7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
1/35
http://home.roadrunner.com/~lifetime/pc-
essay.htm
America in Crisis:
The Triumph of Political CorrectnessRichard Rorty: The Argument for EmpathyPolitical Correctness and UtopianismUtopian Visionaries in History and LiteratureNoble Intentions and Sinister Impulses: The Strange Case of Mistah Kurtz
by Wm. B. FankbonerAn impalpable censorship is eliminating all intellectual and artistic vitality in
Western society with a vengeance; persistent recourse to euphemism andcircumlocution is corrupting and debasing language; and the coerciveatmosphere of guilt, fear and intimidation surrounding this censorship isinhibiting the easy give-and-take of human discourse, the life-blood ofdemocratic institutions, and ultimately of man's own social and spiritual life.Thoreau warned us to 'beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.' Whatwould he have said about enterprises that require new vocabulary?
'The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versusindividualism. [but] to write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinksfearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.' George Orwell
'Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is aself-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, butthey don't seem to see this.' Doris Lessing
'Chastity, by nature the gentlest of the affectionsgive it but its head'tis like a roaring lion.' Laurence Sterne
'Art made tongue-tied by authority' W. Shakespeare
Like life, history is shot through with coincidence. Consider the sudden resurgence ofpolitical correctness in the wake of the communist collapse in Europe, seemingly disparateevents with no apparent connection. But coincidence is often only a statistical illusion, a bit of
hocus-pocus which, on closer examination, yields to the laws of cause and effect. Viewed in a
broader context, the air of mystery dissolves and a connection emerges: for the New Left, the
defeat of the Soviet Bloc was a sign that mankind was on the threshold of a Golden Age of
World Peace, that the time had come to conquer the evils of society itself. Verily, the
Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Now that the threat of armed conflict has been eliminated
from the human landscape, man can advance to the next stage of his social evolution and
create an organic social order, a dream that has eluded mankind from time immemorial.
http://home.roadrunner.com/~lifetime/pc-essay.htmhttp://home.roadrunner.com/~lifetime/pc-essay.htmhttp://home.roadrunner.com/~lifetime/pc-essay.htmhttp://home.roadrunner.com/~lifetime/pc-essay.htm7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
2/35
There is only one problem with this narrative: man himself, a brutish,
savagely territorial creature driven by irrational impulses, superstition and
ignorance, and beguiled by the idols of the cave. Despite spectacular advances
in science and technology, mankind remains stubbornly depraved. In The
Brothers Karamazov, Father Zosima and the mysterious visitor, Mihail, find
that they share the same epiphany: that if men were to take upon themselvesthe crimes of all other men, the Kingdom of Heaven would be a living reality.
(Antoine De Saint Exupery, explaining his hopeless stand against the German
Luftwaffe, said: 'I understand now for the first time the mystery of the religion whence was
born the civilization I claim as my own: "To bear the sins of man." Each man bears the sins of
all men.') But, asks the young Zosima, when will this come about? Not for some time, replies
Mihail soberly. Man must pass through the crucible of individualism and existential isolation
before he will be ready for universal love. This will take some time, he councels. The
Christian exhortation that we should take upon ourselves the crimes of all other men, a
sharing of guilt and sin not to be confused with the Marxist sharing of surplus value and the
means of production, has an intoxicating allure, but it is not at all clear Dostoevsky believed it
possible in this life.
Nonsense, say the social revolutionaries. Human nature is not immutable. Just as the human
race evolved biologically, it is capable of evolving socially, of making 'moral progress.'
Mankind is still young and the universe unfinished. All that is necessary to ascend to the next
level of his spiritual evolution is verbal discipline, for man to cleanse his mind of 'incorrect'
thoughts and attitudes. Language rules thought and thought is destiny. By establishing a
program of linguistic hygiene and purging speech of all the verbal correlates that predispose
man to iniquity, we can remove the precursors of immoral conduct and man's unconscious
biases, and contain his capacity for evil.
But this program has an ominous ring to it: substitute the word 'subversive' for 'incorrect,' and
you have the old Communist Party line for thought control and the suspension of free speech
for the greater good of the state. In Arthur Koestler's novel, The Darkness At Noon,
Rubashov, an old guard Bolshevik imprisoned for treason by the Soviet government he helped
create, is asked by the man in the next cell why he was arrested. Using the prisoners' quadratic
alphabet Rubashov taps out an enigmatic two-word answer on the wall of his cell: "Political
divergencies." As far as the Marxist-Leninist schedule was concerned, the time for political
discussion was over. Political purity was the only way to achieve the single-minded
dedication required for victory. A new form of autocracy had come into being far more
despotic and lawless than the one it had replaced. 'The dictatorship of the proletariat,' said
Lenin, was a power limited by nothing. (Ironically it was this elevation of Marxist dogma toinfallible gospel that hastened rather than forestalled the collapse of Soviet Communism.)
There are convincing arguments that this semi-religious fervor for ideological purity, which
gave the world the concept of 'thought-crime,' is, among the industrialized nations, unique to
Russia, which remains in many respects a tribal society. Wrote Marshall McLuhan (p.30, The
Gutenberg Galaxy):
[In] a society still so profoundly oral as Russia, where spying is done by ear and not by eye, at
the memorable "purge" trials of the 1930's Westerners expressed bafflement that many
confessed total guilt not because of what they had done but what they had thought. In a highly
literate society, then, visual and behavioural conformity frees the individual for innerdeviation. Not so in an oral society where inner verbalization is effective social action.
Doris Lessing
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
3/35
Unlike 'profoundly oral' societies like Russia, Western literate communities, with their long
tradition of print technology, humanism, applied science, egalitarianism, and universal
education, do not feel compelled by tribal ritual or social law to restrict thought in any way,
since verbalizations generated by book culture are educational or informational in nature, i.e.
our private ruminations do not directly result in 'effective social action.' As Spinosa says,
'Every man is by indefeasible natural right the master of his own thoughts.' And the so-called'life of the mind,' a thing unknown to oral cultures which depend exclusively on 'operational
wisdom,' is a product of the Gutenberg invention of moveable types and Western literacy.
McLuhan credits J. C. Carothers with this valuable insight. Says Carothers in his study
contrasting literate and non-literate natives
In these circumstances it is implicit that behavioural constraints must include constraint of
thought. Since all behaviour in such societies is governed and conceived on highly social
lines, and since directed thinking can hardly be other than personal and unique for each
individual, it is furthermore implicit in the attitude of these societies that the very possibility
of such thinking is hardly to be recognized. Therefore, if and when such thinking does occur,at other than strictly practical and utilitarian levels, it is apt to be seen as deriving from the
devil or from other external evil influences, and as something to be feared and shunned as
much in oneself as in others. (p. 312, J. C. Carothers, writing in Psychiatry, November,
1959, on "Culture, Psychiatry and the Written Word")
A haunting and poetic dramatization of this brutal, nightmarish aspect of tribal life can be
found in Joseph Conrad's short story, "The Lagoon," in which two Malaysian lovers, Arsat
and Diamelen (a servant of the Rajah's wife), attempt to flee the repressive atmosphere of
strict religious law and coercion by eloping. Pursued by the Rajah's men, they die in their
attempt to find freedom in the white man's world of justice and law.
Cultural Marxism Finds a Home
Ideology does not like a vacuum. Is Doris Lessing correct in her belief that political
correctness is 'the heritage of communism'? Have the dispossessed ghosts of the Marxist-
Leninist Revolutionary Club found a new home in the Victims' Revolution? While such a
strategic transformation might not have been what Marx had in mind when he called for the
'forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions,' it could achieve a similar result; and
comes not a moment too soon for the moribund Communist movement. According to
orthodox Marxist theory, the Communist revolution was supposed to take place in a decadent
capitalist society, not in a Slav agrarian economy like Russia's, leaving many to wonder ifRussian communism was anything more than Czarist thuggery masquerading as ideology. But
if, as diehards of the Marxist rearguard maintain, Communism has never failed because it has
never been faithfully implemented in any society, what is this but to say that Marxist doctrine
in its 'pure' form is so perversely utopian and politically regressive it has never captured the
imaginations of able men?
Commenting on the doctrinaire incompetence of the Soviet apparat and Party nomenklatura in
Putting Up With the Russians, British journalist Edward Crankshaw, wrote: "this is a milieu
almost impossible for the foreigner to present to his own countrymen. I have had to work with
such officials in war and peace. Their sycophancy, their barefaced lying, their treachery, their
cowardice, are so blatant, their ignorance so stultifying, their stupidity so absolute, that I have
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
4/35
found it impossible to convey it with any creditability to those fortunate enough never to have
encountered it."
Crankshaw would have little trouble conveying this sensibility today, for, paradoxically, it is
just this milieu that we are encountering with increasing frequency in Western society. In fact,
it bears a remarkable resemblance to a fringe movement of political activists who identifythemselves as the New Left.
Suppose some unrepentant Marxist wished to reproduce the Russian milieu of personal and
moral degradation described by Crankshaw in American society. Absent the lethal methods of
coercion and intimidation at the disposal of the communist terror state, how would he
proceed? First, he would revive class hatred and cultural warfare by promoting the cult of
victimhood, invoking an inclusive class of perpetual victims, and deputize legions of
carpetbaggers and race hustlers to interpret, codify, and eulogize their every resentment,
manufactured or real. Next, he would create a repressive atmosphere of fear and paranoia by
promulgating exhaustive lists of verbal taboos and forbidden ideas so comprehensive,
arbitrary and capricious that, as in Puritan Salem, no one would be above suspicion. Finally,he would establish cultural relativism as the state religion, and advance the cause of
multiculturalism in order to undermine and trivialize the intellectual and cultural
achievements of Western society. In short, our Marxist would institute Pavlovian conditioning
in the form of political correctness, enabling a reflexive Marxist police state in all but name.
How ironic it would be if the conquest of world Communism were only to result in its revival
in cultural form, as a kind of psychological deprivation that perceived the self as a spiritual
nullity. What a triumph for the forces of totalitarianism if, by a mere verbal substitution of the
word 'incorrect' for 'subversive,' they could retire terrorism and the familiar apparatus social
repression (intimidation, imprisonment, torture, murder, blackmail, exile, etc.) and implement
an invisible censorship to promote the Marxist worldview with Pavlovian conditioning. The
police state would no longer require vast bureaucracies of agents and informants, Gulags and
labor camps, to suppress dissent and achieve its utopian social goals; it need only indoctrinate
men to police their own thoughts.
That militaristic regimes and police states contain the seeds of their own destruction is, of
course, a historical truism. After interrogating senior Nazi officials in the days immediately
following Germany's surrender in World War II, intelligence analysts from the U. S. State
Department expressed surprise at their mediocrity, observing that, with the exception of few
men like Albert Speer, they were 'a bunch of jerks,' an opinion shared by many Germans at
the time. How a gang of inept sociopaths succeeded in taking over the country that producedKant, Goethe and Beethoven is still something of a mystery. When asked, most Germans
simply shrug and say they awoke one morning and found the Nazis in control. Though the
Nazi Party seized power in stages, over a period of about fifteen years, the recollection of
many ordinary citizens is of an event that took place overnight.
Something of the same illusion of suddenness attends the arrival of political correctness. It
seems only yesterday that cases of PC began appearing in the press and the evening news.
There was about these initial incidents a sense of suspended disbelief and complacency, and
its early critics were accused of hysteria. Katharine Whitehorn, a British journalist, wrote:
"The thing has been blown up out of all proportion. PC language is not enjoined on one and allthereare a lot more places where you can say "spic" and "bitch" with impunity than places where you cansmoke a cigarette."
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
5/35
Few observers understood that by the time a cultural phenomenon has come to the attention of
the media, it is already deeply entrenched. Typical of reported incidents was U. S.
Congresswomen Pat Schroeder's complaint that current specifications for the cockpits of
fighter aircraft conformed to only 85% of the general population. Fighter cockpits should
accommodate 95% of the population, insisted the stalwart egalitarian. Aeronautical engineers
patiently explained that an ejection seat designed to hurl a 250 pound man clear of a mach 2fighter, would toss a 100 pound woman into the stratosphere.
When sensitivity collides with common sense, the result is always absurdity, and incidents of
this kind have provoked hoots of laughter from both the right and the left sides of the aisle,
along with the growing contempt of the public. But while critics may cackle, it looks as
though PC partisans may have the last laugh. Imperceptibly, the victims' revolution has
acquired the ubiquity of smokers' cough and the hysterical frenzy of a Southern Baptist
revival. A sense of inevitability hangs in the air, and there are ominous signs of a fait
accompli. Skeptics who thought political correctness was a camp phenomenon or a passing
fad are invited to read theNew Yorkerreview of the movie What's Eating Gilbert Grape, in
which the mentally retarded brother is described as 'mentally challenged.' Evasive,patronizing and inelegant, tortured circumlocutions like this have crept into the writing of
discriminating journalists and writers who would have considered them ludicrous a few years
ago. Thoreau warned us to 'beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.' What would he
have said about enterprises that require new vocabulary?
Even the augustL. A. Times, flagship of the Times-Mirror colossus bestriding downtown Los
Angeles, has succumbed to the victims' rights agenda, and its stylebook committee codified a
new set of amendments proscribing such phrases as Dutch treat. This, of course, is absurd,
but typical of the comic contradictions that arise when the totalitarian mind attempts to
interpret culture. The charm of slang is its inherent bias, and even members of the Times
stylebook committee must know that you cannot eliminate evil from the world by expurgating
language. Nor is that their purpose. During the debriefing of a KGB agent who had defected
to the West during the Stalinist era, a CIA official asked him why the Communist Party line
was so patently stupid. Didn't this actually work against loyalty to the state? The KGB agent
laughed and replied that you cannot create an atmosphere of terror by requiring people to
believe in reasonable things. In order to instill the maximum fear, guilt and self-loathing
necessary to cow people into abject submission to the state, you must demand that they
believe, or at least act as though they believe, in something that is manifestly absurd. The list
of forbidden words and phrases enforced by the thought police at theL.A. Times certainty
satisfies this condition, and is a useful reminder that the armory of social repression is not
only rather lethal, it is utterly impersonal. Those who resort to coercive censorship, whetherthey are the egalitarian thistlebottoms at theL.A. Times or doctrinaire thugs of the KGB, wield
the same bloody axe. The results are uniformly destructive to the human spirit.
It is axiomatic that those least alarmed
by the erosion of society's moral and
intellectual life have none themselves. It
is easy to understand the crude appeal of
political correctness to liberal yahoos of
the New Left (closet fascists posing as
60's liberals): it provides them with a
ready store of social causes that requireno thought and confers instant moral authority on all those who profess to champion them;
An invention of the educated elite, politicalcorrectness is essentially a class phenomenon, i.e.designer morals for yuppies of uneasy conscience. Socioeconomic groups informed by the starkexigencies of survival have shown little interest in thehair-splitting subtleties and scholastic quibbling ofvictim taxonomy.
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
6/35
less obvious is its attraction to the intelligentsia. The cynical tactics of manipulation and
intimidation are a throwback to the police state; the childlike faith in the efficacy of social
engineering hopelessly nave; the unctuous solicitude for downtrodden minorities andclammy compassion for the wretched of the earth are an affront to human dignity. What self-
respecting liberal could be taken in by such fatuous posturing and moral exhibitionism? What
is Pat Schroeder doing telling Lockheed how to build jet fighters? Why have hard-nosedjournalists developed a sudden Pollyanna fixation? And why are distinguished publications,
famed for their aggressive editorial independence, appeasing self-anointed victims' groups
and groveling before sanctimonious minorities?
More to the point, why would any society beset with realsocial problems (pandemic crime,
the worst educational system in the industrialized world, an imploding socioeconomic
infrastructure, in a world where terrorist states have access to nuclear weapons, etc.) squander
its limited moral resources on the frivolous, manufactured distinctions posed by the PC
partisans? The question answers itself. The PC movement is both a potent distraction from
more intransigent social problems and an ersatz substitute for the patience, wisdom and
expertise needed to solve them; while the emergence of a class of PC carpetbaggersguarantees that, as the lurid melodrama of the victims' revolution unfolds in the full glory of
its irrelevance upon the stage of jaded public consciousness, grave issues of national survival
will continue to be pushed further into the background.
An invention of the educated elite, political correctness is essentially a class phenomenon, i.e.
designer morals for yuppies of uneasy conscience. While advocates of victims' rights agonize
over whether to call persons of African descent 'blacks' or 'Negroes,' tens of thousands of
Africans are dying of starvation, AIDS, and in tribal warfare. Socioeconomic groups informed
by the stark exigencies of survival have shown little interest in the hairsplitting subtleties and
scholastic quibbling of victim taxonomy. Coincidentally, these are the very social groups PC
purports to champion; but this would not be the first time a subversive agenda and
questionable motives had been concealed by a smokescreen of concern for the common man.
It is a commonplace that elaborate stratagems to compensate penalized minorities and avoid
giving pain to others, such as quotas, affirmative action, preferential treatment, euphemistic
speech, and other palliates, often achieve the opposite. By drawing attention to, and
stigmatizing, the victim's disability, they serve only to confirm that he hasn't enough self-
esteem, dignity and imagination to deal responsibly with his own problems. As a corollary,
such a strategy tends to encourage self-pity and the manufacture of sensitivities without end,
promoting an autonomous culture of victims and empowering sanctimonious minorities with
unearned moral authority. Every one of us constitutes a minority of one, and no amount ofsympathy or fellow-feeling, however well-intentioned, can ever remove the pain of man's
isolation or the tragic nature of the human condition.
PC zealots hold that if we attend to minutiae, larger issues will take care of themselves, that if
(say) you proscribe ethnic humor, genocide will become, literally, unthinkable. This is the
rank fallacy of the feckless harridan who believes if she natters at her husband for dumping
his pipe dottle in the potted plants, he wouldn't dream of visiting a house of prostitution. It's
whistling in the dark. Not only does it lull society into a false sense of security, but the
persistent recourse to euphemism and circumlocution corrupts and debases language, and the
coercive atmosphere of guilt, fear and intimidation surrounding this capricious censorship
inhibits the easy give-and-take of human discourse, the life-blood of democratic institutions,and ultimately of man's own social and spiritual life.
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
7/35
Recalling the strenuous schedule of examinations at the Munich Gymnasium and Zurich
Polytechnic, Albert Einstein remarked that "This coercion had such a deterring effect that,
after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems
distasteful to me for an entire year." One of the great fallacies of the apostles of sensitivity is
their implicit assumption that we are vulnerable in our affective life, when it is our cognitive
life that is at risk. Emotions and feelings are comparatively robust and self-sustaining; it is thedelicate and finely tuned instrument of reason, or our capacity to reflect, conceive and learn,
that is contingent and that requires continuous nurture.
The Persistence of Utopia
The latest cause clbre of the victims' revolution is cash reparationsfor the descendants of American slaves. With an unerring instinct for lurid
controversy, unmatched even by the tabloid press,Harper's Magazine
conducted a forum in its pages called, "The Case for Reparations." One
would have thought that the casualties of the American Civil War had gonea long way toward the cancellation of that debt. Perhaps a visit to
America's Civil War cemeteries would appease the twice- and thrice-
removed 'victims' of nineteenth century slavery. My great-grandfather, Pvt.
William J. Connor of the Eighth Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment,
took part in the bloody assault on the Second Texas Lunette at Vicksburg, and was poisoned
at a rebel drinking well at Otterville, Missouri in 1861, an injury from which he never fully
recovered. May I and my family claim an indemnity from the U.S. Government?
In a movement that is about the here and now, historical amnesia is the order of the day, and
explains why PC partisans have never bothered to deal with several inconvenient facts
surrounding Negro victimology. Consider, for example, the curious affinity of African-Americans with Islam and Islamic names. It was not Christian missionaries, but Muslims
North African Arabs and Berberswho organized and ran the black slave trade in the African
interior. Similarly, there is no linguistic evidence that 'welshing' on a debt is a slur on the
inhabitants of Wales (the verb originated in the resistance of Welsh school children to English
language instruction), yet its use is strictly forbidden by the PC handbook of theLos Angeles
Times. When the coin of the realm is moral indignation, historical truth is a devalued
currency.
Political correctness is the triumph of sensitivity over truth; but it is more than and less than
that. The following editorial appeared on May 5, 2003, in The Desert Sun, a newspaper of the
Gannet chain located in the Palm Springs area:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging thefreedom of speech or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress of
grievance." First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
Don Quixote
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
8/35
Our VoiceFind other names for Sports teams
'Redskins,' 'Braves' have no place in today's sport arenas
Those who use Indian names for mascots or sports teams probably don't intend to offendanyone, but the point is that they do. As a state, it's time to reassess our thinking and thepay heed to the sensitivities of American Indians.
The tool available to begin the sea change in actand attitudeis Assembly Bill 2115. Theproposed legislation aims to protect tribes from having names traditionally associated withIndians such as "Redskins" or "Braves" used for mascots or teams names by the state'spublic schools.
The only question here is: What took so long for such legislation to surface?
Dismissing the issue as much ado about political correctness does not eliminate the disputeor change the feeling of those American Indians truly offended. Why prolong such aneedless point of friction?
"So-called Indian mascots reduce hundreds of indigenous tribes to generic cartoons,"Cornel Pewewardy writes in "Why Educators Can't Ignore Indian Mascots." "These 'WildWest' figments of the white imagination distort both the indigenous and non-indigenouschildren's attitudes toward an oppressedand diverseminority. Schools should be placeswhere students come to unlearn the stereotypes such mascots represent"
It's been more than 30 years since the National Congress of American Indians launched acampaign to bring an end to the use of Indian sports mascots and other media stereotypes.Still, there' work to be done as is evidence by AB 2115.
There are those who trivialize the issue, saying tribes should be more concerned aboutunemployment, health care and poverty on the reservations than about sports teamcaricatures. But this issue transcends a distorted cartoon. For any student of history, it isapparent such caricatures are rife with racism. It is that simple.
The bill has support from a broad range of educational and Indian organizations, and rightlyso. According to the March issue of Sports Illustrated, 83 percent of Indian nationally wantprofessional sports teams to stop using Indian Names. How many times and in how manyways do they need to deliver that message?
The time has come for sports teams in California to stop turning to Indian-themed mascots
to generate cheers. It brings shame to the teams and to the schools. It's time to take theissue to a higher plane.
This newspaper proudly displays the First Amendment at the top of its editorial page, but it is
doubtful anyone in the editorial department has read it lately. The fact that Assembly Bill
2115 did not pass is scant consolation; a form of propaganda, PC censorship is atmospheric;
upon release it pervades the fabric of our social life and remains there like a bad odor; i.e., it
succeeds even as it fails. Like the old-style Soviet propaganda with which it has much in
common, PC censorship is not designed to advance the truth; it is an instrument of
manipulation, conditioning and control; and those who deny its influence have alreadysuccumbed to it as environment.
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
9/35
Although the authors are quick to distance themselves from political correctness, this editorial
is a classic specimen of PC fascism. Notice how cleverly the reverence for the authoritarian
power of the state and the invitation to groupthink are folded into a self-congratulatory
solicitude for a penalized minority. The empathetic authors would have us believe they are
inside the minds of the 'victims,' feeling their pain and anguish (the idea being, apparently, to
inflict maximum survivor guilt on the rest of us).
It is all so familiar: the travesty of benevolence, the asinine unction, the creepy solicitude; the
absurd demands, bogus scholarship and invented statistics provided by special interest groups
(Pewewardy is no more an anthropologist than Sports Illustratedis a scientific journal). If
Indian tribes have suddenly developed ethnic sensitivities, perhaps it is because cleverly-
worded survey questions suggest that they should. Other polls indicate that American Indians
are blandly indifferent to team logos. But what if they were not? What authority would this
give the state to dictate linguistic usage? Do American Indian tribes own the trademark rights
to these common English words? And what does the adoption of team logos like 'Aztecs,'
'Braves' and 'Redskins' have to do with crying 'fire' in a crowded theater? Surrendering
autonomy to special interest groups is hardly what the Founding Fathers had in mind whenthey framed the Bill of Rights.
All this is obvious and, hence, trivial; less obvious and trivial is the chilling effect of this
whimsical censorship on our daily lives. The most insidious effect of these proscriptions is not
that they enjoin free speech and assemblyafter all, Assembly Bill 2115 did not passbut
that they cast a shadow of inhibition over human discourse that paralyses the free flow of
ideas, making spontaneous thought all but impossible; undermining not merely the contentof
speech and thought, but the very impulse to think and speak freely, for centuries the crucial
enabling principle of democracy, and man's social and transcendental life.
On its face, the objection to team logos is absurd. This is a familiar inversion: the more
superficial the distinction, the more ferocious the moral approbrium; the more absurd the
proscription, the more effective the inhibition of thought. This is a recurrent theme in the
works of Franz Kafka, i.e. the terrifying disproportion between guilt and punishment; the
more minute and mysterious the offense, the more brutal the retribution. The sense of horror
is heightened by the surreal and arbitrary nature of the penalty meted out. In Kafka's universe
of malevolent lunacy, thought itself, not merely 'incorrect' thought, is a crime. "It is something
you do not need to know," answers K.'s lawyer when K. asks him what offense he has been
charged with in The Trial.
The use of sham research and statistics is an attempt to impart a veneer of rationality to abelief-system. Political correctness, like its collectivist ancestor, stems from a political
ideology based on a nihilistic interpretation of man. PC zealots are less concerned with the
welfare of minorities than they are with imposing their reductionist view of man on society.
The premise of this editorial is not that we should accede to the manufactured sensitivies of
minorities (this is only a tactical diversion); it is that minorities, and humanity in general, lack
the spiritual resources and imagination to deal with bad taste and vulgarity, without the
intervention of the state. That is thepremise. The effectis simpler and more lethala toxic
cloud of fear and paranoia that surrounds every impulse, thought and decision we make, to the
exclusion of thought itself; leaving us with only the nihilism and anemic social philosophy of
progressive ideologues to confront the anarchy of life. The unstated message of this editorial
is that we are all sinners in the hands of an angry Marxist God.
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
10/35
Editorial pieces like the one above have been appearing in newspapers and periodicals all
over America. The editors of these publications were not acting on orders from the
Comintern, and they would probably be shocked to hear themselves described as cultural
Marxists. Political philosophy, they would say, was the furthest thing from their minds.
Let us grant this at once. Most proponents of political correctness do not consider theiradvocacy political, let alone ideological; they are simple idealists and dreamers, well-meaning
yuppies and flower children with ponytails, who believe that it is a humane and decent guide
to compassionate conduct. The immediate allure of political correctness is that it 'feels right;'
it seems to be a good idea. No reflection is called for: PC is flypaper for a new generation of
'useful idiots,' Lenin's expression for social activists living in the liberal democracies who
unwittingly advanced the cause of Communism. The impulse to censor the speech (and
thought) of others fulfills a deep human appetite for power and control inextricable from the
Communist worldview, i.e. with the 'tyranny of the proletariat.' In practice, if not theory (in its
brutal implementation if not in Party discussions in London coffee houses), Marxism is
simply another name for fascism.
Richard Rorty's Utopia of Sensitive Souls
It would be hard to find a more candid rationale for political correctness than Richard Rorty's
book, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, a candor evident in his unapologetic use of such
words as 'utopia' and 'sensitivity.' Rorty begins with the familiar nominalist argument that
such words as 'truth,' 'beauty' and 'goodness' are mere names that refer to no objective
phenomenon, and holds with the doctrine of historicism that there is no baseline humanity
below our socialization or history.
Indeed Rorty, and other Marxist thinkers like Davidson and Chomsky, would have us believe
language is some sort of irreducible activity that anchors thought and is the foundation of
human consciousness. As Davidson puts it, "speaking a language... is not a trait a man can
lose while retaining the power of thought. So there is no chance that someone can take up a
vantage point for comparing conceptual schemes by temporarily shedding his own." This
dovetails neatly with the pieties of political correctness; for if, as these theorists hold,
language is the precondition to human thought, then all that is necessary for man's moral
rehabilitation is to correct his speech.
That there are no universal human values, says Rorty, is proven by the fact that there is so
much human diversity. For example, in Western societies marital fidelity is considered the
norm, but in some Polynesian and Eskimo societies, it is not uncommon for a man to offer hiswife to a visitor for the night. So according to Rorty, rather than ask: "What is it to be a
human being?" we ought to ask: "What is it to inhabit a rich twentieth century democratic
society?" But democratic societies, even 'rich' ones, are not exceptional. Over a hundred
viable democracies have emerged in the last century, not to mention earlier prototypes:
Tribal Man
Periclean Athens
Classical Rome
The Vikings
Colonial America
Victorian England
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
11/35
All of these societies were in some sense de jure democracies. Even primitive societies were
quick to see that tribal counsels shared by an inclusive membership were less controversial
than decisions arrived at by fiat. This is the practical argument Pericles made when he said
that 'democracy is everyone's business,' and in the empirical observation that, despite all its
flaws, no other political system seems to work. There is no human universal here except the
evolutionary response to employ the most useful tools at hand, like the plow. But this onlyleads to a deeper question: "Why do men refuse to yield to lawless autocracy?" And we
discover the answer in the realm of the transcendental: because their personal dignity and
their potential for spiritual growth are crushed by authoritarianism.
We can certainly make the argument that the growth and success of democracies in the
twentieth century was due to their inherent stability, but if we look beyond this simple
pragmatic argument we will see that this stability is based on the fact that in a free society
man is able to pursue such ideals a 'truth,' 'beauty' and 'goodness,' the metaphysical
abstractions the nominalists tell us are nothing more than irrational sentiment and estheticism.
These abstractions, Rorty tells us, belong to an obsolete paradigm:
In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away"prejudice" or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is tobe achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellowsufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing oursensitivityto the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people.[emphasis added]
This is the philosophic foundation for the victims' movement, the imaginative power to
empathize with fellow sufferers. Human solidarity, or those immutable laws by which man
interacts with his fellow man and the world around him, are a Chimaera, abstractions adduced
after the fact. We do not consult the past to create the conditions for utopia, e.g. the wisdom
of Homer, Aristotle and Blake, etc., because they spoke only to their own times, but
imaginatively project ourselves into the unique specificity of the here and now. So in addition
to public debate and reasoned discourse we are asked by a leading advocate of gay rights,
Martha C. Nussbaum, to imagine a 'humane public poetry':
The issue [of gay rights] demands more [than discussion]. It demands also an effort of culture: worksof art, high art and popular art, that touch the public imagination and inspire it to feel empathy withrelationships that are now viewed with loathing.
Thus, it is not reflection but empathy that is the magical key to the
gates of Beulah Land. But where does empathy end? It is not clear
where we should draw the line or even if there is a line. Carry thisPollyanna philosophy to its logical conclusion and we find there is no
human conduct unworthy of our empathy, no fail-safe mechanism to
prevent us from empathizing with the Devil himself. For example,
there are those who deplored the Marshall Plan as an instrument to
achieve European recovery, because it isolated the USSR and
provoked Stalin. Had it not been for the Marshall Plan, they tell us,
Stalin would have been prepared to make peace with the West
instead of being forced into aggression. This is reminiscent of the
argument that had not America imposed an oil embargo on the Japan
in 1941, Japanese militarists would not have ordered the attack on
Pearl Harbor. (Never mind that the Japanese Imperial Army had
The caption says: "With the help ofJapan, China, and Manchukuo, theworld can be in peace."
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
12/35
already killed ten to twenty million Chinese civilians in Manchuria and mainland China to
establish its 'Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere' .)
There is something perversely naive and subversive about the concept of empathy. (Uncle Joe
would have freed the Captive Nations had America appeased his volcanic paranoia?)
Something addled in its optimism about the human race. (Homosexual activists have noradical agenda to mainstream their epicene lifestyle, promote an androgynous society, and
recast American culture in a unisex straightjacket?) According to the Bodhisattvas, Gautama
Buddha, is not smiling out of a supernatural goodness of heart or a sentimental belief in the
brotherhood of man, or because he is a kindly, sensitive, empathetic being; the Buddha's smile
is an expression of his delight in the creative process of knowing. He is smiling because he
understands and sees all. Kindness is a by-product of reflection.
InAnna Karenina, when Alexy Alexandrovitch Karenin expresses his displeasure with his
son, Seryozha, for neglecting his studies, the narrator (Tolstoy) observes that
He was not a stupid boy. On the contrary, he was far cleverer than the boys his teacher held up asexamples to Seryozha. In his fathers opinion, he did not want to learn what he was taught. In realityhe could not learn that. He could not, because the claims of his own soul were more binding on himthan those claims his father and his teacher made upon him. Those claims were in opposition, and hewas in direct conflict with his education. He was nine years old; he was a child; but he knew his ownsoul, it was precious to him, he guarded it as the eyelid guards the eye, and without the key of love helet no one into his soul.
Seryozha resists the learning imposed on him by his tutors because he cannot admit anything
to his inner life that has not been sanctified by love, which, for Tolstoy, was the beginning of
all human understanding, creativity and achievement. (Or, to paraphrase Mozart: Love, not
loftiness of intelligence or imagination, is the soul of genius.). When liberal progressives like
Rorty speak of empathy, sensitivity and utopia, they are not referring to mankind's capacityfor love, but to the Promethean impulse to transcend human nature and remake society by the
sheer exertion of human will without reference to moral limits. Rorty, and the partisans of
political correctness, represent the tutor imposing an external idea on society, i.e. the timeless
myth of a terrestrial paradise, and it is because this originates from without, rather than from
within, that all utopian movements eventually fail.
In his scholarly study of cartography,Mapping Paradise: A History of
Heaven on Earth, Alessandro Scafi notes that up until the Renaissance,
Western map makers took pains to include earthly paradise on their maps of
the world. In the Medieval worldview the Garden of Eden was an actual
geographic location that was or would become heaven, the place where the
saints and mankind would find rest and repose at the end of history. In short,
the abode of the blessed was a destination, not a social engineering project.
After the Copernican Revolution there evolved, in a kind of blasphemous
mimicry, a humanistic or secular tradition of earthly paradise, Utopianism,
born of the notion that paradise was a perfect society or ideal civilization that man himself
could bring about. Thomas More coined the word, 'Utopia' (no place), for the as yet
unachieved perfect society or ideal civilization that mankind could call into being through the
agency of good works.
We are indebted to Arnold Toynbee for his analysis of millennial movements. Utopianism, hetells us, is an attempt either to recapture the past ('archaism') or scrap the past and cut short to
Arnold Toynbee
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
13/35
the millennium ('futurism'), and is associated with senescent institutions and societies in
decline. Because creativity is a process that articulates itself moment by moment, societies in
a period of dynamic growth and self-discovery, e.g. such ongoing enterprises as the Periclean
Age, the Italian Quattrocento, the English Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Colonial
America, in a state of emergent evolution, do not develop according to a definitive plan, and
there is little inclination to formulate doctrines for success in the midst of success. It is onlyafter things have gone wrong, during a 'time of troubles,' that political thinkers, in a desperate
attempt to shore up the ruins of a collapsing civilization, resort to shallow prescriptive
remedies. Plato'sRepublic, a utopian manifesto that followed the catastrophe of the
Peloponnesian War, is a notorious example of this kind ofad hocpolitical thinking. Plato's
solution to Athens' social problems, of which the judicial murder of Socrates was
symptomatic, was the creation of an elite academy of philosopher-kings to the rule a state
based on the Spartan military model. Plato's preference for a regimented oligarchy was a
repudiation of the historic synthesis of democracy and culture that had made Periclean Athens
the envy of the other city-states, the political miracle Pericles called 'the education of Hellas.'
PC from Nursery to University
The education of America has become a lightning rod for PC revisionism, and the evolution
of the American educational system is a history of contending educational philosophies,
beginning with Ciceronian humanism, and ending with a decline into instrumentalism,
relativism, multiculturalism, and finally obscurantism (we can prescribe prophylactics for pre-
teens and they can listen to rap, but we cannot expose them to team logos).
In colonial America educational philosophy was influenced by the French encyclopedists of
the Enlightenment, of which Jefferson was the exemplar and leading advocate. Jeffersonian
democracy was based upon the Ciceronian ideal of the citizen-farmer who was an intellectualaristocrat by virtue of a classical (non-specialist) education in the humanities. As America
shifted from an agricultural to an industrial economy, another educational theory, based on
New England Calvinism, began to assert itself. According to the Calvinistic doctrine preached
by the New England divines, man was a fallible creature who could only redeem himself by
good works. This led easily to the notion that his education should be utilitarian, an idea that
dove-tailed neatly with New England's industrial bias and the logical positivism of John
Dewey. Dewey held that man was a technological unit of the state and that his training should
therefore be scientific and specialist; with a strong emphasis on something called 'critical
thinking,' as opposed to mnemonic skills. Professional educators subscribed readily to the
bold simplicity of this idea, for in it they sensed a profound correspondence to the stark
simplicity of their technocratic souls, and it has been the foundation of the Americaneducational system ever since.
The influence of Dewey has been most pronounced in the training of
secondary school teachers, where an emphasis on methodology, how to as
opposed to what, gave rise to the notorious 'life-adjustment' curriculum and
a class of dreary professional careerists who excel in pedagogic technique,
with only perfunctory attention to course content. More recently the 'life-
adjustment' curriculum has been co-opted by 'Outcome-Based Education.'
According to OBE, the test of educational efficiency no longer depends
upon the adjustment of a child to his or her environment (the central tenet of
progressive education) but upon the sense of well-being such an adjustmentJohn Dewey
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
14/35
confers upon the child. In either case, the result is the same : both teacher and student are
exempted from the more strenuous disciplines of traditional learning.
At the university level, Dewey's ideas meshed neatly with the Teutonic model of inquiry
based on scientific scholarship adopted by Harvard University. The hierarchy of knowledge
achieved in fifth-century Athens, and rediscovered by secular humanists of the EuropeanRenaissance and Colonial America, was supplanted by the concept of knowledge as
asymptotic and phenomenal, a leveling of human experience to a behavioristic plane,
denuding Western culture of metaphysics. In an attempt to emulate the glamour and
ascendancy of the scientific disciplines, the American university reduced humanistic studies
to sterile specialization and pseudoscience (scientism). This has a PC correlative. For this
development not only set the stage for a decline in the prestige of humanistic studies, it
opened the way for deconstructionism, a nihilistic theory of criticism which holds that
literature is devoid of meaning. If Western literature has no meaning, then its preeminence in
the curriculum is unjustified, paving the way for multiculturalism. The goal of
deconstructionism was to dismantle Western metaphysics, but trivialization of the humanities
had already proceeded so far there is some question whether there was anything left todismantle.
After this relentless battering by the -isms (Calvinism, Progressivism, Behaviorism,
Scientism, and Deconstructionism) the failure of the American educational system was a
foregone conclusion. Math proficiency and English literacy have fallen to such low levels that
even the stolid bovines of the educational establishment have begun to bestir themselves. The
effects of a uneducated populace reverberate throughout society. The first casualties of
ignorance in a democracy are those institutions most dependent upon an educated citizenry for
their maintenance, such as the judicial system. Legal scholars, who have long bemoaned the
capricious verdicts of American juries, attribute the problem to an unwieldy legal system so
overbuilt with case precedent it is virtually unusable. But no legal system in the world would
be proof against the ignorance and ineptitude of a typical American juror.
The displacement of humanism and metaphysics by the Teuronic ideal ofWissenschaft
(scientism, and its handmaiden scientific specialization), in an increasingly secular society has
created a moral vacuum and spiritual malaise felt at every level of American life. The
American university now finds itself populated by a generation of students who are culturally
illiterate and spiritually adrift. Reared in an educational milieu of sterile methodology and
moral relativism that has trivialized its sacred texts and great books, they view their own
society as a militant technocracy rather than a universal culture, and their contempt for
Western values extends not only to its democratic institutions, but to its norms for civility aswell. As a result, the social disintegration that was once confined to the inner city, has now
invaded the genteel precincts of academia, and American campuses have become the scene of
unprecedented antisocial behavior, including an alarming increase in racial incidents and such
crimes as date-rape.
This was fertile ground for political correctness and baffled university officials have
responded in typical PC fashion. Treating symptoms, rather than causes, they called for strict
censorship of offensive speech and instituted Draconian disciplinary codes; and, in an attempt
to defuse racial tensions, implemented a multicultural curriculum. Some of these desperate ad
hoc disciplinary measures, such as Antioch College's sex code, were not only silly, they were
flagrant violations of due process, and were subsequently struck down by the Supreme Courtas unconstitutional. The humanities curriculum, already eviscerated by deconstructionism and
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
15/35
'scientific' scholarship, was further debased with courses in gender-politics and black studies,
while prestigious institutions, like Stanford University, dropped their Western Culture course
requirements altogether; and today it is possible to graduate from a major American university
without having read any of the great seminal works of Western civilization.
The parallels to Plato's Republic are uncanny, but should surprise no one; while the dynamicsof social creativity are unique, the pattern of social failure is always the same. A society that
has lost touch with the dynamic vision responsible for its success is rarely able to rekindle the
creative spark from the cold ashes of failure, or even to arrest decline. Hypnotized by its own
pathology, and impatient for quick solutions, a society in decline typically undervalues its
earlier achievements. The allure of the exotic is irresistible to those who no longer understand
their cultural origins, and they cast about for solutions outside their own society. Just as Plato
rejected the achievements of Periclean Athens and turned to Sparta for inspiration, banning
poets as enemies of the state, university officials discarded the Western canon and enforced
multiculturalism with police state censorship and the suspension of due process. Instead of
reaffirming the universal values of Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian society that have bound
diverse cultures to one another for two thousand years, they promoted cultural relativism, astrategy that accelerates social collapse.
These developments have already acquired an alarming momentum and are probably beyond
immediate remedy. Is there a way to reverse the process social disintegration? We can no
more control the course of social pathology than we can govern the human passions that drive
it; the corruption of a society's cultural values is only noticed after it is far advanced; changing
direction is somewhat analogous to reversing the course of a supertanker.
But there must be a start. Sometimes understanding a phenomenon removes the need to
control it; for when we become aware of the hidden workings of such a process, it no longer
has the power to impose itself on our unconscious life. Traditional societies turned to their
gods in a time of crisis; a modern society consults its visionaries and artists. It is a
commonplace that a gifted novelist can tell us more about our social history in a single work
of fiction than is available to us on the sagging bookshelves of social science; literary
techniques and poetic imagination afford a wealth of insight into social pathology and provide
us with an intimate and penetrating understanding of our society. Comparing documentary
history to the human history revealed by literary imagination, Joseph Conrad wrote:
Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on
firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena,
whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwritingon second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth.
What is more, literary works, and especially the novel, provide us not only with the most
accurate social history of the times, but in their power to reveal the metaphysics of human
existence in poetic expression, they are semi-religious documents and sacred texts in their
own right, inspirational moral guides to human conduct. If the words 'Apostolic succession'
have any real meaning to the modern world, it is in reference to the works of its literary
artists. Homer'sIliadwas just such a document, rich in universal wisdom, poetic perception,
and lessons in noble conduct and self-sacrifice, and a testimonial to the tragic nature of the
human condition. No one has has better expressed this than Thomas Mann in his introduction
toAnna Karenina:
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
16/35
Art is the most beautiful, the most pungent, the most joyous and most reverent of symbols for
all man's super-rational striving toward the good, toward truth and toward perfection. And the
breath of the surging sea of epic art would not so stirringly expand our breasts, did it not bring
with it the pungent in invigorating roots of the spiritual and the divine.
We get a notion of who we are as we read and absorb these literary artifacts of the past andpresent. That Western dramatists, novelists and poets constitute a natural succession of the
Twelve Apostles was first suggested by George Santayana:
Religion and poetry are identical in essence, and differ merely in the way in which they attach
to practical affairs. Poetry is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it
merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry.
Utopian Visionaries in History and Literature
We find that the utopian visionary is well-represented in Western literature, and includes such
worthies as Don Quixote and Candide. But for a more contemporary example, we turn to
Kurtz in Joseph Conrad'sHeart Of Darkness, a novel as harrowing in its moral power as a
Biblical parable. Kurtz is of particular interest, because in him Conrad has evoked the
definitive utopian visionary of modern times, and a close reading of the narrative yields
significant insight into the utopian mind. But before turning to Conrad's novel, it might be
useful to establish a historical context for the problem. History has a way of revealing the
arbitrary, and at times unsavory, origins of our most cherished beliefs; and an investigation of
the ancestry of a compelling political idea often serves to qualify the enthusiasm of even its
most ardent partisans.
One of the most influential utopian thinkers in recent history is Francis Bacon.HisNew Atlantis described an ideal society based on reason, and it is still
regarded by many as the original blueprint for the West's spectacular advances
in science and technology. "The end of our Foundation," says one of the
guiding Fathers, "is knowledge of causes and secret motions of things; and
enlarging the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible."
Bacon believed in the perfectibility of man, and that it could be achieved by a
balanced education in the arts and the sciences. Like all utopians, he was
convinced he could bring about such a society in his own time, and to that end
he petitioned the Crown for funds to establish colleges and educate a cadre of leaders. He
was, of course, rebuffed. King James, chronically short of revenue, had his hands full with the
Parliament, and man's mastery of the physical universe and "the effecting of all thingspossible," would have to wait a few centuries. Not surprisingly, some of the leading intellects
of Bacon's time were unsympathetic to his ideas. It was to a gift copy of Bacon's Novum
Organum that Sir Edward Coke had scornfully affixed the celebrated couplet:
It deserveth not to be read in Schooles
But to be freighted in the ship of Fooles.
No matter. The cause of science and human progress has never had a more eloquent
spokesman, and Bacon had thrown open a magical casement on the future.
Francis Bacon
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
17/35
Bacon's belief in the utility of 'an achieved body of truth' and 'collective
wisdom' and the Promethean gift of science, was to bring him into conflict
with another utopian, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What Bacon had seen as
Divine instruments to aid man in a Sisyphean struggle to master his soul and
unlock the mysteries of the universe, Rousseau had seen as an impertinent
intrusion into God's domain and a profane disruption of the cosmicharmonies. What Bacon had seen as the gradual and painstaking evolution of
man from barbarism to Godly perfection, Rousseau had viewed as 'an
artificial pageant of blood and butcheries perpetrated by "a few mad,
designing, or ambitious priests." ' Like Bacon, Rousseau believed in the perfectibility of man,
but he was convinced that it could, and must be achieved without the intervention of society.
Man's works, generated by ego, artifice and guile, had only brought about his enslavement;
his manifest duty was to disinter his soul from the detritus of civilization and rediscover his
lost innocence in direct communion with Nature. At war with reason, Rousseau believed man
must exorcise the accumulated knowledge of the collective past and cleanse his soul of all
civilizing influences; and if he was willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater, it wasbecause centuries of war and religious strife had convinced him that the baby was stillborn.
His program to recapture lost innocence of childhood and put man back in touch with the
primal forces of the universe evolved into the doctrine of the 'noble savage' and the re-
creation of society in the image of man's original state.
The 'noble savage' was a picturesque construct of Rousseau's that bore little resemblance to
the real thing. But it was from the vantage of this fiction that he launched his attack on
civilization. What Rousseau failed to realize was that his paradisiacal vision of primitive
nobility, was as much a symptom of corruption as the civilized institutions he abhorred. His
critique of civilization and embrace of Romantic barbarity led later to savage assaults on
human decency, masquerading as movements of liberation ('a pageant of blood and
butcheries' Rousseau had not anticipated).
Darwin's discovery that man had evolved from lower animals, 'red in tooth and claw,' not only
forced the Church to re-examine the dogmas of the Creation, it made sentimental nonsense of
Rousseau's nave view of nature as the cradle of innocence. Nevertheless, Rousseau hadhappened upon a profound poetic truth, one that was to exert a powerful influence on the
Romantic imagination down to our own time, that 'the child is father to the man.' That man's
spiritual life proceeds from the rapt wonder, enchantment and simplicity of childhood is
foreshadowed in Christ's instruction to his disciples:
Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me; for of such is the Kingdom of
Heaven. . . . Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the
Kingdom of Heaven.
Unfortunately, the apotheosis of nature held many dangers, for with the passive merging of
man with nature came the extinction the ego and of individual consciousness, and by
implication the reduction of man to a functional unit of an absolutist society, the paradigm for
modern Twentieth Century collectivism. Nature conceived as a picturesque object of
sentimental idolatry was essentially a rejection of human genius, a form of spiritual lobotomy
and moral deprivation; and the doctrine of the 'noble savage,' and its implicit message of anti-
intellectualism, held the seeds for a Romantic nihilism that was to exercise a less than salutaryeffect on Rousseau's disciples: two hundred years later 'innocent' children would be
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
18/35
suffocating adults with plastic bags in the killing fields of Cambodia. It is to this nihilism that
John Stuart Mill refers in his Chapters On Socialism:
If appearances can be trusted the animating principle of too many of the revolutionary
Socialists is hate; a very excusable hatred of existing evils, which would vent itself by putting
an end to the present system at all costs even to those who suffer by it, in the hope that out ofchaos would arise a better Kosmos.
It is the fatal notion that, if we could somehow eliminate all trace of civilization and start with
a blank page, we could create a perfect society, or as Joseph Conrad said, 'the strange
conviction that a fundamental change of hearts must follow the downfall of any given human
institutions.' As V.S. Naipaul has observed, the 'wish to wipe out and undo' has been the
hallmark of some of the bloodiest 'revolutions' in recent history:
A rebellion like this occurred after independence. It was led by Pierre Mulele, a former
minister of education, who, after a long march through the country, camped at Stanleyville
and established a reign of terror. Everyone who could read and write had been taken out tothe little park and shot; everyone who wore a tie had been shot. These were the stories about
Mulele that were circulating in neighboring Uganda in 1966, nearly two years after the
rebellion had been put down . . . . Nine thousand people are said to have died in Mulele's
rebellion. What did Mulele want? What was the purpose of the killings? The forty-year-old
African who had spent some time in the United States laughed and said, "Nobody knows. He
was against everything. He wanted to start again from the beginning."
During the French Revolution, there was interesting exchange of words between Lavoisier's
counsel and the judge at his trial. When the councel said: "You are condemning a great
scholar!" the judge replied: "The Republic does not need scholars." Rousseau's apologists
insist that these enormities came about as a simplistic interpretation of his ideas and that he
would have been appalled by these ritual butcheries; but the fact remains that Robespierre and
Pol Pot did not invoke the writings Voltaire or Thomas Paine to justify their slaughter of the
intelligentsia, but those of Rousseau.
If the dictatorship of the proletariat is absolute, then any violent act committed in it's nameis permissible. But this violence is ritualistic: the ambushes, beheadings, eviscerations ofthe innocent, obviously serve no social end; they are essentially primitive human sacrificesto appease the rain gods or stave off plague. The Left has an atavistic streak, a puritanicalsuperstition that human sacrifice, or to used the Marxist term, 'purification,' is required for
the Marxist-Leninist nod of approval, the necessary and sufficient condition to achieveutopia. Death on less than a massive scale isn't meaningful enough for Communismcan't really be Communism, can it?
According to the recent biography of Mao Tse-Tung, Mao, the Unknown Story, by JungChang and Jon Halliday, Mao was rotten to the core and harbored "a love for bloodthirstythuggery," blithely predicting that during the Great Leap Forward "half of China may wellhave to die." This turned out to be a bit of an exaggeration: only 38 million people died ofstarvation and overwork in the purifying flame of social revolution.
We are the hollow men. . .
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
19/35
But the Mulele revolt was a mere tremor compared to the human disaster that preceded itsome sixty years beforethe methodical enslavement and extermination of millions of
Congolese by Leopold II of Belgium. This was an unprecedented human catastrophe. History
had seen whole cities put to the sword and witnessed enormities of unparalleled savagery, but
never one of this scale nor one committed by a 'civilized' European power.
Hired on as the skipper of a paddle steamer by Leopold's Royal Belgium trading company,
Conrad was to become a firsthand witness to this apocalyptic event, an evil so morally
shocking in its extent that it was to permanently transform him (he would later remark that up
until his Congo experience, he had been living in a dream world). His health broken by fever,
Conrad returned to England after only a few months in the Congo. But there would be eight
years of searing meditation before he was able to assimilate the trauma of this experience and
explore its meaning inHeart Of Darkness.
There has been much speculation about Kurtz's true identity. In Conrad's
own words,Heart Of Darkness is a "histoire farouche d'un journalist quidevient chef de station l'intrieur et se fait adorer par une tribu desauvages."[a wild story about a journalist who became a chief of station in
the interior and made himself adored by a tribe of savages]. On this
showing, Kurtz could have been the rogue trader-explorer-journalist Henry
Stanley. There are also obvious parallels with the buccaneering exploits of
the 'White Rajahs' of Sarawak, and in particular with Charles-Marie David
de Mayrna and his brief reign as the 'King of the Sedang.' But with therecent publication of Adam Hochschild 's book,King Leopold's Ghost, we discover that
Conrad probably knew of, and may even have crossed paths with, a Captain Lon Rom, oneof Leopold's most notorious officers. Like Kurtz, Rom wrote for publication, painted, dabbled
in science, and decorated his fence palings with the heads of African tribesmen.
Conrad's characters could germinate from a random scrap of conversation, a name or a news
item; so the person who actually sparked the novelist's imagination was probably an obscure
agent by the name of Georges Antoine Klein, a Frenchman who worked for an ivory trading
company at Stanley Falls, who had fallen ill at his station and died aboard the steamboat
Conrad piloted on the Congo River. Little else is known of the mysterious Klein, and it is
doubtful that he provided more than a few of the story's incidental features. Here is Conrad's
description of Leggatt in The Secret Sharer: "He had rather regular features; a good mouth; a
smooth square forehead; no growth on his cheeks; a small brown mustache, and a well-
shaped, round chin." But aside from the observation that he was very tall, we have no physical
description of Kurtz, which would suggest he was a composite, possibly of Antoine Klein,Lon Rom, and the Irish liberal Roger Casement, with whom Conrad had struck up anacquaintance at Matadi.
It would have been interesting to listen in on Conrad's conversations with the Irish patriot and
humanitarian; he took few notes but tells us significantly that Casement had 'a touch of the
conquistdore' in him. Kurtz and Casement share other traits: Casement was a tall charismatic
figure with a mellifluous speaking voice. And like Kurtz, he was a man of humble origin
imbued with liberal sympathies, particularly the cause (of human progress). Both men were
attracted to the romance and mystery of Africa, and excited by the prospect of nation-building
and bringing civilization to the Belgian Congo (a country roughly the size of western Europe).
It is probably no coincidence that both Kurtz and Casement are journalists. Raised in a
household of Polish nobles, Conrad harbored an aristocrat's contempt and distrust for the
King Leopold II
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
20/35
press, and considered it less a catalyst for democracy than a tool used by populist demagogues
to dupe and manipulate the semi-educated masses.
So, let us speculate thatKlein (a German synonym forKurz) provided the name and narrative
seed, Leon Rom (angel of death) the savage vision, and Roger Casement (emissary of
progress) the utopian ideology that constitute the unique personality of Kurtz. Rom andCasement stood, of course, at opposite ends of the moral spectrum, but it took Conrad's
penetrating gaze to reveal that Rom's stark inhumanity and Casement's liberal sympathies
could, and often did, coexist in the same mind.Heart of Darkness is without question a
landmark of literary and moral imagination, and the high place it occupies in the Western
canon is due in no small part to the novelist's fearless examination of 'the sinister impulses
that lurk innoble intentions.' This was indeed disturbing terra incognita, and its exploration
by Conrad was to permanently transform Western literature.
It is curious that Kurtz, one of the most celebrated characters in modern
fictionT. S. Eliot invokes his name at the beginning ofThe Hollow Men
is also one of the most abstract, and there are times when he seems less aperson than a symbolic presence. Our encounter with Kurtz (or Klein-Rom-
Casement) is muffled by the passage of time, the remote geography, and
Conrad's layered narrative style. He comes to us second-hand, by way of a
friend of the narrator, the familiar Charlie Marlow, on the cruising yawl
Nellie, and much of what Marlow learns of Kurtz comes through the
accounts of others. When finally he does meet him, after an arduous passage
upriver, Kurtz is dying of fever and is only accessible during brief moments of coherence in a
haze of delirium. Marlow is by this time himself feverish and has only a precarious grip on
reality, so that our picture of the protagonist resembles the phantasmagoria and hurly-burly of
a fever dream, more like the ghost of Hamlet's father than Hamlet.
Marlow is able to maintain his mental equilibrium amidst the lunatic greed of the ivory agents
('the pilgrims') by patching up his tinpot paddle steamer, and by the chance discovery of a
book in a riverside hut some fifty miles below the inner station:
It was an extraordinary find. Its title was, "An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship," by a
man Towser, Towsonsome such nameMaster in his Majesty's Navy. The matter looked
dreary reading enough, with illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables of figures, and the
copy was sixty years old. I handled this amazing antiquity with the greatest possible
tenderness, lest it should dissolve in my hands. Within, Towson or Towser was inquiring
earnestly into the breaking strain of ships' chains and tackle, and other such matters. Not avery enthralling book; but at the first glance you could see there a singleness of intention, an
honest concern for the right way of going to work, which made these humble pages, thought
out so many years ago, luminous with another than a professional light. The simple old
sailor, with his talk of chains and purchases made me forget the jungle and the pilgrims in
delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real.
At first glance this excursion into marine lore seems a puzzling digression from the narrative
thrust of the novel, but thematically it is central. For Conrad, there was no higher calling than
the sea. He believed that shipboard discipline, the hardships of life at sea and the dangers of
sailing fragile wooden ships across the storm-tossed oceans of the globe, had transformed
England's lower classes into a race of noble seafarers, and that this was the making of hisadopted country both as a political entity, the conscience of Europe, and a moral cynosure of
Roger Casement
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
21/35
the world. His friend, H.G. Wells, was to ridicule this extravagant notion as a nave andfanciful literary affectation. But time has sided with Conrad: modern historians are in general
agreement that the ordeal of transmarine migration is a revitalizing influence, and that the
demands of seamanship and shipboard cooperation, which are contractual in nature, became
the cultural bedrock of England's democratic institutions, and constituted the spiritual
discipline that released the Angles and Jutes, and later the Normans and Danes, from theancient bonds of tribal kinship and oriental despotism that enslaved the continental states,
including Conrad's native Poland, for centuries after England had achieved parliamentary
government. 'The simple old sailor,' Towser or Towson, is not introduced for atmospheric
effect, but as an admonitory presence and symbol of probity, in stark contrast to the Pilgrims'
and their mad scramble for loot.
Much of what we learn of Kurtz is related to Marlow by the ivory agent's
devoted companion, a Shakespearean court jester (fool to the monarchic
Kurtz) accoutered in harlequin patches, who is the son of a Russian
Orthodox arch-priest. Kurtz's own genealogy is at one with the patchwork
of his young Russian assistant: A German with a half-English mother andhalf-French father. "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz,"
Marlow tells us significantly. Prodigiously gifted, he is an accomplished
musician, artist, and writer and speaker of electrifying eloquence, and even
his enemies in the trading company acknowledge that he is a 'universal
genius.' Why has such a man journeyed to the vast wilderness of an
unexplored country? We learn that the aristocratic family of his intended
spouse disapproves of his impoverished circumstances, and he is forced,
like many talented men of his time, to seek his fortune in the colonies.
Fully sentient of his powers and impatient to make his mark on the world, he decides to try his
hand at commerce. Says Kurtz: 'You show them you have in you something that is really
profitable, and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability.' Rather than
confront the shabby commercial values of his time (the proper destiny of genius), he chooses
to exempt himself from the obscurity of poverty and the opprobrium of his fiancesbourgeois family to become an ivory agent. Kurtz's moral ruin is prefigured in his childish
and quixotic pursuit of conflicting goals; his first act of violence is, thus, against himself, a
self-inflicted spiritual wound and act of self-betrayal from which his subsequent crimes take
their rationale and momentum (what inNostromo Conrad described as "the picturesque
extreme of wrong-headedness into which an honest, almost sacred, conviction may drive a
man").
Kurtz is not without a higher calling. A precursor to Albert Schweitzer, he describes himself,
in an unintentional lampoon of King Leopold's pious humanitarian cant, as an 'emissary of
pity, science and progress,' with 'vast plans' for the Belgian trading company. "Each station,"
he tells the company directors in Brussels, "should be like a beacon on the road towards better
things, a center for trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing."
Despite his credentials as a humanitarian and a crusader for human progress, disturbing
rumors about Kurtz have reached the base camp (Stanley Pool), sufficient to give even the
company director (a man who inspired uneasiness in all) misgivings. He grudgingly admits
that Kurtz has collected more ivory than all the other agents combined, but considers his
methods unsound and unorthodox. Just how unorthodox we learn when Marlow scans the
Captain Leon Rom
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
22/35
buildings of the inner station with his glass, and ornamental knobs on stakes expand on
magnification into human heads.
"I am not disclosing any trade secrets. In fact, the manager said afterwards that Mr. Kurtz's
methods had ruined the district. I have no opinion on that point, but I want you clearly to
understand that there was nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there. They onlyshowed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was
something wanting in himsome small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could
not be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I
can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at lastonly at the very last. But the wilderness
had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic
invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things
of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitudeand the whisper
had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the
core. I put down the glass, and the head that had appeared near enough to be spoken to
seemed at once to have leaped away from me into inaccessible distance."
There is, Marlow tells us with deliberate understatement, something wanting in a man who
decorates his yard posts with human heads. Kurtz, we learn, is not only a commercial agent of
transcendent virtue, but a respository of monstrous passions; a man who could discourse on
'love, justice and the conduct of life' with his faithful Russian companion one moment, and
conduct murderous raids on the neighboring villages for ivory the next; i.e., Kurtz exhibits all
the powers of dissociation and unblinking self-contradiction found in children and in
criminals. Conrad sets himself to explore one of the great moral paradoxes of modern times:
how an 'emissary of pity' becomes a pitiless brigand, and what role his lofty ideals played in
accelerating his precipitous fall from grace.
Kurtz belonged to a class of men who, to
use Dostoevky's words, 'have only to feel
the faintest stirring of some kindly and
humanitarian emotion to persuade
themselves that they stand in the
foremost rank of culture.' But noble
deeds are not always accompanied by
noble feelings. True moral conduct is the
product of a rigorous soul-searching, of a
strenuous and exhausting moral struggle.
Kurtz is a humanitarian dilettante, aconnoisseur of sensation who seeks and
expects the splendors of moral exaltation
to validate his sense of self-importance
and romantic self-image; and who, when
these fail to sustain him, yields to the
exhilaration of power. Both autocrat and utopian visionary are promiscuous devotees of
sensation and intoxication, and savor the exhiliration that accompanies the pursuit of noble
causes and the quest for power with impartial zeal, so that any moral distinctions that separate
the two are blurred by their quest for personal identity.
This is the theme of Conrad's political novel, Under Western Eyes (which, like Victory,proved to be eerily prophetic of twentieth century social upheaval). Conrad, a Pole who
"the sinister impulses that lurk innoble intentions"
"We must be aware of the dangers which lie in ourmost generous wishes. Some paradox of our natureleads us, when once we have made our fellow menthe objects of our enlightened interest, to go on tomake them objects of our pity, then of our wisdom,ultimately of our coercion." Lionel Trilling
Kurtz is reminiscent of Paul Muniment, the chemistand social reformer in Henry James's novel, The
Princess Casamassima. In Muniment, says Trilling,a genuine idealism coexists with a secret desire forpersonal power. He is the idealist who takeslicense from his ideals for the unrestrained exerciseof power.
7/28/2019 o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing
23/35
understood the slavic character well, examines the personal and philosophic motivations of
lawless tyrants and oppressed revolutionaries in Czarist Russia, and comes to the conclusion
that there is little difference between the two, i.e. that autocrat and social revolutionary are
both malefactors involved in the orchestration of criminal enterprises. Helplessly addicted to
indiscriminate sensation, Kurtz fancies himself an altruistic liberal, but cultivates the
adoration of a tribe of savages; i.e. he enjoys the exaltation of noble aspirations while it suitshim, but yields to the temptations naked power without scruple the moment he encounters the
evitable frustrations that attend the pursuit of ambitious social goals. Mortified by failure and
driven by an insatiable appetite for glamour, he discards the mask of passionate humanitarian
and adopts the role of the ruthless autocrat, accepting the truth of whatever sensation happens
to validate his romantic self-image. Sainted benefactor of mankind intoxicated with the
ravishments of progressivism (Roger Casement), or hell-for-leather adventurer and pitiless
brigand (Lon Rom)it is all one to Kurtz. Obsessed with fantasies of greatness, andenslaved by vanity and immediate personal gratification, as opposed to rigorous moral
principle, he is 'hollow to the core.'
Conrad divided criminals into two classes: common and uncommon. The common criminalis, of course, the familiar career recidivist who is felonious by habit, e.g. the incorrigible
second- or third-generation thief for whom crime is a way of life. The uncommon criminal is
a first-time offender who commits a situational crime in a moment of weakness. While
Conrad's portraits of common criminals, like Martin Recardo, are adroit and fully rounded,
they serve mostly as foils for uncommon criminals, and his narratives revolve around men
who blunder into criminal conduct under extreme adversity, men of a superior stripe but in
whom an unexpected and harsh turn of events has exposed some hidden moral flaw,
protagonists like Lord Jim, Leggett, Kerain and Kurtz himself. If Conrad is sympathetic with
uncommon criminals, perhaps it is because he saw so much of himself in them. After all, this
was a man who had, in his early twenties, run guns for the Carlists in Spain and had tried to
discharge his gambling debts by putting a bullet through his heart. Suicide was con
Top Related