I keep wanting to go back to my previous entry to see if in any way I am endorsing a return to a Puritanical, repressive society. It's interesting to notice my own reaction to myself, once I put the words out in public. I get a little queasy and wonder if I might be offending someone. What if I'm wrong?
This reaction is indicative of not only my own lack of self confidence, but I believe a larger, societal pressure. In our society, it is acceptable to be loud, edgy and opinionated only if a person holds a certain worldview.
For example, it is perfectly acceptable to decry the fall of Mother Earth and the decimation of human kind due to global warming...oh I'm sorry, right...climate change. (Because the earth is not actually warming, and hasn't been for over ten years now.)
But for me to say so is risque, and not in a good way.
I've been thinking for a while now that politically correct thinking and speech is, in fact, a religion and it imposes a moral code on those who use it. It is a reverse moral code; it implies judgement itself to be wrong.
We cannot say, for example, that gay marriage is morally wrong, or else we are homophobes and branded as extremely offensive. We cannot say, for example, that sexually crude, explicit movies are degrading, as it is someone else's work of art and we must respect that.
Politically correct speech was engineered, seemingly, in order to avoid offending anyone. Anyone, that is, who does not hold a Judeo/Christian worldview. If they do, it is one's solemn PC duty to ignore and marginalize them.
I started thinking about this in more depth after I read the article, "A Tale of Two Sound Bites," by Mark Steyn. In it he talks about the media's response to Anita Dunn, who cited Mao as one of her two favorite political philosophers. (The other being Mother Theresa.)
"If you say, “Chairman Mao? Wasn’t he the wacko who offed 70 million Chinks?”, you’ll be hounded from public life for saying the word “Chinks.” But, if you commend the murderer of those 70 million as a role model in almost any school room in the country from kindergarten to the Ivy League, it’s so entirely routine that only a crazy like Glenn Beck would be boorish enough to point it out.
"Which is odd, don’t you think? Because it suggests that our present age of politically correct hypersensitivity is not just morally unserious but profoundly decadent."
Profoundly decadent. That phrase really stuck out at me.
I believe, for example, that it is profoundly decadent to ban DDT in developing worlds at the cost of the lives of millions of children who now die from malaria, in order to save...how does that song go?...the birds and the bees. (link)
I believe it is profoundly decadent to defend Roman Polanski, a man who drugged and then anally raped a thirteen year old girl, on the grounds of him being an artiste.
Lately, I have had to admit to myself that I have a moral code and it is not PC. I will, therefore, clash with my own society's rules for acceptable thinking and behavior. I am fulfilling the one great cause of my age: that of self expression and fulfillment. Ironically, my self expression will cause me to receive moral judgement from the very society that erroneously believes itself to be all accepting.
And that is enough moral/political philosophy for one day.
