Christina Hoff Sommers is an avowed feminist and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She’s spent a lifetime visiting college campuses. Recently, upon her arrival at Oberlin College, Georgetown University and other campuses, trigger warnings were issued asserting, in her words, that her “very presence on campus” was “a form of violence” and that she was threatening students’ mental health. At Oberlin, 30 students and the campus therapy dog retired to a “safe room” with soft music, crayons and coloring books to escape any uncomfortable facts raised by Sommers.
The problem for students and some professors is that Sommers challenges the narrative, with credible statistical facts, that women are living in a violent, paternalistic rape culture. As a result, she has been “excommunicated from the church of campus feminism” in order to protect women from her uncomfortable facts. This prompted Sommers to say, “There’s a move to get young women in combat, and yet on our campuses, they are so fragile they can’t handle a speaker with dissenting views.” I wonder whether there will be demands for the military to have therapy dogs and safe rooms in combat situations.
The University of New Hampshire published a “Bias-Free Language Guide,” which “is meant to invite inclusive excellence in (the) campus community.” Terms such as “American,” “homosexual,” “illegal alien,” “Caucasian,” “mothering,” “fathering” and “foreigners” are deemed “problematic.” Other problematic terms include “elders,” “senior citizen,” “overweight,” “speech impediment,” “dumb,” “sexual preference,” “manpower,” “freshmen,” “mailman” and “chairman.” For now, these terms are seen as problematic. If the political correctness police were permitted to get away with it, later they would bring disciplinary action against a student or faculty member who used the terms.
What I will submit is that Political Correctness is an ANTI-morality. It does not teach its adherents what constitutes a good life. It has no equivalent to Eudaemonia, and likely in most cases explicitly rejects “normative” moral systems.
But what is left? Attack. That is all that is left. If you cannot live your own life in peace because you believe nothing–you don’t believe in the ideals of “manliness” or “womanliness”, or fathering or mothering, or believe in America, or God, or Christ, or even Goodness of any sort–then all you can do is detract from the lives of others.
Egalitarianism is the creed that all people are equal, but it is not the creed that all CREEDS are equal. If it were, it would be tolerant. As it is, it is radically INtolerant. It reject and punishes anyone who believes in notions like the relative worth of one morality versus another. It rejects and punishes anyone who thinks moral and spiritual growth are possible, since that would necessarily imply that some people are morally better than others–which is obviously, plainly, blatantly the case, which is why the propaganda and violence, to hide this fact.
This is why Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor wanted to immolate Christ.
This is why, to take a vastly different, but relevant example, Dr. Frank N. Furter had to kill Eddie in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”. It has been some time since I’ve seen this movie–25 years at least–but I remember Meatloaf projecting an unambiguously masculine energy, in a world where all such distinctions were erased. All of these things, all of these signs, are all around us, of moral decay masked as moral superiority.
I just yesterday saw some informational buttons which had Male, Female, and Other.
And one has to ask: who is helped? No one. Who do I help, really, refusing to use the word American? Homosexual? Mothering? Elder?
This is a system formulated by and for drooling, philosophically imbecilic children. There used to be a grandeur and respect that attended being an “elder”. “Mothering”, in a positive sense, was understood as one of the most important tasks possible.
We lose all the good that came with these words when we lose the words. And we gain nothing. This whole thing is a system whose sole function is to allow anti-social, emotionally disconnected nihilists to feel the thrill of moral superiority doing nothing but advancing violence into the world under the banner of peace.