly right. Persons could agree for example on the ethical principle that one ought to show love, but could still disagree about what love calls for in a particular case. I struggle with this one every day as the parent of two teenagers! This is to acknowledge the need for judgment in interpreting one's principles. But the relativism of those who are politically correct is not merely a matter of differences among people about interpreting principles they all agree on. It is deeper. The relativism of political correctness is about differences of principles themselves and even more importantly about the assumption that these differences can never be resolved because there is no higher standard than human choices. This obviously leads to the conclusion that one should never impose one's own views on another. They are just as entitled to their choice of principles as you are to yours. It's easy to see how political correctness based on relativism makes tolerance its chief virtue. But the bad news is that this not only leads to ugly symptoms, it involves two bad contradictions; one of them behavioral and the other theoretical.

In the first place, advocates of political correctness often behave as if everyone must adopt their views. In other words often they seem to impose their value on others. Everyone must be tolerant. In its worst form, they are intolerant of those who do not make tolerance the chief value of their ethical system. This intolerant tolerance is plainly self-contradictory. What it amounts to is saying that anyone who does not believe that all values are merely the result of individual choices is immoral. But many people, Christians and other theists among them, believe that right and wrong are NOT merely the result of individual choices. Instead, things are objectively right or wrong apart from whether any human being actually chooses them or not. A consistent relativist would tolerate even those who hold such a view. But those who insist on political correctness are inconsistent.

In the second place, the central idea of relativism, the idea that something is right or wrong merely because the individual or their cultural group says so, has a theoretical weakness. It loses any power to oblige anyone to do anything. For example, if the only reason it is right to be kind is merely because I say it is good to be kind, then why should I feel obliged to be kind? If I prefer not be kind, I merely have to change my mind about saying that kindness is good. Since the goodness came originally from my choice, the new choice is just as legitimate. Now just because I say so, kindness is bad. And of course because it is now bad, I am no longer obliged to be kind! Presto, my obligation goes away! How convenient!

Or, suppose that something is right or wrong not merely because I say so, but because my cultural or ethnic group has said so. For example, murder would be wrong merely because my society disapproves of it. Now again, why should I feel obliged not to murder? Well, if I feel like committing murder, all I would need to do is either exercise enough political power to change the consensus of my group and again presto, my obligation disappears and murder is okay. Or if I fail to change the consensus of my society, all I have to do is join or create another society or cultural sub-group which does not disapprove of murder and again my obligation disappears. As Frederick Nietzsche recognized long ago, in an ethic of relativism there is no way to resolve differences except by brute power. It is therefore no surprise that Hitler's fascism can be traced in part to Nietzsche.

The point of this is that while one might SAY that relativism is a reasonable ethical theory to hold, it must be understood to contradict the widespread understanding of ethics as a system which obliges us to do certain things and avoid others.

The Good
But I don't want to leave you just with the ugly and the bad. As I said at the beginning, educated people must try never to overlook the good. The rise of political correctness has its good sides.

In the first place, much of the attention to sensitivity and tolerance is needed. For too long, racial and gender stereotypes have degraded and demeaned people made in God's image. And the argument that "I didn't mean those words that way!" or "I use the male pronouns generically" or "I am gender and color "blind!" or "AIDS victims probably deserve what they get!" will no longer do. People can as easily be hurt and kept down by our ignorance and insensitivity as by the most pernicious manipulation. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. As Christians we do have reason to value diversity. We may feel like strange bed-fellows with those who are politically correct because we affirm diversity for different reasons. They affirm it because of their relativistic ethics. We affirm it because we value each person made in God's image, because we recognize the beauty and strength to be found in the diversity of the Body of Christ, and at a liberal arts college, because we see how it contributes to the liberation of our thinking through the widening of our perspectives. But despite this difference of motivation, the good news is that we are in part, co-workers with those who are politically correct.

Second, the attention to political correctness has heightened everyone's awareness of something about which the general public has for too long been very naive. In the past, most people have assumed that the faculty at state universities provide a neutral unbiased education. Christian colleges have been criticized because they have been seen as indoctrinating. Now, as some of the ugly anecdotes above show, it has become abundantly clear to the public that all educators, not just religious ones, teach with certain implicit political or religious assumptions. The difference is that Christian colleges have always been up front about theirs.

With this new "truth in advertising," "consumers" of education--parents and students alike--are becoming more discriminating in their choices. The evidence suggests they are flocking to private value-oriented colleges in increasing numbers. Perhaps it is because they agree with our values, or perhaps it's just because we at least state our values up front while so many other institutions still hide behind the myth of neutrality. Despite considerable differences in tuition costs, enrollments at academically rigorous Christian colleges have continued to climb during a period when predictions were to the contrary.

But there is further evidence that this public awareness that all education makes assumptions is spreading. In what may be a landmark decision last week, the Supreme Court (Rosenberger vs. Rector) ruled that a Christian student newspaper at the University of Virginia should not be denied state funding. That newspaper had as its mission, "To challenge Christians to live in word and deed in accordance with the faith they proclaim and to encourage students to consider what a personal relationship with Jesus Christ means." In it's 5 to 4 decision the high court pointed out that to stifle the expression of such assumptions about the world would jeopardize academic freedom and if applied consistently would have prohibited the expression of alternative assumptions about reality such as those of Plato, Descartes, and even Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. I say this is good news. Even though I still believe in the separation of church and state, I think it's about time that traditional religious assumptions are granted the same tolerance granted so many others.

So now colleges and universities need not try to erase or mask their assumptions but can be as honest and clear about them as possible. We at Christian colleges are now even freer than ever to be unapologetic about our faith and value assumptions. Professors should not be neutral; professors should profess something.

That is not to say they should indoctrinate, or reinforce student's "black and white" perspectives. So at student's early stages professors usually need to push them down a few slippery slopes and introduce a little cognitive "pain." It makes sense for good athletic coaches to do it, why shouldn't the same be true for good academic coaches?

But in the end professors can move students not only beyond that black and white dogmatism of unexamined convictions, but beyond the overly critical scepticism of no belief at all, and even beyond the ironically dogmatic scepticism of politically correct relativism.

This goal is to produce graduates who are what I call critically committed. They do hold to commitments with passion and conviction. Yet unlike the dogmatic black and white thinkers, and unlike the intolerance of the politically correct, they are self-critical, genuinely open to seeing as others see, willing to venture out on the slippery slopes of complex issues while still holding an edge, and all of this with an attitude of intellectual humility that recognizes that for now we all "see through a glass darkly." That is what it means to be liberally educated. So the good news is that because of the way political correctness has heightened public awareness that assumptions are always at work in education, this goal of ours has been increasingly legitimized.

I trust that all of you, as alumni of a college which cherishes this goal of intellectual liberation will get past the ugliness of political correctness, understand what is bad about it, and most importantly engage and celebrate what is good about it.