The Retreat Of Reason:
Political Correctness And The Corruption Of Debate In Modern Britain by Anthony Browne:
Talk about making a wrong judgement.
I was given this book by a friend as a Christmas present. I thought the title somewhat pretentious, and wasn’t impressed that it was published by a group calling itself the ‘Institute For The Study Of Civil Society’. I was expecting a rant from a Little Englander, something that I wouldn’t agree with, coming across as spiteful, small minded, and risible.
Boy, was I mistaken on that one!
The book’s subject matter is something that we’re all aware of: Political Correctness, and its entrenchment in our society, which has made it wonderfully rewarding to be labelled as a victim, a status that grants to the porter special treatment, whereby criticism is restricted in spite of demonstrable merit.
This work probably comes across as haughty just because you couldn’t argue logically against the points made even if you wanted to.
I’m so glad that this is work that features concrete, real-life examples, rather than a generic thing that could be attacked as lacking in truth. It is absolute madness that the BBC deliberately chooses a panellist to lay the blame for a rise in HIV detections in the UK on teenagers not using condoms when the same report that they’re quoting these figures from tells us that over 90% of the cases came from immigrant men from Africa who already had the disease when they arrived. That’s ludicrous, deliberately preventing a person from commentating on the facts of a case.
The same is true with other things that are empirically measurable, and these are highlighted in the book. We’re told that white neo-Nazis are mostly responsible for attacks on Jews. Not true, as the numerous reports by both NGOs and government bodies show, yet our climate prevents us from naming the guilty. Same with myriad issues.
We all know this. We’ve all been in situations where we’ve wanted to make reasonable, salient points, yet automatically prefix our sentence with such things as “I’m not being racist/sexist but …”, switching to PC English as easily as a person operating a tannoy in a supermarket adopts the language that they wouldn’t use anywhere else. (“We kindly remind our customers that …”)
No, I got this book wrong with my immediate judgments. In effect, my condemnation of it was based on a programmed PC way of thinking. Because the author was (in my immediate perception) a middle-aged, right-leaning white man, I came to the conclusion that it must be a racist, spiteful polemic against a tolerant society and the poor minority groups that are small parts of it. Nothing could be a better example of our conditioned-to-think-in-a-PC-manner brains or, in fact, further from the truth.
I don’t see that this book will change the world but I’m pleased that someone put on paper what lots of us think anyway: In a climate where there is a premium on being a victim, there is a lot of unfairness and inaccuracy too. By all means we should help those who are oppressed, be mindful of the consequences of our actions and comments on others, and work for just outcomes, but not taken to the ludicrous degree where blame is incorrectly apportioned so as not to offend the guilty, avoid tackling the issues as they really are, and ultimately create a society where the much-vaunted freedom of speech is subject to PC approval.
Top book. Get it.