Political Correctness: A Definition

I recently read Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam (2006), by then-Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, and the Italian philosopher and politician Marcello Pera. The book consists of lectures delivered at different venues by Ratzinger and Pera in 2004, and an exchange of letters between the men. Pera is a secularist and Ratzinger, much to the chagrin of liberals worldwide, is in fact Catholic.

Pera's lecture, "Relativism, Christianity, and the West," contains as concise and accurate a definition of the intellectually paralyzing, self-censoring phenomenon of political correctness (PC) that I've come across. Given the moral underpinnings of many of Bruce's posts, and the importance of not losing sight of the moral foundations of democracy, I think a brief selection from Pera's essay might be interesting to our readership. What follows, though truncated, captures some of Pera's argument that PC is an intellectually vacuous relativism that the West can ill afford:

One particularly revealing symptom shows the extent to which this mixture of timidity, prudence, convenience, reluctance, and fear has penetrated the fiber of the West. I refer to the form of self-censorship and self-repression that goes by the name of political correctness. "P.C." is the newspeak that the West uses nowadays to imply, allude to, or insinuate rather than to affirm or maintain.

We read and hear this newspeak every day. According to its dictates, everything can be compared and evaluated within the confines of Western culture--be it Coca-Cola with Chianti, Gaudi with Le Corbusier, Darwinism with intelligent design--and many comparisons can be made between aspects of Western culture and their counterparts in other cultures, such as hospitality, social customs, individual behavior, clothing, and so forth. Yet should one attempt to place in a hierarchical order these cultures or civilizations--such as the ones that Max Weber described in the past and Samuel Huntington describes in the present--or to simply organize them according to a scale of preferences, from better to worse, out pop self-censorship, prohibitions, and linguistic restraints. Consequently, as one can easily document in today's newspeak, whenever a culture lacks or flatly rejects our institutions, we are not allowed to say that our own culture is better or simply preferable. The only thing that politeness allows us to say is that cultures and civilizations are different.

To me this form of linguistic re-education is unacceptable. I reject it on moral grounds, which are the ultimate reason for refuting an intellectual position.3

Here Pera's footnote reads:

To whoever might take issue with my use of the word "ultimate," I would point out that we reject Nazism, fascism, communism, racism, anti-Semitism, and fanaticism not because they conflict with some logical theorem, or because they are empirically or scientifically false, but because they offend our consciences, contradict our deep intuitions about human rights, and violate our fundamental values. We reject them, in other words, for practical rather than theoretical reasons.

Back to his text, a couple of pages on:

The world is filled with concern but also with hypocrisy. Hypocrisy on the part of people who see no evil and speak no evil to avoid becoming involved; who see no evil and speak no evil to avoid appearing rude; who proclaim half-truths and imply the rest to avoid assuming responsibility. These are the paralyzing consequences of the "political" correctness (as well as intellectual, cultural, and linguistic correctness) that I reject.