I first heard the term political correctness when we were looking at colleges with our daughter. It was a term raised by other parents. I didn’t know what it referred to. Now it’s so common it’s just called PC. I just think of much of it as manners, and at the root of manners is kindness.
Kids tease each other mercilessly. Some of that becomes so concentrated on particular children we call it bullying. Words can, and do hurt.
I admit that sometimes the search for euphemisms seems useless, where the new term simply picks up the meaning of the old leading to a search for still newer ones. But there is a difference between terms that describe a problem and terms that invest that problem with an insult. It is a problem to be born deaf, blind, or retarded. But there are wonderful, decent, loving people with every one of those problems, and many who are very creative and effective.
And in virtually every case, other people can make that condition more or less severe or disabling. Race, religion, national origin, gender, of course, are only problems to the extent that others make them so. But why would we do that when we could reach out to the very folk that others belittle for such nonsensical reasons? Why when we could be helpful? Why when we can make our surroundings more pleasant rather than more hateful?
Isn’t that the message that all of our faiths teach us? Doesn’t gratuitous meanness simply make hypocrites of us all?
Is our culture so competitive that everything has to be turned into rankings, insults, failures, and, to use Trump’s favorite term, losers? I know that people justify that to encourage others to be strong. But what is strength? Is strength simply the ability to survive the taunts of others? Don’t we have enough challenges without taking each other down.
There is another possibility, that our own egos are so tender that we can only feel good by putting others down. That life is just a set of opportunities to insult everyone except our friends, and perhaps those people who would know that our taunts are insincere jokes.
It is interesting that President Obama cultivated just such a hard shell at his mother’s urging because of their experience in Indonesia. But Obama has never endeared himself to the taunters here. Clearly racial taunts and racial disdain aren’t for the purpose of strengthening people – they are designed to hurt, as if by hurting others we justify ourselves.
Just the opposite: hurting others undermines our own claims on this world. We are in the holiday season. This is the time when Christians are encouraged to find peace and good will toward all men. Jews embody that message most strongly at the Passover, closer in time to Christian Easter. Both of us are exhorted to love our neighbors. Similar prayers are in Muslim worship. We all share our origins in the story of Abraham. And one of the most crucial problems of this world is for all of us to find ways to live peacefully together.
Ultimately that is what good manners are about. Peace on earth; goodwill toward men – even though one of our friends was arrested not far away for wearing a t-shirt that said exactly that. Let’s start making this a better world. There are demons enough in this world without demonizing each other.
Steve Gottlieb is Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor of Law at Albany Law School and author of Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and the Breakdown of American Politics. He has served on the Board of the New York Civil Liberties Union, and in the US Peace Corps in Iran. Steve maintains a blog: constitutionalismanddemocracy.wordpress.com
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