By the way, while I'm at it, I might as well up the flame ante by saying something on the actual topic of the thread:

I am unashamed to declare that I don't care much for Eliot, and think his accomplishments and influence are generally overstated. Admittedly, this is partly prejudiced by my personal response to his work, which in fair trials has repeatedly failed to move me, but I wouldn't be shocked at all if many years from now he seems much less important than he has seemed for the past several decades.

So there!

David R.

David, I was never able to warm to Eliot since long before I knew anything about him as a man. It was his poetry I could not warm to by and large, though I did find Prufrock to be lots of fun. For me, it's sort of like Cats. A big hit on Broadway, but you couldn't have paid me to see it. You are not alone.

I won't comment on whether his influence has been overstated. I tend to think it has been, but I'm not enough of a literary historian to have a firm opinion on the matter.

I think that's substantially true, David, but the original context of this line of discussion was whether "political correctness" was the same as "courtesy". As someone responsive to nuances of language and etymology I see a world of difference between the two terms.

Is "political correctness" the same as "decency"? A difficulty here might be that all groups and individuals think their own particular belief system and political agenda is decent and right. Whose decency? Even the Nazis thought that they were decent and correct. According to Keith Windschuttle, so did those settlers who took over terra nullius from the indigenes. Many good Americans think that the war on "terror" is decent and right -- that the use of white phosphorus and DUM in Iraq and elsewhere is perfectly moral. Many conservative Christians think that it is decent and right that women cover their bodies, obey their husbands, and devote themselves to home duties. Where there is such huge variety of interpretation of what is decent, then to impose one group's view of what is decent on another is always an act of political coercion, and one in which to appeal to "decency" as its justification is to appeal to a concept that is the subject of wide and serious disagreement.

I'm NOT saying that the issues subsumed under the heading of "political correctness" are not issues I agree with. I am saying that it is not as simple as calling it "decency". One person's decency is another person's evil. I once knew a Sicilian fisherman who said in all seriousness that he would kill -- literally -- his daughter if she wore a bikini. He meant it. To him bikinis were vile and whorishly indecent.

Even if you appeal to "commonly accepted standards" as the basis of decency, you have major problems. Standards commonly accepted by whom? The American liberal intelligentsia, who are a tiny tiny fraction of the world's population? I regard myself as decent (of course!) but I take serious issue with much of what the American liberal intelligentsia seek to impose on the rest of the world; and even more issue with what the American Right seek to impose. Or do we mean the standards of Uighur tribesmen? Sicilian fishermen? Orthodox Jews? Workers in Brazil? Rapturists? Iranians? The French, where it's politically correct to force Muslims not to wear the hijab? I'll tell you this for free: the things that get American PC-advocates' knickers in a knot mean little or nothing to most Australian workers, who have their own nitty-gritty standards of decency and fair play.

I'm not against political correctness. I practice and think it myself. Just recognise it for what it is: conformity enforced by an group with sufficient power to impose its set of standards on others who might not agree with that set of standards. Those with the power to coerce will think they represent decency; others may not.

__________

Edited in: David and Roger, I agree with you about Eliot's poetry. As I said earlier, it mostly leaves me fairly cold. Bits of Four Quartets do it for me, kind of. That's about it. I wouldn't take T.S. Eliot to a Buck's Night, that's for sure. And I can't abide Ezra Pound.

"I'm not against political correctness. I practice and think it myself. Just recognise it for what it is: conformity enforced by an group with sufficient power to impose its set of standards on others who might not agree with that set of standards. Those with the power to coerce will think they represent decency; others may not."

But Paul, if the definition is that broad, how come one never hears (or at least I never hear) the term applied to conservative efforts at enforcing a conservative conformity?

For example, you never hear people say that belief in God is "politically correct," although you sometimes hear atheism referred to as political correctness. I believe this is because atheism, though an extreme minority position on both the left and the right, is likely more common on the left than on the right.

I think what your definition does not acknowledge, but which is certainly true at least in the US, is that those who complain the loudest about the PC police tend to be the ones who represent conformity, and they tend to trot out the PC police mantra as a cry against minority incursions into their conformist majority.

I also think it muddies the issues to call mere speech and disagreement "coercion." So often you hear people complain about the PC crowd that wants to muzzle them and deny them their free speech rights, but when you look beneath the surface, all the "PC crowd" did was to exercise its own free speech rights. The PC cry often equates with "I'm all in favor of my own free speech but I have a bit of trouble with yours, especially when you use it to make arguments that show I'm wrong and I can't answer those arguments but I refuse to change my mind."

I do think that Right-wing conservatism forced on people would qualify as political correctness. To me the term denotes the enforcement of one group's standards of decency, whoever that group might be, on others. To be a good Nazi was to be politically correct in that context.

I've never said that mere speech and disagreement is "coercion". I do draw a distinction between free speech and discourteous serial agitprop harassment in inappropriate venues. "Exercising one's own free speech rights" can cover a very wide range of activities, many of which seem distasteful and actually turn others against those who abuse them. If I were to stand up during Holy Mass and yell "The Pope's a bastid for not allowing abortion!" -- well, free speech: yes. But...

I am happy to abandon the PC debate and celebrate our agreement on this.

David R.

Well, Paul, you are consistent in your use of the term political correctness but that is not how the term is actually used in my experience. No one from the left ever characterizes conservative views as politically correct, even though they are the conformist views that the right clearly seeks to impose on everyone.

I think, if it works both ways, from left to right and right to left, then the term really doesn't have any special utility. It's only useful (to the right) by deflecting attention from a group's inability to defend its own conformity in the face of arguments against it. Rather than discussing the appropriateness of its own view, they shift the argument to make themselves the victims. Rather than defend their conduct, they take umbrage at the fact that you are criticizing them and trying to tell them what to do.

It's a dodge, a fudge word. I think your mistake is trying to give PC some neutral definition that applies across the board, when in fact it's a loaded political term (in the US) that the right uses to debate the left.

Hear! Hear! Hooray! I think we're all getting seriously into the old sadistic necrophiliac bestiality there (aka dead-horse flogging).

I'm off to lunch at Kaiser Stub'n on a warm but lovely Sydney day! Weissbier! Pork crackling dumplings! Goulash! Ja!

__________

Roger, since I am from neither the left nor the right, nor American, but am in fact a Minoan-sacred-tree-worshipping matriarchalist, maybe I see things differently from those of the right and left. Nice talking with ya. Cheers!

Perhaps I'm flogging away at this animal corpse, but here's a take on PC from (perhaps) another angle. On the news today there was a woman who has a daughter with Asperger's syndrome who is an actress and has acted parts of people with Asperger's syndrome. The woman was arguing (though stating might be a better word since she advanced no coherent argument that I could see) that to have actors who didn not have mental problems acting the parts of people who did, was analagous to white actors blacking up to play black parts. She brought forward the case of Dustin Hoffman playing an autistic man in Rain Man, and I also thought, all by myself, of Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. I suppose I might have considerd King Lear, though I do see there would be problems in finding a actor who was sane for the first part of the play and mad for the second.

Now I say that this position as it stands is quite fatuous. How could an autististic man play the Dustin Hoffman part? H couldn't because he is autistic. His disability would prevent it. How could a delusional man play the Russell Crowe part. He couldn't. What exactly is the mental condition of Doctor Hannibal Lecter. Is it some sort of psychosis? Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang's M plays a child-killer and he argues powerfully that what he has is a mental condition which is not his fault. Is child molestation a mental condition and, if it is, should only a child molester be allowed to play the part? Well, you see where I am going with this.

I would go further. If blacking up is an unacceptable thing to do in 'Othello' then why is it OK for a black actor to play Henry V or Prospero? Actually, I can see an argument that the two things are not analagous, but I'll let it lie for the present. Should only a Scotsman be allowed to play MacBeth? Should Sarah Bernhardt have been allowed to play Hamlet?

Where does the PC come in? It comes in because the newscaster (is that what you call him?) did not explore this in any depth. He let the woman get away with it. Why? I would say it was PC. The same thing happened months ago when a muslim woman, dressed from head to foot in an all-enveloping garment that covered a lot of her face, was arguing that she should be allowed to teach primary school children in this costume in Britain because she would be allowed to do so in, say, Saudi Arabia. Now, according to me, her position was so absurd it was not worth two minutes of anybody's time to demolish it. And yet she was allowed three, four minutes of television time and nobody really got stuck in to say what the rest of us watching wanted to say, which was something like, 'Don't waste our time. You can't be a teacher in this ciountry in that costume and only a knave or a fool would imagine that you could?' I would say the failure to do that was PC.

Since the dominant discourse here and now in the UK is of the left it is true, as Roger says, that PC will refer to left leaning things, though it is now PC to demand ever greater state power of surveillance in many areas, most particularly having to do with children. The faces of schoolchildren are routinely blanked out on television footage, even if they are doing no more than playing in a school playground and I have been asked to submit to police checks to find out whether I have any convictions for child abuse, or if there has ever been an accusation that I have abused a child (e.g.smacked my own daughters) in order thst I may have permission to teach students whose average age is about sixty and who are never les than twenty-odd. Why? Because they may be 'vulnerable' and children are 'vulnerable' too. This fatuousness is PC but. I would say, it leans towards the right of state control.

Dear me, how I do go on. And did I ever smack my children? Would I? Do I look like a monster? Shall I tell you a secret. I once, in a public street, smacked a child WHO WAS NOT MY OWN.

John

You are Shakespeare's fool!

That of course is a compliment. You've said many things here that are self-evidently true yet, as you point out, most of us daren't say them.

There are all sorts of sacred cows these days.

I was told off at work the other day for calling Bombay Bombay instead of Mumbai. Do I have to order Mumbai Duck now?

The French call London Londres and Scotland L'Ecosse. What's the diff? The people who say such things can never tell you that in my experience, nor why you are "wrong", you just are, and there's an end to it!

Slightly associated with this issue is the one about "Human Rights". These days people are oh so willing to arbitrarily assert their "right" to all sorts of things. Duty? Responsibility? Nah - not ruddy likely.

Philip