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I found this nice little video lecture on the History of Political Correctness today. It is very illuminating even though I dont necessarily agree with all of it. It essentially blames the PC movement on The Frankfurt School of Philosophy and through that Marxism. Worth watching if you have 20 minutes to waste. It also claims that PC is a german invention, those dirty Germans just come up with all kinds of evil stuff huh? ::)
It's interesting because this is the second place that I've heard the Marxist Frankfurt School pop up as the source of the political correctness “movement”, if there is such a thing.Before about a month ago, I hadn't heard of the thing. Maybe more people are waking up to it, including myself.
I first heard of the Frankfurt School about two years ago when I wrote a paper on Post-Modernism for a historiography class. I think that more people are starting to push back against the PC movement (yes, I think it is there). One of the things that strike me is how pervasive Marx and Marxism are. His thinking seems to be behind a lot of the freedom stealing initiatives of the last 150-200 years. The ways in which his thought can be interpreted is nothing short of amazing.I have read both The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital and they are very slick books. If you accept the basic Marxist premise that property and its possession is the controlling factor in historical progression you can make all kinds of logical leaps. The PC movement differs from classical or Leninist Marxism in that they substitute intellectual for physical property as the medium of exchange. They essentially follow the methods of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and gang except they seek to collectivize and control knowledge and thoughts, intellectual capital if you will, instead of the physical capital. The PC/Post-modernists gang wants to collectivize thought the way Stalin collectivized the farms of the Soviet Union. The way they do this is by infiltrating and gradually taking control of the academy and thus the sources of Knowledge. They don?t seek abrupt revolutionary change, instead they seek to gradually change the way people think. The tragedy is that it seems to be working. The Post-modernists stifle originality and subvert the system such that school is not about gaining access to the methods of creating new knowledge but rather about learning to regurgitate the thoughts one is programmed to accept. The ray of light in this is that they are fairly unsuccessful at infiltrating the hard sciences such as physics and engineering although they have been quite successful in the life sciences. The hard sciences are not very susceptible to their methods because natural laws do not care about ideology, they just are. I think they have been more successful in the life sciences because biology and medicine have many more debates within them. There is no engineering equivalent of ethical debates in medicine or the creation vs. evolution argument of biology.
