Political Correctness - The Retreat of Reason

Anthony Browne argues in The Retreat of Reason that political correctness, which classifies certain groups of people as victims in need of protection from criticism and allows no dissent to be expressed, is poisoning the wells of debate in modern Britain.

"Anthony Browne ... provides a swingeing attack on the way 'political correctness' has corrupted public debate in Britain, and does it with panache."
A.C. Grayling, New Statesman, 23 January 2006

'Members of the public, academics, journalists and politicians are afraid of thinking certain thoughts'. Political correctness started in academia, but it now dominates schools, hospitals, local authorities, the civil service, the media, companies, the police and the army. Since 1997 Britain has been ruled by political correctness for the first time. Anthony Browne describes political correctness as a 'heresy of liberalism' under which 'a reliance on reason has been replaced with a reliance on the emotional appeal of an argument'.  Read Sample Chapters and Reviews and Readers' Comments.

From Anthony Brownes defining chapter: "Brownes definisjon: Political correctness is an ideology that classifies certain groups of people as victims in need of protection from criticism, and which makes believers feel that no dissent should be tolerated."

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"The rise of political correctness represents an assault on both reason and liberal democracy. It is an assault on reason, because the measuring stick of the acceptability of a belief is no longer its objective, empirically established truth, but how well it fits in with the received wisdom of political correctness. It is an assault on liberal democracy, because the pervasiveness of political correctness is closing down freedom of speech and open debate"

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"The politically incorrect arguments aren’t engaged with; they are just stated in a way that everyone will understand means it is unacceptable because it is not PC. ‘He believes women win fewer Nobel prizes because of genetic differences between men and women’ is deemed a conclusive rebuff to the evidence that there are differences to men’s and women’s brains. When Larry Summers, the president of Harvard University, mildly suggested innate differences in ability between men and women may account for the differences in achievements at the summits of academia, he was met with walk-outs, denunciations and demands for resignation by people who offered no actual proof that he was wrong."

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"Believing that their opponents are not just wrong but bad, the politically correct feel free to resort to personal attacks on them. If there is no explicit bad motive, then the PC can accuse their opponents of a sinister ulterior motive—the unanswerable accusations of ‘isms’. It is this self-righteous sense of virtue that makes the PC believe they are justified in suppressing freedom of speech. Political correctness is the dictatorship of virtue.
The end result is that the politically correct build impregnable castles around their beliefs, which means, like royalty, never having to justify and never having to apologise. As the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, a champion of free thinking, wrote:

Castles in the air—they are so easy to take refuge in. So easy to build, too."

Gode definisjoner er ofte et godt middel til å unngå å la seg dupere av alle de politiske kommentatorer, partier som har engasjert seg i kampen mot folks sunne dømmekraft, ved å manipulere med språket. Se for eksempel Britannicas definisjon av racism