Monday Monday: Down with political correctness

Over the past few years, a worrying trend has emerged on American college campuses. A large number of liberal students have, under the guise of “social justice,” begun turning away from reasoned debate. Any voice—conservative or dissenting liberal—that dares say something politically incorrect in public is immediately shut down by an overwhelming outpouring of liberal rage. They do not consider the merits of opposing ideas. They use emotional discomfort as a guide to which ideas are good and which are bad. They threaten American freedom of speech and even freedom of thought; it is their stifling political correctness that I hope to address in this column.

In many of our nation’s educational institutions, political correctness has reached absurd levels. Take, for example, an incident in November of last year when a professor at Marquette University was suspended for his defence of a student’s views. An offended co-worker immediately reported him to the administration, leading to his removal from campus. This is an example of the typical knee-jerk reaction we have grown used to on college campuses; liberals refuse to hear new ideas on a subject simply because the subject is taboo. Certainly, the views the professor in question was defending may have been that gay marriage is wrong, but that does not change the fact that this offended liberal was simply being deaf to new ideas.

I would like to make an important distinction however. Political correctness is of course the blind, ideological, dogmatic rejection of words and ideas merely because they “offend” someone’s sensibilities. Distinct from political correctness, though, there is another, superficially similar kind of backlash which I like to term “democratically true.” In contrast to political correctness, democratic truth is of great value to our nation because it represents the real voice of the American people taking a stand for what is right. An example of democratic truth in action is when Duke planned to host the Islamic call to prayer at the Chapel. A sudden din of real American voices rose up to quiet and override the liberals’ tortured arguments. An example of politically correct backlash, by contrast, would be whenever liberals loudly disparage and silence anyone who writes a conservative column in The Chronicle.

At first glance these two examples may look similar. But the two in fact couldn’t be more dissimilar. This is because there are just certain facts that we Americans should all know to be true. We will punish any public figure that questions Israel’s automatic right to exist, America’s unconditional love for its military or the notion that America is the land of opportunity. These are democratically true ideas. By contrast, the ideas that rape, racism or homophobia are bad are not set in stone and the political correctness that protects them should be questioned at all times.

Now, I would like to turn to a particularly pernicious manifestation of political correctness that has recently begun to grip college campuses. It is known as a trigger warning—a note put at the start of a work or syllabus to warn readers it contains content that could potentially “trigger” PTSD flashbacks.

Greg Lukanioff and Jonathan Haidt recently wrote an excellent piece in The Atlantic addressing the harm that trigger warnings are doing. In their article, Lukanioff and Haidt demonstrate that trigger warnings are bad because they encourage “magnification” and “catastrophization”—the inference of dangerous trends from minor things. They in turn prove that trigger warnings are a dangerous trend by referencing a small number of extreme cases of over the top political correctness. It is a truly elegant argument.

The authors should be applauded for their psychological approach to the matter of political correctness. The idea that you can get over your trauma by avoiding it has become all-pervasive on American campuses recently. But, as Haidt and Lukanioff point out, if you ask any psychologist, they’ll tell you that the best way to get over a phobia is sudden, unannounced confrontation. The best way to deal with someone’s arachnaphobia, for example, is to drop a bag of spiders on them in their sleep. The best way to get someone over a fear of heights is to kidnap them, bring them to the top of a tall building and then push them off. In much the same way, the best way for a rape survivor to get over her trauma is to suddenly subject her to graphic depictions of sexual assault, an experience she would miss out on in a system that used trigger warnings.

This trend of trigger warnings and political correctness represent a mortal threat to our education system. Liberal students, using Socratic thinking, now question whether the Socratic method itself feeds back in to systems of oppression. But how, in this situation, are professors supposed to teach? As the old educator saying goes: “Don’t teach students what to think; teach them how to think. And then if they start using that thinking to question how you’re teaching them, go back to teaching them what to think.”