Roger Kimball writes on Political Correctness, Or The Perils of Benevolence: "Major newspapers in the United States refuse to accept advertisements for houses to let that mention that their property has 'good views' (unfair to the blind), is 'walking distance' to the train (unfair to the lame), is on a 'quiet street' (unfair to the deaf). I know it sounds mad. It is mad. Nevertheless, it is true." Gee, I hope not. Anyway, he warns against political correctness, which tends to breed unaccountability: "At its center is a union of abstract benevolence, which takes mankind as a whole for its object, with rigid moralism." He concludes that this combination, while found amongst communists,

is by no means peculiar to communists. It provides the emotional fuel for utopians from Robespierre to the politically-correct bureaucrats who preside over more and more of life in Western societies today. They mean well. They seek to boost all mankind up to their own plane of enlightenment. Inequality outrages their sense of justice. They regard conventional habits of behavior as so many obstacles to be overcome on the path to perfection. They see tradition as the enemy of innovation, which they embrace as a lifeline to moral progress. They cannot encounter a wrong without seeking to right it. The idea that some evils may be ineradicable is anathema to them. Likewise the notion that the best is the enemy of the good, that many choices are to some extent choices among evils--such proverbial, conservative wisdom outrages their sense of moral perfectibility.

Alas, the result is not paradise but a campaign to legislate virtue, to curtail eccentricity, to smother individuality, to barter truth for the current moral or political enthusiasm. For centuries, political philosophers have understood that the lust for equality is the enemy of freedom. That species of benevolence underwrote the tragedy of communist tyranny. The rise of political correctness has redistributed that lust over a new roster of issues: not the proletariat, but the environment, not the struggling masses, but "reproductive freedom", gay rights, the welfare state, the Third World, diversity training, and an end to racism and xenophobia. It looks, in Marx's famous mot, like history repeating itself not as tragedy but as farce.

It would be a rash man, however, who made no provision for a reprise of tragedy.