Has Political Correctness Gone Mad?
Interrogating a Right-wing Conspiracy Theory
Tony McKenna
Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 9781350429574
We are all familiar with the charge that some policy or decision is a case of ‘political correctness gone mad’, part of the rhetoric of the ‘culture wars’, but we may not have thought a great deal more about it. Through a detailed analysis of attacks on a variety of left movements and agendas, Tony McKenna dissects some of the ideas and rhetorical strategies of this style of criticism, and traces its class basis and perspective. Although Has Political Correctness Gone Mad? appears under the Bloomsbury Academic imprint and its arguments are carefully thought out and rigorously pursued, it is written in a polemical and colourful style. It is hard hitting and highly readable.
McKenna discusses a wide range of cases that have made headlines in recent years in the popular media. He starts with some controversies about the school syllabus which has been a particular focus for charges of ‘political correctness gone mad’. The Daily Mail, for example, denounced a new school syllabus in 2007 because it would make ‘every lesson politically correct’, by teaching in maths and science, ‘key Muslim contributions such as algebra and the number zero,’ and in literature classes experiences of migration, such as Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth, or Brick Lane by Monica Ali. Schools, it was said, had come to resemble ‘vehicles for multicultural propaganda’ and classrooms turned into ‘laboratories of for politically-correct thought’ (4).
As McKenna points out, such views presuppose a view of Britishness as essentially white and Protestant. But teachers are working in a world in which immigration is part of the experience of many pupils. Moreover, As McKenna says, there is a more general conception of knowledge at stake. ‘Why not teach Zadie Smith alongside Shakespeare?’ (5)
It is not those who teach a curriculum that is chock-full of the colourful and diverse experiences the modern world provides who are problematic. Rather it is the dull, dismal hacks – mostly middle-aged white men with rather red faces – arguing against the expansion of knowledge and experience in the classroom in favour of some cauterized conception of ‘Britishness’ that acts as barrier to curiosity. (5)
(The aside between the dashes here is not untypical of McKenna’s style, which is at times excessively polemical and, in my view, detracts from the important points that he is making).
Another case discussed at length concerns the repercussions of the recent Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement which spread internationally in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by a policeman in Minneapolis. In response to the objection that ‘all lives matter’, McKenna shows how this erases the way in which black people have been discriminated against for centuries, well described in this book with an informative history of racism.
In England, the BLM movement led to an angry crowd pulling down a statue of Edward Colson, a major Bristol slave trader, and throwing it into a nearby river. The right-wing press suddenly leapt to the defence of Colson and his statue, attacking the demonstrators for trying to erase British culture and British history, and as another case of PC gone mad. In a recurring pattern, the perpetrator is thus portrayed as the victim.
The statue was a monument to a certain type of culture, a certain type of history – that much should be acknowledged. A historical moment in which a small and wealthy elite were able to enshrine and glorify its own ability to truck in human flesh […] But the destruction of the statue at the hands of protestors represents a historical moment in its own right. The right of generations of the oppressed to carve out a very different type of world with a very different set of standards and expectations. (92)
These issues are not new and they are not, as the right claims, the product of a new conspiracy of the radical left with ‘global elites’. There have been repeated local calls in Bristol for this statue and other memorials of Colson to be removed.
Moreover, it is not an isolated issue. The street I live in is called Havelock Street. It was named after General Havelock, a long forgotten figure of Britain’s imperial past. In 1857, he was responsible for putting down the Indian Mutiny – or, as the Indians call it, their First War of Independence. One of the three statues in Trafalgar Square is of him. Soon after he was elected Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone proposed replacing it with a statue of someone more in keeping with contemporary political sentiments and of greater contemporary relevance. This unleashed howls of protest from the Daily Express, the Daily Mail and the right-wing of the Conservative Party. The statue is still there. Again, the idea that it should be replaced was not the result of some paroxysm of PC sentiment on Livingstone’s part. There is a balance to be found between preserving historical memory, even of less savoury aspects of our history, and adapting and changing with the times. But accusations of PC gone mad are not sensitive to this.
A more contentious case that McKenna deals with at length is the treatment of trans women demanding rights to be treated as women and allowed to use women’s facilities. This has been at the centre of an extraordinary storm of controversy. The idea that trans women are really men, it is said, and the demand that they have access to women’s spaces is an egregious case of PC gone mad. These arguments have come not only from the right-wing press, but also from writers like Germaine Greer and JK Rowling, who insist that gender is defined by a person’s biology and that trans women are not really women.
McKenna and others who defend trans rights reject this view. He gives an eloquent and passionate defence of a wider conception of gender. It is not a biologically given characteristic with which a person is born, but rather something chosen, a fundamental expression of their freedom and personhood. From the right comes the familiar charge that the idea of trans rights is an example of PC gone mad, and supporters of trans rights are accused of conducting a witch hunt against people who express other ideas, like Greer and Rowling – silencing them, banning them from speaking on campuses, ‘cancelling’ them.
These issues are difficult and attitudes are highly polarised. They demand careful treatment that is sensitive to both sides of the question. It is wrong, it seems to me, to lump Greer and Rowling together with the Daily Mail and the right-wing press. The different sides of the argument need to be explored more calmly and more carefully. But that is not McKenna’s way. This is a highly polemical and partisan work – that, for better and worse, is its character and its value.
These are just a few of issues and arguments that are dissected in detail in Has Political Correctness Gone Mad? It also covers right-wing attacks on the Me Too movement, on the campaign of denigration and political assassination unleashed against Jeremy Corbyn, it deals with numerous examples of islamophobia and racism where those who have criticised them are accused of PC gone mad in a way that typically inverts perpetrators and victims, and of originating in a conspiracy of the radical left and ‘global elites.’ McKenna shows that there is no truth in this. Many other cases are analysed in the book as well.
In an illuminating and useful analysis, McKenna maintains that these sorts of arguments ultimately descend from Nietzsche. He rejects the usual story of the history of European civilization as one of increasing enlightenment and progress. Nietzsche inverts this story. Modern liberal and equalitarian ideas, he maintains, are a product of the overthrow of the masters by the slaves and the triumph of slave morality. Liberal values of equality, the Christian celebration of meekness and mildness express the slave point of view. They are not progress. They are anti-human and anti-life.
Like those who criticise the left for their PC attitudes, Nietzsche thus inverts the usual story of liberal morality as enlightenment and progress – but with this vital difference: Nietzsche’s philosophy is explicitly elitist. It makes no bones about speaking from the point of view of the masters. Recent right-wing attacks on the left for its PC attitudes claim to be aimed against the global elite and its dupes on the far left, and to be speaking on behalf of ordinary people (even though they serve the interest of the ruling class). They are a form of populism, though McKenna doesn’t use this term.
In these ways, Has Political Correctness Gone Mad? criticises pernicious forms of argument that are all too familiar but have not been given sufficient critical scrutiny. It is an important and illuminating book.
Sean Sayers is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kent. He has written many works from a Hegelian‑Marxist perspective, most recently, The Making of a Marxist Philosopher (2024). He was a founder of Radical Philosophy (1972) and Marx and Philosophy Review of Books (2010). (http://www.seansayers.com)
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