John M. Ellis

A sophisticated man of letters, disillusioned and even embittered by the flaws, inconsistencies, and retrogressions of a great civilization, deludes himself that a world of primitive innocence and natural goodness exists in peoples who are untouched by the advances of that civilization. So intense are his hostile feelings toward his own society that he is unable to see the one he compares it to with any degree of realism: whatever its actual qualities, it is endowed with all of the human values that he misses in his own. Consequently, he sees his own culture not as an improvement on brutish natural human behavior but as a departure from a state of natural goodness. This recurring Western fantasy runs from Tacitus' idealized Germans all the way to such twentieth-century versions as Margaret Mead's sentimentalized Samoans and ultimately to one of the most far-reaching outbreaks of this illusion--the political correctness of our own day.

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John Searle recently defended Western thought against the criticisms of the politically correct by pointing out that it is uniquely self-critical. But an even stronger point can be made: political correctness itself is a thoroughly Western phenomenon. From earliest times, Western society has been prone to recurring fits of this self-doubt. Those who are seized by this mood may imagine that they are taking an anti-Western stance, but that is all part of the same pattern of self-delusion.

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There is more than a broadbrush similarity between today's political correctness and these recurring fantasies of the primitive innocence to be found outside a corrupt Western society. Many of the views that are currently cherished as the sophisticated products of modern theory are in fact neither modern nor derived from theory) they are instead a replay of earlier episodes in the history of Western culture. Take, for example, the view that the Western canon of great books reflects ruling class values and that when reconstructed it reveals hidden power relations that have the repressive function of social control of the lower classes. This sounds like the very latest thought of those among us who have absorbed the teachings of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Antonio Gramsci. But now look at the same point, made in a more felicitous style over two hundred years ago: "Princes always view with pleasure the spread among their subjects of a taste for the arts.... The sciences, letters and arts ... cover with garlands of flowers the iron chains that bind them, stifle in them the feeling of that original liberty for which they seemed to have been born, make them love their slavery, and turn them into what is called civilized people."

This is again Rousseau, and here he presents all the essential elements of the avant-garde thought of our daring modern theorists: both the literary canon and scientific inquiry are really about social control and serve the interests of rulers by brainwashing the lower classes.

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All the major elements of modern political correctness can be found in the Western tradition, and in every case we can learn something from the way they have played out. One worth a careful look is the currently fashionable theory of cultural relativism.

In the modern context, what has become known as political correctness has two distinct strands. The first consists of people who are rather like Tacitus--intellectuals who are alienated from their own society and who in their disgust with its imperfections imagine a primitive society full of sweetness and light. The second reaches the same conclusion as the first but by a different route. We might call the two groups the alienated insiders and the resentful outsiders. The outsider denigrates the dominant culture not because of his disgust with its imperfections but because he does not feel part of it. Resentment is the reason for his adulation of primitive cultures. The alienated insider is motivated by self-disgust, the outsider by self-defense) and that defensiveness takes the form of cultural relativism.

...Anyone who thinks that cultural relativism and the celebration of ethnicity will ensure democracy and egalitarianism is sadly mistaken: history has shown us, to the contrary, that these attitudes are more likely to unleash the dangerous forces of tribal chauvinism and resentment. Encouraging people to think of themselves first and foremost as members of a tribe is a perilous undertaking. If Serbs and Sinhalese could have thought of themselves as human beings first and Serbs or Sinhalese second--the Enlightenment's way--much bloodshed might have been avoided.

When some scholars argue that we should pay less attention to the history of the Western tradition and more to both our own age and Third World peoples, we should be aware that this is a very Western thing to say. The Third World cultures so favored by these scholars are generally far more insistent on their own traditions that we are.

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Given our knowledge of the world through modern communications, it rakes an extraordinary act of self-deception nor to see that it is the developed countries that are slowly leading the world away from racism and male dominance. To demand an end to racism and sexism is not to reject Western society but, on the contrary, to ally oneself with certain Western values. "Enlightened" attitudes toward the relations between men and women; social justice; torture, rape, and other forms of physical brutality; tribalism; and even imperialism have slowly coalesced in Western societies. Only someone who reads history blindfold could think that the absence of these evils is a normal state of humankind from which the West deviates. In denouncing any deviation from their own value system as "oppression," race-gender-class scholars by implication denounce non-Western cultures and measure them rigidly by Western standards, the reverse of what they think they are doing.

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Some degree of dissatisfaction with one's society, or more specifically with one's place in it, is normal and rational.... Experience shows, however, that when these feelings reach a certain level of intensity, all perspective is lost. Antagonism toward one's own society then becomes so great that nothing can be conceded to it. Its imperfections can no longer be compared to those of other societies, yet it is the imperfect implementation of its own values that has caused the anger. The alienated insider is so much a creature of his own society that the values that are the basis of his criticism are uniquely its values.

When most of us reflect on the shortcomings of our society, we are likely to remember that the frailty of human nature is always the biggest problem...

It is this critical step that determines the nature of politically correct thinking, because from this beginning it must follow that people are not responsible for, since they are inherently better than, what the alienated insider complains about. They are dragged down by this society, and their current state of degradation need not have happened. The politically correct impulse thus leads inexorably to thoughts of a place where people are simply allowed to be what they can be. And this, in turn, leads to the idea of a primitive harmony and Rousseau's idyllic state of nature.

Primitive harmony is therefore not simply a daydream that arises through fantasy but a result that follows with ironclad logic from the premises of the initial impulse... For some, the disparagement of Western culture has had the effect of impoverishing their education so that they have been protected from any knowledge of Rousseau's thought and of the disasters that it has helped bring about. But even for those whose education was not deficient in this respect, the force of the impulse is still strong enough to make them dream of the elusive primitive harmony that allows them to denounce their own society. It is there in the idyllic life of the American Indians, according to Annette Kolodny, before the white man raped the country; or it was there in the Americas before Columbus brought the evils of European society; or it was there throughout the world, before Western civilization destroyed the reign of the "Goddess," a benign deity who presided over human life just before recorded history began; or it was there in Africa before colonization by Europeans brought misery with it; or it was there before capitalism. In each case we are told of lives of great beauty and simplicity, without exploitation of people or abuse of the environment; in short, these were ecological and human paradises. But they all appear to have existed before we could actually witness them and, in most cases, before recorded history began. In such settings, imaginative fantasy and wishful thinking encounter fewer obstacles.

It would be an understatement to say that arguments can be mounted against all these imagined conditions and more to the point to say that it is embarrassingly easy to show that none really existed. Our knowledge of pre-Columbian society, of North American Indians, or of precolonial Africa establishes that all the Western vices that race-gender-class scholars complain of were there, and more: human sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery, ethnic hatreds, rigidly hierarchical societies, and even a taste for cruelty and torture that would have put medieval Europe to shame...

Most would agree that Western society, though far from perfect, has made very real progress: compared with the rest of the world, its system of laws keeps cruelty and torture in check, its people live longer and are healthier than those in other societies, it feeds its people comparatively well, it manages to change governments without civil war or bloody coups, and so on. But to say this simply angers alienated intellectuals, who know that the core of Western society is rotten, however rosy its surface appearance. Starting again will not return us to natural goodness, however, but only to a natural chaos where all kinds of natural human nastiness flourish; that would mean both undoing the progress made by the Enlightenment and abandoning much practical experience about the calamity of naive utopian political thought.

The cruel paradox of the politically correct impulse is that it is impatient with imperfection and wants something better, but its actual results are always destructive. As Marxism is to the economic sphere, so cultural political correctness is to the cultural sphere. Marxism promised a utopian economic abundance to be shared equally by all--if only we would dismantle the existing bad economic structure. But only the dismantling was ever realized, with the result that the formerly socialist countries must now suffer severe hardships during the long process of rebuilding their economies. In just the same way, cultural political correctness now promises cultural abundance for everyone in a new egalitarian culture if only we are willing to reject our elitist Western culture. The result is just as predictable: we shall all be culturally poorer as, once again, the destruction succeeds but the promised state of cultural utopia that is to replace it never materializes. Our Western cultural inheritance is not perfect, but it has succeeded in raising us from the barbarism of a state of nature. It has managed to abolish many forms of human cruelty, has given us forms of democratic government that actually work, and has a record of human thought in literature and philosophy that offers extraordinary range, depth, and complexity. Far from debasing human beings, it has enhanced their dignity in a thousand different ways. We can build on it, extend it, modify it; but if we allow the politically correct to pull it down with their characteristic utopian promises about what they can replace it with, we have only ourselves to blame. We can be sure that if we allow their destructive resentment to destroy yet again so that they can create perfection, we shall witness the destruction but never see the benefits promised. We shall soon be faced with cultural ruin and a painful period of rebuilding--a cultural disaster analogous to the economic disaster that has befallen eastern Europe.