Belle Waring on Jonathan Chait: Political Correctness Gone Mad OMG I’m Scared: Live from La Farine
It is a true fact that Jon Chait's extremely ill-advised New York Magazine article crossed my desk at the same moment that I was watching this equally ill-advised piece by Meg Perrett and Rodrigo Kazuo go by. They try to condemn an eight-person classical moral-philosopher reading list for various sins against leftism1. The interesting thing is that they get no traction whatsoever, even though they are here at the University of California Berkeley at what Jonathan Chait imagines to be the hotbed of American crazy leftism.
Belle Waring administers the smackdown:
Chait has about 75% of perhaps two points, but the wheat/arsenic-laced chaff ratio is bad. Very bad.... There is some element of pulling rank in questions about privilege.... [In] campus culture.... Chait cites examples of straight-up vandalism in which people’s signs were torn from their hands b/c they expressed the wrong views. This, plus the dude in the opening para, merits one full argumentative point....
[But] Jonathan Chait’s whining about “Political Correctness gone mad,” or, as I like to call it:
people criticizing me forcefully, in such a way as to call my liberal bona fides into question, and pretty much just calling me racist, when actually I was only adjacent to racists, and people should look into these things more carefully before they say something that might hurt someone’s feelings.
The shutting down last year of the storied magazine The New Republic, aka “The Even The Liberal.” When the magazine folded, Jonathan Chait wanted everyone to dab at their eyes with folded, clean linen handkerchiefs and mourn the death of A Higher Journalistic Calling. Instead, many writers reminded people... Marty Peretz more or less called... Palestinians... animals and savages.... The Bell Curve... how then-editor Andrew Sullivan pushed that to the forefront of American political discourse... and then claimed that the vigorous debate... was retroactive justification for the choice, and proved... Murray was one of the most prominent social scientists of his day, rather than the racist loon he was?... So Chait didn’t get the glorious send-off he wanted. He got a lot of fully deserved hits coming his way. So what lesson has he learned from this? That people should stop saying mean things about him on Twitter....
98% of what people angrily claim is “Political Correctness” is just manners. Politeness. If something I were saying at a dinner party offended another guest and my host explained why, I would stop saying that thing, in all likelihood. I myself used to call things “retarded” all the time when I was a kid.... I will occasionally call something retarded.... It’s not an appropriate thing to say; will you please correct me when I do it?... Does it make me angry because the word “cisgender” exists now? No, because I’m not an asshole.... Is this killing me? No....
Re-reading I see I haven’t addressed like 12 other weaksauce points, such as that outrage farming is a moneymaker (that’s why everyone’s always hiring queer disabled minority men to… wait, WTF?)
And also the complaining about trigger warnings AAAAAGH. Just don’t read Shakesville, no one’s making you!.... I, personally, have wanted and needed trigger warnings.... At times... I have wanted John to tell me in advance about a book, whether there’s rape in it or not, and then I won’t read it right then. My home did not suddenly become a den of feminist groupthink in which John was forbidden to speak...
1 The list of authors not containing women, People of Color, or (supposedly) LGBTQ* representatives, but instead being composed of white males from the five imperial powers of France, Germany, Italy, America, and England--never mind that the authors don't seem to know that Michel Foucault did not come from America; that Plato and Aristotle did not come from Italy; that Aristotle at least half came from the city of Atarneus, in what is now Turkey, hardly an imperialist power; that Plato, Aristotle, and Foucault would today be coded as LGBTQ*; etc. It may all be a joke.
