National Post

Saturday, November 20, 1999

When political correctness ruled in the late '80s, a distinctive acronym emerged to describe authors such as Shakespeare, Dickens and George Orwell -- DWEM, meaning Dead White European Males. Some believed that the books we regard as classics lacked "relevance," and that the great Caucasian patriarchs of literaturewould soon be swept off high school reading lists, to be replaced by writers who were non-white, non-male and non-dead.

That upheaval never arrived. In fact, the whole idea of "political correctness" -- a catch-all for attempts to sanctify minority viewpoints and censor opposing ideas -- is in its death throes. Apart from a handful of professors, how many people still use such locutions as "womyn," "European hegemony" or "phallocentrism" -- except to make fun of them?

Yet few of PC's enemies realize they have triumphed. Denouncing political correctness has become such an obsession of conservative writers that they now seem reluctant to admit the crusade is over. This year, being the 50th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell's 1984, is a good moment to celebrate, particularly so since much of the credit for the victory of free expression belongs to that grand DWEM George Orwell himself.

In fact, since the publication of 1984, the critics of political correctness have found it difficult to express their views of politically motivated censorship without using Orwell's vocabulary. Dust the English language for his fingerprints and you will turn up such Orwellian neologisms as "thoughtcrime," "doublethink" and, of course, "Big Brother." These terms have entered the language as a convenient shorthand for denouncing censorship and propaganda, and Orwell's evocative idiom has allowed PC's critics to capture the moral high ground in the battle against censorship, even in the face of PC's fiercely moralistic program.

In Orwell's time, "correctness" referred not to the modern obsession with race and gender but to views that conformed to a Marxist-Leninist analysis of history. In March, 1921, for instance, at the Bolsheviks' 10th Party Congress, anarchistic elements were accused of perpetrating "massive political incorrectness" for resisting the party line. At the same congress, Lenin managed to push through a ban on all factions within the party. From that point on, political incorrectness wasn't a badge of the independent thinker: It was an act of sedition.

Many of the West's intellectuals quickly bought into this. They had become so enamoured of the Soviet Union as a free and prosperous workers' paradise -- what Orwell called "the Russian myth" – that the mere act of criticizing Gulag communism or of debunking Russian propaganda was seen as a crime against historical progress.

Orwell's political correctness and its more recent manifestation share a crucial similarity: Both orthodox Marxist-Leninism and orthodox anti-racism/anti-sexism/anti-homophobia demanded of their followers a huge psychological investment. Both claimed a right to transcend the normal rules of reasoned debate. " 'The truth,' has already been revealed," as Orwell described this mindset, "and the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly aware of 'the truth' and merely resists it out of selfish motives." Its adherents had to ignore inconvenient facts or falsify new ones in the service of the "truth."

"The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism," wrote Orwell. "The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background."

Of course, Orwell was required to invent a language to describe this species of intellectual dishonesty. The task of the modern free-speech champion is simpler: He can denounce Big Brother while standing on Orwell's shoulders, summoning up all the demons of the book's nightmare world: the Ministry of Truth, the telescreen, Room 101.

Defenders of political correctness have argued that it is absurd to compare modern PC speech codes with totalitarian thought control. Orwell would have disagreed: "To be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes."

He intended 1984 not only as an indictment of totalitarianism but as an exposition of the theory of propaganda he articulated in an earlier essay, Politics and the English Language. There he wrote: "Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style ... [This] style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy ofclear language is insincerity."

This is why individuals who would normally have no interest in the squabbles that go on in university English departments have bristled under the PC idiom -- not only because it confuses and intimidates, but because political correctness enforces a mode of speech that is sterile and humourless. Today, in some circles, quotas have been renamed "diversity programs"; censorship has been renamed "protection and empowerment of minority voices"; and meritocracy has been renamed "propagation of the academic oligopoly." People of common sense (a group that, as Orwell noted many times in his essays, includes few intellectuals) are quick to understand that such encroachments on plain expression have no logical stopping point; and that every book, speech, comment, joke, argument, song or television show that is thought to undermine the pious project of anti-discrimination is threatened.

Not that Orwell would have had anything to say against fighting discrimination. The point is, his attack on totalitarian thought affected all facets of life. He believed that intellectual dishonesty inheres in every zealously held ideology. While communism, fascism, religious fundamentalism and orthodox liberalism differ greatly from one another, they all treat their cause as more important than the need to report the truth or the right of heretics to have their say.

Many of the greatest enemies of contemporary political correctness have been dedicated liberals. They have opposed censorship and intellectual dishonesty not out of sympathy for reactionary attitudes, but because they have learned Orwell's lesson well: Censorship and intellectual dishonesty eventually corrode the moral and intellectual force of the zealot's cause.

Since the dawn of the civil-rights era, in fact, no institution has hurt the cause of anti-racism and anti-sexism more than universities and governmental agencies in their attempt to impose a liberal orthodoxy. If the average person is told that every aspect of his society is racist, when his own common sense tells him this is not true, then he will come to believe (wrongly) that racism is merely an invention conceived to manipulate him. Or if the average person is told that all cultures are morally equal, when his own moral compass tells him this is plainly wrong, then his suspicion of other cultures will be compounded, because he resents the lie.

1984 did not prevent such lies from being told -- but the book's legacy did hasten their debunking. This is why the 50th anniversary of 1984 is worth celebrating. This single novel changed the ideological landscape so thoroughly that, a half-century later, its lessons are still being applied to debunk propaganda and undermine censorship.