Are Progressivism and Political Correctness Just Another Form of Absolutism? (regular, Murray)
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I'd welcome anyone who adheres to such beliefs to argue for them.
To provide some background, I grew up in the Fifties and Sixties, on a dairy farm, but just outside a small industrial community that was 98% white and about 75% Protestant. In those times, with the Second World War a fairly recent memory, you were not encouraged to challenge the absolutes of the day. Bible-reading and non-sectarian prayer were mandatory in school until I entered the eighth grade,
At eighteen, and strongly committed to my family's agrarian/small business Republicanism, I left for college, then on the cusp of the Vietnam-era upheavals. The campus conservative movement at the time was strongly committed to abandoning the blind traditionalism of the Old Right in favor of figures like Ayn Rand, Karl Hess and Murray Rothbard.
A lot of water has gone over the dam since those days; Like most people of a similar background, but more education, I quickly came to recognize that the real world was a lot more diverse than the ones in which I grew up and gained an education -- and that in a high-pressure, constantly-changing economy, you sometimes have to abandon principle in order to make a living.
I still respect a lot of the basics: Voltaire's "I disagree with what you say, but will defend your right to say it", Acton's observation that "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely" and Rand's dictum that "A contradiction means that one of the premises is wrong". But I long ago abandoned the unworkable dream of a "society absolutely free of coercion" or a return to a dispersed economy of small proprietors. The people I most admire today are men like David Stockman, George Will and the late Eric Hoffer -- people whose principal concern is the continuing concentration of power within the central government (with a generous amount of help from Madison Avenue and Hollywood).
And I cannot identify in any with with the collection of warm, fuzzy, trendy and contradictory platitudes called Political Correctness; even assuming that one can define a set of core values, this "philosophy" seems willing to change them on a regular basis in order to attract the most-malleable followers of the cause of the day.
But if anyone on the other side of the fence is willing to define and defend what I have to view as just another collection of absolutes -- and one apparently committed to the seizure and augmentation of centralized power, rather than its dispersal, please step forward.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 06-14-2015 at 05:30 PM..
Somethings aren't politically correct they are just correct.
Take for example our much maligned Texas schoolmarm who is alleged to have been hung on the alter of political correctness. Well let's see:
"I'm almost to the point of wanting them all segregated on one side of town so they can hurt each other and leave the innocent people alone. Maybe the 50s and 60s were really on to [sic] something."
Now for a teacher in an integrated public school system, such sentiments expressed so publicly raises not on the question of good judgement but also raises serious concerns about this teachers ability to treat black children in her classroom fairly.
That isn't about being politically correct that is about being correct. Correct in evaluating the fitness of an employee who has been charged with the responsibility of teaching black children.
I didn't grow up on a farm; I grew up in 60's-70's suburbia, but my grandparents on my mother's side were farmers in Indiana and in retrospect their agrarian values shaped me more than I ever realized.
They taught me to work, not by words, but by example. The agrarian impulse is the heart and soul of the US, going back to Thomas Jefferson and the anti-federalists. In 2015 it is still present.
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