‘Mansplaining’ the return of political correctness: Neil Macdonald

Neil Macdonald on the current trends in politically correct discourse (there is a line being sensitive in one’s use of language and being over-sensitive as some of his examples indicate):

Employers or school officials, faced with tens of thousands of sneering tweets, can be forgiven for thinking the quickest way out is to sacrifice the sinner, even if the sinner hasn’t really sinned.

Students who follow this crypto-salafist orthodoxy despise the concept of free, protected speech (except, obviously, their own).

On campuses, many still tend to follow the thinking of the feminist scholar and activist Catharine MacKinnon, who argues that free speech is just a weapon in the patriarchal arsenal.

In reality, this view is not very new at all. Back in the early 1990s, the head of student government at Stanford University declared “We don’t put as many restrictions on free speech as we should.”

Of course, there are others who think that way, too.

The Bush-era neoconservatives who clamped down on speech and stepped up surveillance in the name of security after 9/11 are one example.

The Canadian government, with the broad provisions in its Bill C-51 allowing it to order the removal of what it calls “terrorist propaganda” from the internet, is another. (Define terrorism? Canada’s justice minister says the public should just “look it up.”)

As the social critic and author Robert Hughes put it in his brilliant 1993 book The Culture of Complaint, “paleo-conservatives and free-speech therapists are both on the same wagon, the only difference being what they want to ban.”

But re-reading Hughes’s book I am confident of one thing: in another generation or two, language that now seems so inclusive and tolerant, words designed to create a “safe place” for discourse, will undoubtedly seem jarring, if not insulting. Language police will be insisting on new argot.

My grandchildren will no doubt someday stare agape at their parents for using the term “people of colour,” and inform them that any reference to colour is divisive and ugly.

Or that “transgender” implies that there was ever any validity to “gender” in the first place.

The urge to control other people’s speech is atavistic. It will never lessen, and my guess is the technology to enforce it will only grow more sophisticated.

‘Mansplaining’ the return of political correctness – World – CBC News.