The Anthropological Considerations Behind Political Correctness

Political correctness is the consequence of humanist anthropology. PC presupposes that man is a victim as seen in its usage of language to cover up the Christian notion as man as responsible. Because of the PC anthropology a language is created that reinforces “man the victim.” Illegal Immigrants become undocumented workers, “bums” become the “dislocated unhoused.” In both cases the idea of the person as being responsible for their negative status is replaced with the idea that the person is a victim of circumstance, or environment or of White people. The PC jargon is a jargon that belies a switch in anthropology from Christianity where men are responsible to humanism/Marxism where man is a victim of his environment. This denial of holding people responsible to established standards allows the “victims” to avoid moral opprobrium moving the moral opprobrium to anyone who would dare use non-pc language to label correctly the malfeasance in behavior of the person who is a bum, tramp, or illegal immigrant, etc..

All of this is a denial from Christian culture as inherited from the Puritans for example. Puritan culture was traditionally marked by a strong sense of sin and responsibility. The Puritans felt that man was responsible to God, that what he did he had to give an accounting. Therefore, in everything he did man had to be a responsible person. The anthropological shift, which Political Correctness gives cover for, now insists that man is not responsible for anything he does or is and instead of being responsible is now a victim.

With its use of language PC reinforces the denial that human behavior is fixed and immutable as is the reality in Christian culture and instead introduces a new anthropology where human behavior is malleable and is what it is in any individual not due to any fault (sin) in them but is due to their environment, their upbringing, or their being oppressed.

Political correctness in speech could not exist unless the anthropology was first being changed out.  As such Political Correctness is indeed an Orwellian Big Brother project to control thought but as in the service of the new anthropology that is foundation for its existence.

This has several implications

1.) Political correctness by turning people into victims and so removing any kind of moral responsibility for man’s behavior ends up eviscerating any idea of a coherent moral code except as that moral code is applied to anyone actually using language that rightly defines people as responsible.

Said slightly differently, Political Correctness, by flattening out the distinction between good and evil removes all sense of the irregular, strange, and odd. If all people are victims, oppressed, or non responsible, then no behavior can be labeled as out of bounds.

2.) The truth of the above works to make the chief sin to be the sin of noticing. Those who notice and label strangeness are now those who are the real criminals because they threaten the new anthropology. It is those who commit the sin of noticing who must be noticed and, if possible, experience cancel culture.

3.) All of this creates what has been called a “paranoid culture.” A victim anthropology, with a PC speech code to provide cover, works to turn every man into someone who is paranoid. According to John Caroll in his book, “Puritan Paranoid Remissive: A Sociology of Modern Culture,”

“For the paranoid, it is always someone else who is to blame. Misfortune, like all emotional states and influences, comes from without. Even sin is projected. Hence, the paranoid’s chronic fear of the unknown, his lack of curiosity and his one dimensional imagination. The paranoid accepts the existence of authority, but in a negative, punitive form. He lives the antithesis of personal responsibility, having no self. It is the external that is always guilty.”

So, again we see the connection between Politically correct speech which provides the cover for a anthropological shift from a Christian anthropology to a Humanist/Marxist anthropology where paranoia and blame shifting are rife because everyone is now  a victim except those who refuse to own this anthropology.

This new anthropology and the speech code that provides cover reminds us, in the words of Stanley Fish,

“Speech, in short, in never a value in and of itself but is always produced within the precincts of some assumed conception of the good to which if must yield in the event of conflict.”

Which is just another way of saying that even in speech codes there is no neutrality. In the case of Political Correctness it is produced within the precincts of the assumed conception of the good as now defined within the precincts of the Humanist/Marxist new anthropology.

In conclusion we note that when the Church gives into Political Correctness in any form it is at that point dining with the Devil and using a very very short spoon.