Political Correctness and the Destruction of Social Order

Chronicling the Rise of the Pristine Self

Howard S. Schwartz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783319398044
• eBook ISBN: 9783319398051
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book develops a psychoanalytic theory of political correctness and the pristine self, which is defined as a self touched by nothing but love. It explores the damage that political correctness can do to social order. Applications include the breakdown of social capital, the financial crisis, and Occupy Wall Street. Long an issue for conservatives, alarm over political correctness has now spread to the liberal side of the political spectrum. As Schwartz argues, all have reason to be concerned. The psychology that underlies political correctness has the potential to be extremely destructive to social organization on every level. Schwartz discusses the primitive roots of political correctness and, through the use of case studies, shows its capacity for ruination. The book focuses on a transformation in the idea of the self, and specifically the rise of the pristine self. The problem is that, in truth, the world does not love us. This puts the pristine self at war with objective reality.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and the Author(s) 2016

Howard S. SchwartzPolitical Correctness and the Destruction of Social Order10.1007/978-3-319-39805-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Hedgehog is Embarrassed by his Riches

Howard S. Schwartz¹ 

(1)

Oakland University, Jackson Heights, New York, USA

 

End Abstract

The fox, Isaiah Berlin, famously said, knows many things. The hedgehog, by contrast, knows only one important thing. But, of course, whether the thing that the hedgehog knows is really important is not something the hedgehog, whose bias in this matter defines his life, can, with any objective authority, say.

And so when it happens, after several decades, that life simply erupts with instance after instance that validate his obsession, and whose importance nobody even thinks to deny, the hedgehog may find himself gratified, but may also come into possession of a range of emotions that are unfamiliar and, however pleasing, more than a little bit weird.

This is my third book on the psychological processes underlying political correctness. For the previous two books, when it came time, after the substantive work had been done, to write the introduction, I looked for contemporary illustrative events and ideas that would attract the reader’s attention. There was always something, and I had no doubt that there always would be. But what I am finding now is that, far from there being an issue of finding something, there is a problem of sorting my way through everything, and this stuff already has readers’ attention. Something new happens every day and every one of them is fascinating enough to qualify for a place in my introduction. The question of selection, then, is no longer one of weighing the virtues of various candidates, but of arbitrarily picking a date, selecting the current outrage, and resolving to stick with it, as a way of moving on to the other matters that need my attention in finishing the book.

The point is that political correctness is everywhere, and even liberal publications like The New York Times and The Atlantic, that previously ignored such matters, are now beginning to give them serious attention. For example, in running up to Halloween, which is tomorrow, The Times devoted a 1500-word article to the way college campuses, on the lookout for the brand-new crime of “cultural appropriation,” have been dictating what can and cannot be worn. (Johnson 2015). Summing up:

As colleges debate the lines between cultural sensitivity and free speech, they are issuing recommendations for Halloween costumes on campus, aimed at fending off even a hint of offense in students’ choice of attire. Using the fairly new yardstick of cultural appropriation—which means pretending for fun or profit to be a member of an ethnic, racial or gender group to which you do not belong—schools, student groups and fraternity associations are sending a message that can be summed up in five words: It is dangerous to pretend.

For me, what is particularly gratifying, and even new, is the way the commenters on these articles, almost unanimously, find these developments absurd and even outrageous. One representative view was from “Peter,” who gained 263 recommendations for writing that

So people can’t dress up as a mariachi band, even though mariachi bands exist and members of mariachi bands often wear sombreros and ponchos? Can a person dress up as a cop or a nurse if they aren’t actually cops or nurses? Are Americans not allowed to wear Dia de los Muertos-style facepaint and outfits because they originated in Mexico? Are Mexicans not allowed to participate in American Halloween parties dressed as Marty McFly?

I consider myself pretty culturally sensitive, but this is cultural hypersensitivity run amok. It’s Halloween—for one night a year you just dress up like someone you’re not. It’s that simple.

But the point I want to emphasize was summed up by “Manhattan William” who said: “People are losing their minds.”

People are indeed losing their minds, I aver, but the sign of this is not primarily the apparently exponential growth of examples; that could just be the fashion. It is the fact that the nature of the examples themselves seems to represent a shift of the whole society toward the fringes of madness.

When I say madness I am not just talking about garden-variety neurosis. There has never been any shortage of that, and it has not been entirely unsalutary. I am talking about something else, and there is no better index of it than what I call the level of ambient rage. Rage is different from anger. Anger is directed, and bounded. Rage is diffuse and unbounded. If it seems to have a focus at one point, it can have an entirely different one at the next. Most importantly, it has become impossible to predict what will set people off. Who would have thought, for example, that the idea of Halloween costumes would occasion such fury?

In this book, I am going to try to gain some understanding of this madness though the use of psychoanalytic theory, but first a little bit of physics may be useful in providing an analogy.

Everybody knows that energy is to be had from the transformation of matter at the level of atoms and molecules. That’s chemical energy, and of course we see it whenever we drink a cup of coffee or start our car. But we also know that a quite different level of energy is brought out when an atomic bomb is set off. That’s nuclear energy.

Nuclear energy is released when the nuclei of atoms are split and the energy that previously held the nuclei together is unbound. Of course, the amount of energy in a single atomic nucleus is not much, but there are many atoms and when you release the energy holding together a zillion of them, you get quite a bang.

That’s where we are today, except what is being split is not atomic nuclei but human minds. So when we say that people are losing their minds, we really mean it.

The occasion for this has been what I call the rise, or the establishment, or the normalization, of the pristine self. This is a self that is touched by nothing but love. The problem is that nobody is touched by nothing but love, and so if a person has this as an expectation, if they have built their sense of themselves around this premise, the inevitable appearance of something other than love, indeed the appearance even of any other human being, blows this structure apart. That is where we are today.

Where the idea of the pristine self has come from, how it and its decomposition have become manifest, and what the effects of this are likely to be, are the subjects of this book. I cannot offer a happy prognosis here, except to say that nothing lasts forever. This, too, shall pass and when it does those who are left will need to know how what happened to them happened. So I am writing a chronicle now. Hopefully, when the time comes, it will be of use.

This is a work of what I call psychoanalytic phenomenology. My subject matter is my own mind. I try to understand the minds of others by finding them within my own. As I have said, my theoretical framework for this is psychoanalytic, and that calls for a word of explanation. The credibility of psychoanalytic theory is, of course, not universally granted. It has, however, a unique suitability to the study of political correctness. There is clearly an element of irrationality in political correctness. It is a form of censorship without a censor; we impose it on ourselves. Yet, it keeps us away from the reasoned discussion of social issues which everybody can see are important, consequential, and desperately in need of wide-ranging analysis. It does so through an emotional power that is rarely gainsaid and which anyone can see is ultimately against everyone’s interest; yet it prevails nonetheless. If that is not irrationality playing itself out in the social domain, what is?

Yet where does it get that power? This is a question that is rarely posed—it is, after all, politically incorrect to do so—but it is no less important than the totality of the issues that political correctness has obscured. And if we do not approach this question through psychoanalytic theory, what, exactly, shall we approach it through? The rational understanding of irrationality is what psychoanalysis was developed to accomplish. In fact, more than any specific theory that is what psychoanalysis is. It is in that spirit that we will undertake this inquiry.

—Jackson Heights, New York

Reference

Johnson, Kirk. 2015. Halloween Costume Correctness on Campus: Feel Free to Be You, but Not Me. New York Times, October 30.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and the Author(s) 2016

Howard S. SchwartzPolitical Correctness and the Destruction of Social Order10.1007/978-3-319-39805-1_2

Begin Abstract

2. The Pristine Self: Psychodynamics of the Anti-Bullying Movement

Howard S. Schwartz¹

(1)

Oakland University, Jackson Heights, New York, USA

End Abstract

The anti-bullying movement came upon us like a summer storm. All of a sudden, everywhere was the belief that bullying is everywhere, and that it is intolerable. Schools all over the place were moved to stamp it out. The US President got out in front of this by calling a White House Conference. Under enormous pressure, and with the highest sense of urgency, laws were proposed and passed in 49 states (Clark 2013). To be sure, there is somewhat less publicity now, in 2015, than there was a couple of years ago, but that probably just means that the movement has become institutionalized. Certainly there can be no doubt about its social power.

But where has this power come from? There is no reason to believe that it was generated as a response to an increase in the incidence of bullying. There is no evidence of that, and in fact what evidence is there seems to indicate that the level of bullying has declined over the last two decades.

Writing in a publication of the Crimes Against Children Research Center of the University of New Hampshire, David Finkelhor (2013), summarized the findings from youth surveys that had tracked bullying and related phenomena. ¹ His conclusion:

The surveys that reflect change over the longest time periods, going back to the early 1990s, consistently show declines in bullying and peer victimization, some of it remarkably large. The more recent trends, since 2007, show some declines, but less consistently.

This suggests that the interesting question is not so much what to do about bullying, but about how the idea developed that bullying is everywhere, and that it therefore is a phenomenon that something needs to be done about.

In what follows, I am going to try to make sense of the movement against bullying. In doing this, I will make the assumption that this movement is of a piece; that whether the focal points are workplace bullying, or school bullying, these various concerns are driven by the same dynamics. I think this is a reasonable assumption, given that they all arose at the same time and have the same general orientation.

For purposes of theory development, however, I will look at only one area of the anti-bullying movement, which is the concern with school bullying. This idea invokes the image of damage to children, and this is where I believe its emotional center is located, and where it derives its power.

Looking at the matter this way presents us with an interesting paradox, which is that school bullying, in practice, encompasses individuals who, in previous times, would not have been considered children at all. For example, a New York Times article on the relationship between bullying and suicide, focusing on the case of Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi, relies on a study of “students between the ages of 11 and 22” (Schwartz, J 2010).

I submit that it is the treatment of people well into their twenties as children that provides us with our first clue about the nature of the dynamics in question. The anti-bullying movement treats people as children, whether they are, in any realistic sense, or not. It does not seek to limit its efforts to those areas most central to its concerns, but rather expands to areas outside of its focal point and bring its concerns along with it.

I will try to show that this would tend to perpetuate childhood and establish it as the normal way of living life. The corollary of this would be the diminution of adulthood.

Looking at the matter this way suggests that the anti-bullying movement is not actually about bullying, but about something much broader; and that the way to understand it is to get at the broader phenomenon of which it is part.

My claim is that the anti-bullying movement is an avatar of political correctness; one of a range of social processes that go under that label. It is, moreover, an avatar of a very particular sort. Political correctness, by itself is, a very controversial matter. It has its power, but that power is often contested. Almost anyone, for example, will acknowledge the category of things representing political correctness run amuck. Being against bullying is not ordinarily subject to that kind of check. To the extent that it arises from, and brings with it, the kind of dangerous dynamics which almost anyone will be able to associate with political correctness, it can do so in a way that is very difficult to oppose. If it is an avatar, it is an avatar of a very dangerous sort.

As I have said, it aims to protect children, but it also reinforces childhood and establishes it as the normal way of living life, at the expense of adulthood. But there is a powerful irony at work here. Bullying is a perfectly normal way for children to relate to one another. The cure for it is growing up. Adulthood is the only way that bullying can be recognized as bullying, and thereby gotten over. The result is that the logic of the anti-bullying movement leads to a condition in which bullying is not eliminated, but, through the prolongation of childhood, made universal.

The Pristine Self

The key to my analysis is the proposition that the anti-bullying movement offers as normal what I will call the pristine self. The pristine self is an idea of the self as not having a boundary around it; it is not thought to need one. ² A person necessarily encounters other persons, but in the model of the pristine self such experiences with others are exclusively a matter of being loved. We form a boundary when we need to defend ourselves against the negative feelings that others have toward us. In an interpersonal universe made out of love for us, such boundaries would not develop. But while this universe of love sounds appealing, and certainly the idea that we can hold ourselves entirely open to the feelings of others sounds appealing, such appeals are superficial. The boundaryless, pristine self, properly understood, poses dangers to society that are very serious, and ultimately these are what I would like to bring to our attention.

My plan will be to first explain the psychological underpinnings of political correctness, then to show that the anti-bullying movement expresses that psychology and how political correctness and the anti-bullying movement establish as normal the boundaryless, pristine self. Then, I want to show the negative consequences of all this for social organization. Finally, I will illustrate some of these points through analysis of a case of bullying and anti-bullying in the USA.

Oedipal and Anti-Oedipal Psychology

As I have said, the key to understanding the anti-bullying movement is political correctness, and the key to understanding political correctness is what I have called anti-Oedipal psychology (Schwartz 2010). But the best way to understand anti-Oedipal psychology is to understand the Oedipal psychology that it is defined against. That is a relatively easy matter, because it is based on a story that will be familiar to many, Freud’s adaptation of the myth of Oedipus, which here will be slightly adumbrated for our use.

Freud tells us that, in the beginning of psychological life, we do not experience ourselves as separ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: The Hedgehog is Embarrassed by his Riches
• 2. The Pristine Self: Psychodynamics of the Anti-Bullying Movement
• 3. Putnam’s Paradox: Diversity, Destruction of Community, and Anti-Oedipal Psychology
• 4. Analysis of a Racism Hoax at Oberlin College
• 5. Anti-Oedipal Dynamics in the Sub-Prime Loan Debacle: The Case of a Study by the Boston Federal Reserve Bank
• 6. Analysis of the British Riots of 2011
• 7. What was the Occupy Wall Street Protest a Protest of?
• 8. Conclusion: Christakis at Thermopylae
• Backmatter