Manent on political correctness

By -
"This divorce between action and word contributes to explaining the novel role of 'political correctness.' Political correctness is a particularly significant aspect of the contemporary emancipation of speech. One over longer expects that speech will be linked to a possible action; thus is taken seriously as though it was itself an action. Not being linked to a possible and plausible action that measures its purport, speech is willingly considered, if it is unpleasant, as the equivalent of the worst action unimaginable. Thus one tracks those infamous words that are designated as 'phobias' in clinical language. The progress of freedom in the West consisted of measuring words by the yardstick of visible actions. 'Political correctness' consists of measuring words by the yardstick of invisible intentions." -- Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses of the City, p. 11

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more