The effect of Political Correctness on the art of our civilization

a reply to: Byrd

Censorship has been around forever, sure, but political correctness is a different form of it. Though it is similar to all brands of authoritarianism, it employs a different guiding principle, namely, that language can lead to offence, exclusion, discrimination and hatred, and only some anointed class of intellectuals can provide us with the correct usage. It turns out this principle can justify all sorts of abuse, exacerbating the very problems it seeks to avoid.

a reply to: MichiganSwampBuck If that was truly their goal, they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Public works of art from the classical and Hellenisic periods of Greece, republican and imperial Rome, the Renaissance and so many other times and places was so much better than the crap we get now. Modern architecture is aso hideous; boring boxes of steel, glass and concrete with little to no decoration.

originally posted by: CitizenZero
a reply to: Byrd

Censorship has been around forever, sure, but political correctness is a different form of it. Though it is similar to all brands of authoritarianism, it employs a different guiding principle, namely, that language can lead to offence, exclusion, discrimination and hatred, and only some anointed class of intellectuals can provide us with the correct usage. It turns out this principle can justify all sorts of abuse, exacerbating the very problems it seeks to avoid.

As I've said, it's been around forever.

As a modern example, you might remember George Carlin's 1966 performance of "Seven words you can't say on television?" (which you couldn't back then... Buzzfeed has a list of 68 of them that you can't say today) - although you hear them in movies, they're often bleeped out even today in television... and certainly in live-streamed television and radio.

Heck, back in that time you didn't even hear those words in most of the porn films!

Because those words, as your response said, led to offense (you never said them in front of a woman - and a man could get punched for that kind of language here in the South), it was a mark of exclusion (in spite of most modern movie scripts, even most criminals didn't use that language. It marked you as a pimp or worse), people discriminated against those who used those "seven words" (business people didn't want to be represented by someone who'd let off an F-bomb when they were upset) and turned you into a real pariah.

The label "political correctness" is just an attempt to weaponize a practice that's been going on for thousands of years in all human cultures and in many forms.

And there's all kinds of examples out there that you can easily find, dating back even to ancient Egypt (there's some fine examples of this relating to Akhenaten) where (as you put it) some word or representation led to " offence, exclusion, discrimination and hatred, and only some anointed class of intellectuals can provide us with the correct usage"