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I think, therefore I’m guilty |
‘Politically correct’ views all derive from anti-Western, secular ideologies such as anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, utilitarianism, feminism, multiculturalism and environmentalism. These all share the aim of overturning the established order in the West. So any groups who have power within that order can never be offended or hurt because they are themselves offensive and hurtful, while ‘powerless’ groups can never be other than victims.
This obsession with power is, of course, a Marxist position; indeed, ‘political correctness’ is a form of cultural Marxism. But how has good old empirical, pragmatic, anti- ideological Britain succumbed to such extremism? Part of the explanation is that, with the collapse of Soviet communism, the left shifted its focus from economics and politics to the cultural arena. Employing Gramsci’s tactic of ‘the long march through the institutions’, it captured the citadels of the culture for a variety of Utopian ideas.
Class divisions would give way to equality, capitalist despoliation of the earth would be replaced by prelapsarian agrarian communes and all hatred, prejudice and irrationality would be excised from the human heart.
Like all ideologies, these Utopian fantasies wrenched facts and evidence to fit their governing idea. Independent thought thus became impossible — which inevitably resulted in an attack upon freedom, because reason and liberty are inseparable bed- fellows.
Because these creeds purported to embody unchallengeable truths, they could permit no dissent. Reason was thus replaced by bullying, intimidation and the suppression of debate. What we are living through is therefore a fresh mutation of the previous despotism's of first the medieval church and then the totalitarian political movements of the 20th century.
