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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HAS POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GONE MAD?  
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Sean Sayers
December 11, 2024
Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
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_ This new book offers an analysis of one of the right wing's main
talking points. _

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_Has Political Correctness Gone Mad?
Interrogating a Right-wing Conspiracy Theory_
Tony McKenna
Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 9781350429574

We are all familiar with the charge that some policy or decision is a
case of ‘political correctness gone mad’, part of the rhetoric of
the ‘culture wars’, but we may not have thought a great deal more
about it. Through a detailed analysis of attacks on a variety of left
movements and agendas, Tony McKenna dissects some of the ideas and
rhetorical strategies of this style of criticism, and traces its class
basis and perspective. Although _Has Political Correctness Gone Mad?
_appears under the Bloomsbury Academic imprint and its arguments are
carefully thought out and rigorously pursued, it is written in a
polemical and colourful style. It is hard hitting and highly readable.

McKenna discusses a wide range of cases that have made headlines in
recent years in the popular media. He starts with some controversies
about the school syllabus which has been a particular focus for
charges of ‘political correctness gone mad’. The _Daily Mail_, for
example, denounced a new school syllabus in 2007 because it would make
‘every lesson politically correct’, by teaching in maths and
science, ‘key Muslim contributions such as algebra and the number
zero,’ and in literature classes experiences of migration, such as
Zadie Smith’s novel _White Teeth_, or _Brick Lane_ by Monica Ali.
Schools, it was said, had come to resemble ‘vehicles for
multicultural propaganda’ and classrooms turned into ‘laboratories
of for politically-correct thought’ (4).

As McKenna points out, such views presuppose a view of Britishness as
essentially white and Protestant. But teachers are working in a world
in which immigration is part of the experience of many pupils.
Moreover, As McKenna says, there is a more general conception of
knowledge at stake. ‘Why not teach Zadie Smith alongside
Shakespeare?’ (5)

It is not those who teach a curriculum that is chock-full of the
colourful and diverse experiences the modern world provides who are
problematic. Rather it is the dull, dismal hacks – mostly
middle-aged white men with rather red faces – arguing against the
expansion of knowledge and experience in the classroom in favour of
some cauterized conception of ‘Britishness’ that acts as barrier
to curiosity. (5)

(The aside between the dashes here is not untypical of McKenna’s
style, which is at times excessively polemical and, in my view,
detracts from the important points that he is making).

Another case discussed at length concerns the repercussions of the
recent Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement which spread internationally
in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by a policeman in
Minneapolis. In response to the objection that ‘all lives matter’,
McKenna shows how this erases the way in which black people have been
discriminated against for centuries, well described in this book with
an informative history of racism.

In England, the BLM movement led to an angry crowd pulling down a
statue of Edward Colson, a major Bristol slave trader, and throwing it
into a nearby river. The right-wing press suddenly leapt to the
defence of Colson and his statue, attacking the demonstrators for
trying to erase British culture and British history, and as another
case of PC gone mad. In a recurring pattern, the perpetrator is thus
portrayed as the victim.

The statue was a monument to a certain type of culture, a certain type
of history – that much should be acknowledged. A historical moment
in which a small and wealthy elite were able to enshrine and glorify
its own ability to truck in human flesh […] But the destruction of
the statue at the hands of protestors represents a historical moment
in its own right. The right of generations of the oppressed to carve
out a very _different_ type of world with a very different set of
standards and expectations. (92)

These issues are not new and they are not, as the right claims, the
product of a new conspiracy of the radical left with ‘global
elites’. There have been repeated local calls in Bristol for this
statue and other memorials of Colson to be removed.

Moreover, it is not an isolated issue. The street I live in is called
Havelock Street. It was named after General Havelock, a long forgotten
figure of Britain’s imperial past. In 1857, he was responsible for
putting down the Indian Mutiny – or, as the Indians call it, their
First War of Independence. One of the three statues in Trafalgar
Square is of him. Soon after he was elected Mayor of London, Ken
Livingstone proposed replacing it with a statue of someone more in
keeping with contemporary political sentiments and of greater
contemporary relevance. This unleashed howls of protest from the
_Daily Express_, the _Daily Mail_ and the right-wing of the
Conservative Party. The statue is still there. Again, the idea that it
should be replaced was not the result of some paroxysm of PC sentiment
on Livingstone’s part. There is a balance to be found between
preserving historical memory, even of less savoury aspects of our
history, and adapting and changing with the times. But accusations of
PC gone mad are not sensitive to this.

A more contentious case that McKenna deals with at length is the
treatment of trans women demanding rights to be treated as women and
allowed to use women’s facilities. This has been at the centre of an
extraordinary storm of controversy. The idea that trans women are
really men, it is said, and the demand that they have access to
women’s spaces is an egregious case of PC gone mad. These arguments
have come not only from the right-wing press, but also from writers
like Germaine Greer and JK Rowling, who insist that gender is defined
by a person’s biology and that trans women are not really women.

McKenna and others who defend trans rights reject this view. He gives
an eloquent and passionate defence of a wider conception of gender. It
is not a biologically given characteristic with which a person is
born, but rather something chosen, a fundamental expression of their
freedom and personhood. From the right comes the familiar charge that
the idea of trans rights is an example of PC gone mad, and supporters
of trans rights are accused of conducting a witch hunt against people
who express other ideas, like Greer and Rowling – silencing them,
banning them from speaking on campuses, ‘cancelling’ them.

These issues are difficult and attitudes are highly polarised. They
demand careful treatment that is sensitive to both sides of the
question. It is wrong, it seems to me, to lump Greer and Rowling
together with the _Daily Mail_ and the right-wing press. The different
sides of the argument need to be explored more calmly and more
carefully. But that is not McKenna’s way. This is a highly polemical
and partisan work – that, for better and worse, is its character and
its value.

These are just a few of issues and arguments that are dissected in
detail in _Has Political Correctness Gone Mad?_ It also covers
right-wing attacks on the Me Too movement, on the campaign of
denigration and political assassination unleashed against Jeremy
Corbyn, it deals with numerous examples of islamophobia and racism
where those who have criticised them are accused of PC gone mad in a
way that typically inverts perpetrators and victims, and of
originating in a conspiracy of the radical left and ‘global
elites.’ McKenna shows that there is no truth in this. Many other
cases are analysed in the book as well.

In an illuminating and useful analysis, McKenna maintains that these
sorts of arguments ultimately descend from Nietzsche. He rejects the
usual story of the history of European civilization as one of
increasing enlightenment and progress. Nietzsche inverts this story.
Modern liberal and equalitarian ideas, he maintains, are a product of
the overthrow of the masters by the slaves and the triumph of slave
morality. Liberal values of equality, the Christian celebration of
meekness and mildness express the slave point of view. They are not
progress. They are anti-human and anti-life.

Like those who criticise the left for their PC attitudes, Nietzsche
thus inverts the usual story of liberal morality as enlightenment and
progress – but with this vital difference: Nietzsche’s philosophy
is explicitly elitist. It makes no bones about speaking from the point
of view of the masters. Recent right-wing attacks on the left for its
PC attitudes claim to be aimed against the global elite and its dupes
on the far left, and to be speaking on behalf of ordinary people (even
though they serve the interest of the ruling class). They are a form
of populism, though McKenna doesn’t use this term.

In these ways, _Has Political Correctness Gone Mad? _criticises
pernicious forms of argument that are all too familiar but have not
been given sufficient critical scrutiny. It is an important and
illuminating book.

Sean Sayers is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Kent. He has written many works from a Hegelian‑Marxist perspective,
most recently, _The Making of a Marxist Philosopher_ (2024). He was a
founder of _Radical Philosophy_ (1972) and _Marx and Philosophy Review
of Books_ (2010). ([link removed])

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