Political Correctness

The question came up today about PC (political correctness) and what it is really all about.

I stumbled onto the following video in which Michael Macy, a sociologist from Cornell, gave a talk on a panel discussion "The State, Social Norms, and Institutions" at the Origins Symposium.

In the video Macy points to three levels at which social groups organize:

1. Conventions - ad hoc agreements to facilitate interaction that self-reinforce by the advantages they give us. There is no coercion to enforce a convention.


2. Social Norms - ad hoc rules to facilitate interaction that are regulated locally usually through behavioural expectation which, if broken, will result in some punishment.


3. Law - defined rules to control interaction that are mandated by some central authority and enforced through explicit mechanisms.

It would appear to me that Macy's "dark norm" is what corresponds to political correctness, i.e. a social norm that is enforced but which has lost its attachment to an original need consequently it is no longer adaptive to the society's needs. This is why those who reject the norm treat it pejoratively, i.e. ridicule it and question those who "follow it blindly".



The "culture war" that broke out in the late 1960s in the US reflect a divergence in norms. The Baby Boom generation was raised by the conformist 1950s society where traditional conservative values prevailed, but these values where collapsing in the face of new realities:

• Traditional patriotism called for "my country right or wrong" and the idea that one owed blind obedience to central authority. This may have made sense in a traditional society of uneducated peasants where the top rungs of society were the only educated portion. But with widespread education in the 1960s, the first generation where a majority attended college, the social emphasis had changed to creativity and intelligence and questioning. This undermined traditional authority. The disaster of the Vietnam war posed a situation where a mindless war was being fought and lost but the traditionalists refused to allow debate or re-thinking the commitment.


• Traditional social relations, especially among the races, were becoming frayed as the civil rights movement broke out. The younger generation could see the hypocrisy of a "separate but equal" system of Jim Crow enforced that gave the blacks a clearly inferior position in eduction, the work force, housing, etc. Similarly, the supposedly God-given sexual roles began to unravel as educated females sought to enter the workforce but ran into silent barriers that limited their ability to rise within organizations.


• Traditional religion presented a simplistic vision of faith: the Bible was inerrant. That meant that science which taught a geology with billions of years of deep time and a biology that taught that life had been evolving to create the complexity of species had to be rejected. But with vastly more young people getting a college education, this rejection of science created contradictions which caused rifts. It was obvious that technology was delivering a materially richer society but religion was rejecting science and implicitly the advances of technology.

Political correctness was a bludgeon to beat back those with ideas that were seen as creating a new conformity at variance with "traditional values". There was a grain of truth in the complaint. Too often the new norms were zealously over-enforced. Appropriate levels between convention, norm, and law had yet to coalesce.

In that turbulent era of uncertainty, traditional conservative lashed back with the label of "political correctness" to paint their opponents as zealots who were imposing some kind of tyranny. When the new norms were seen as rising to the level of laws, the ire of the traditionalist was raised and the fury of the culture wars grew white hot.