I am sufficiently lucky/ social genius to have most of my criticism and external character analysis come from friendly faces (unlike politicians). So apparently I am “too facts oriented” and “talking to me is like writing an essay” (thank you Cameron for that last one). well maybe i can redeem myself yet:
So long story short I had an essay to write and I didn’t care about the mark I got, so was a bit lazy and it sort of just became a rant. The topic was dissecting critically one thing about your culture – so i chose political correctness cause i hate it like poison. i will save you from the full essay , here is just the criticism bit. i take no responsibility for any facts here. also i defined political correctness as:
“Political correcness refers to particular way of attempting to change the ideas that are shared in society, primarily for the sake of avoiding offending people. Political correctness can be expressed through the placing of social or economic presures on organisations and individuals in order to get them to not speak their mind.This is to be differentiated from trying to get someone to stop sharing an idea through convincing or through trying to share alternative ideas to undermine the receptability of the public to their own.”
enjoy the rant and don’t get too offended:
There are several good things that political correctness suppresses and they will be addressed in order: humour, critical thinking, a political culture and civil society involvement.
Political correctness has been used in Australia to suppress humour on a regular basis. Sometimes an example lends itself for our analysis through the national media coverage, as is the Chaser’s “Make a Realistic Wish Foundation” sketch example listed earlier does. However the majority of humour Australians experience is not from the media but from their everyday interactions with other Australians and humorous statements the said. It is obvious some of both types of humour is limited by political correctness, however there is good reason it is not simply crass, hateful, drivel that is lost. A significant portion of popular humour is offensive in nature. John Cleese’s research on his own movie A Fish Called Wanda[1] indicated that the three scenes ranked as being the most offensive scenes were the scenes people considered to be the most offensive. This indicates it is not necessarily just unfunny jokes that are repressed at the behest of political correctness. In Australia political correctness is used by everyday citizens on a regular basis to discourage humour for reasons completely disconnected to whether or not the individual in question enjoyed the joke. I have personally seen people laughing at a joke and then, after the laughter, encouraging the speaker to not say jokes of this nature again. The primary reason for this is that the joke may upset someone else who hears the joke in the future. In this way political correctness reduces the incidents of humour as humour that is perceived by the politically correct individual as possibly being offensive to other people is politically corrected. An example could a joke that is related to a certain event that is deeply emotional or painful for some people, like the holocaust. In Australia a joke relating to the holocaust, in any way, is widely considered to be completely intolerable. However is other cultures, like Israeli culture, jokes relating to the holocaust are accepted to a much higher degree, to the point that they appear in mainstream television. So in this way everyday Australians use their feelings and intuitions regarding what could be considered offensive by certain groups in order to suppress humour on the basis of those perceptions. It is relevant to point out that this is not evidence based suppression and that human intuition regarding what people consider offensive is not a scientific tool, especially when there over twenty three million Australians in Australia. So not only is political correctness used to suppress humour, but in Australia it is done with little evidence regarding the quantity or intensity of offense caused by the joke or comment. I have personally had the unusual experience of being politically corrected regarding jokes about the holocaust by people who know less about the historical event then I do, are not Jewish as I am and do not have any family who was in the holocaust, as I have. They simply assume humour is always used to devalue the importance of an event and decide, with no more information or inquiry, to apply political correctness. This notion or humour devaluing events would be seen as palpably absurd in Israel who uses humour in its culture to emotionally cope with events such as the holocaust and suicide bombings. Bureaucracy, is defined as authoritative organized decision making based on information. I think one of the worst things I can say about Australian political correctness is that it incentivises the suppression of humour in an inconsistent and most unbureaucratic manner.
Critical thinking is also something I consider to be vital and healthy for a society. In Australia it is not unusual for political correctness to be applied liberally and without thought in order to discourage the expression of certain ideas. Those ideas, which often times, in my experience, are palpably absurd (such as the idea that climate change is a hoax) are often met with political correcting instead of actually being engaged with as ideas. This same correcting is, however, also on occasion applied to the questioning of ideas that are rarely questioned and whose questioning is not absurd. This is easily testable by asking in a discussion which is based on human rights as to their source, worth or relevance. In the Israeli Mossad[2] the rule of 10 is used to question convention and avoid groupthink. This is an example of institutions deliberately attempting to avoid groupthink. Political correctness often amounts, in my country, to discouraging the tenth man from speaking and questioning the conventional wisdom or a deeply held conviction by instilling a widespread fear of offence.
This issue relates, and is very similar to, the problem of political correctness limiting political discussion. Certain issues are so limited in what one can say in a typical conversation without experiencing the pressures of political correctness that many have preferred to not speak on the matter at all. the problem with this is multifaceted: firstly it makes some of those individuals feel as if they are oppressed due to their political beliefs. If whenever a person speaks their mind on an issue they are given social signals of disapproval rather then met with actual argumentation a feeling of righteous oppression may set in. The best evidence I can supply for this assertion is in the form of empathetic thinking. Imagine in your own mind if it is logical, with regard to humans, that this pattern of thought will arise as a result of political correctness, especially if the issue is one close to your heart. Secondly they will be more ignorant as a result of this as it contributes to what David Hume called the “separation of the world of learning from the world of conversation”[3] in his unpublished essay titled “OF ESSAY WRITING”. Essentially, if politics becomes a area of discussion where ignorance, idiocy and wrongheaded bloody-mindedness are met with political correctness many people will be incentivised to not speak on these matters. This is unhelpful as these same people will still hold their ignorant views however now, with the addition of the suppression provided by political correctness, they will keep these views amongst themselves and not state them both to challenge our thinking, a good thing, and open their own to criticism. This is particularly the case in Australia in regards to issues such as migration, aboriginal issues and addressing Islamism in Australia. Thirdly, political correctness makes it particularly difficult to put pressure on governments to address these issues. The case is very analogous to overregulation of a sector of the economy discouraging people from entering it. Excessive regulation on speech on certain, highly sensitive, political issues has facilitated those political issues receiving less airtime then they would have otherwise. Lastly, one should be concerned about the problem of stress. Political correctness makes something that ought to be pleasurable and informative, political discussion, a stressful task where one must worry about the possibility of social punishment through political correctness instead of just about understand and being understood.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozNKwaqdlA8
[2]http://matspen.co.il/tag/%D7%97%D7%95%D7%A7-%D7%94%D7%90%D7%93%D7%9D-%D7%94%D7%A2%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%99/
[3]http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Hume/hmMPL40.html
razipilli 