Between 2002 and 2005, I had the misfortune of studying History at the University of Wales, Lampeter. Despite its origins as a theological college that trained students for the clergy, the institution has now degenerated into the proverbial wretched hive of scum and villainy. A classic, though surprising mild (by the degraded standards of the university) incident occurred midway through the second-term of my first year at Lampeter. On this occasion, the chairman of the students’ union was reprimand by one of the sabbatical officers (who is a prominent Labour party activist) for creating a PowerPoint presentation with the offensive images of a traditional nuclear family. According to the sabbatical, the images in question discriminated against homosexual couples. Why? Were there derogatory references or images against homosexuals? Was there any content that incited discrimination or violence against homosexuals? None whatsoever! When I commented to her that her complaint was “madness”, she barked at me, accusing me of a using a derogatory term about those with mental health issues before threatening to have security remove me from the premises. Thanks to the poisonous and counterproductive culture of political correctness, not only has common sense been usurped by wilful ignorance and stupidity, it is also offensive to tell the truth because some others might not or do not believe it!
However, there is nothing new about people taking offence to the truth. Thousands of years before the advent of political correctness, a carpenter from Nazareth caused great and regular offence in the Holy Land with his outrageous claims and remarks. This carpenter caused a huge scandal by having the temerity to claim that he was the son of God and that no one else could gain access to the Almighty expect through him. What arrogance! How presumptuous! How dare he upset the cosy self-righteous consensus of those around him! If someone did that today, that individual would be sectioned. For telling the truth, the carpenter was slandered, threatened, exiled, arrested, tortured and eventually murdered, all because he offended others by just telling the truth. Was this carpenter a bad person? Not in my opinion or the opinion of 1.9 billion others because he was a good man who gave his life for the ultimate truth, that God loves us, God cannot tolerate injustice, but still wants to rescue us from ourselves by sacrificing his only son exactly because he loves us and no other sacrifice can reconcile this contradiction. Being offensive can sometimes be a good thing because it challenges our preconceptions and compels us to think about what is the truth. Those in positions of authority, past, present and future fear the truth because it threatens their power over others. This one common thread unites the Pharisees and Sadducees with the politically correct students’ union bigwig.
There can be no authority, no freedom and no justice without truth and where there is truth, there must also be offence. This is why we remember and love a simple carpenter called Jesus.
3 comments:
political correctness is an interesting term.
it often seems to be used to describe things i find sensible, and never in anything other than a pejorative sense.
i think it's a sloppy cliche. itis only ever used, as far as i have seen, to defend one's right to use offensive terminology.
as lynne truss said of punctuation, those who attend to the rules of grammer less than we ourselves do we considered deplorable, whereas we consider those who find our grammar to be inexact to be pedants.
i think PC takes the place of pedantry here, and is used to suggest that some requests for sensitivity go too far in attacking the rights of the speaker over the spoken about.
i think my point has perhaps been explained better by others;
Simply put, the great "PC" cliché, as commonly deployed in mainstream discourse, is cultural propaganda designed to befuddle and misdirect while defending the current power structure. All politics deal with power relations, and in the debate over America's alleged climate of "political correctness", there's a stark asymmetry of power between the defiant megaphone-wielders who complain of being constrained by humorless hypersensitivity from below, and the under-represented people of color, women, LGBT, handicapped, poor, and otherwise marginalized or dispossessed people who have no choice but to absorb the linguistic, cultural, and physical barbs of the ruling class. The former feel psycho-emotionally oppressed by their inability to crack puerile ethnic jokes without criticism; the latter simply are oppressed.
the article bears reading, and i can offer more if you ouldlike to read further.
i feel examining our on actions with an eye to making them as helpful to ourselves, others and the world we were lucky enough to be given is a laudableaim, and i further feel that the cliche of PC gets in the way of that.
one instructive point that was made to me was that if you look, you will find it very hard to find a group who purport to stand for political correctness.
the term was a creation of the right wing(by which i mean those who seek to conserve and preserve traditional societal norms) to be applied to the left(by which i mean those who seek to interrogate and alter said traditional societal norms) when the left propose taking account of insensitivity towards power relationships.
personally i find it nothing but useless and negatively prejudicial to the satisfactory outcome of a discussion.
I agree completely with you here C4, and as you might have gathered I am not averse to a bit of truth even if it causes offence...in fact, I like causing offence by telling the truth because where there is truth, IMO, there can be no offence...unless of course you employ the language of political correctness where offence can be found in any and all statements by a person wishing to be offended, or by someone who wishes to gain their version of the moral high ground.
I'm experiencing a few people, or maybe just one, stalking me right now because they apparently think me uncouth and a yobbo...but I disagree and think they are fucking twats and PC cunts engaging in pompous games in order to try and gain a descendancy to the noral high ground they they can pontificate. They are deficient in their arguments and assumptions and know it, but feel less inferior by looking down rather than nervously up, and this is also symptomatic of the PC moron.
i strongly suggest you read my comment, shotgun.
i also suggest you follow the link to the article and have a read of that.
the reason i suggest that is when you say the language of political correctness where offence can be found in any and all statements by a person wishing to be offended, i don't think you have read it. am i wrong?
you are using PC as a pejorative.
could you define what you mean by the language of political correctness, and tell me why it is a negative thing?
i'm genuinely curious, especially so if you have some new information i could read and digest.
i'm also curious what you mean when you say I like causing offence by telling the truth. what kind of things do you enjoy saying?
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