Why Grievances Grow
overcomingbias.com
overcomingbias.com
This is because the definition of "political correctness" is different from person to person. It conveniently drifts so people can think they're against some common problem when in reality some people use it to veil homophobia, and others to complain about postmodernism.
It's a convenient term, but useless. You call someone politically correct and they'll say no. You learn nothing about their position, you only get to engage in some petty name calling. Feels good, right? Maybe we should stick to the factual matters, the specifics of what legislation and culture is too "politically correct" for you.
What people mean by “political correctness.” … [is] their day-to-day ability to express themselves: They worry that a lack of familiarity with a topic, or an unthinking word choice, could lead to serious social sanctions for them.
It's about a careless word, a misinterpretation, an honest mistake or as little as stating a fact in a questionable context being able to ruin a person's life.
What topic? What word choice?
My point stands.
He then links to the full piece that contains this definition: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo....
To write an article about this concept, he needs some short phrase. My guess was that the issue you had with the article was not a lack of clarity, rather a lack of charity. Like "Social Justice Warrior", or "cultural Marxism", or other terms that people use predominately to refer to ideologies they disagree with, calling it "political correctness" makes it hard to to have a productive discussion with anyone who doesn't already agree. As someone who seems to take offense to the current phrase, I was hoping you might be able to suggest a less offensive alternative that would be equally clear.
Really? Perhaps the author could have dispensed with the use of the term altogether and just talked about...
> their day-to-day ability to express themselves: They worry that a lack of familiarity with a topic, or an unthinking word choice, could lead to serious social sanctions for them.
...and then referred to that as "their concern". But I think the author deliberately reached for the vague, inflammatory and loaded, but convenient name. I think it is simpler to ascribe this to a lack of desire to have a genuine conversation, than a lack of reader charity. Perhaps if the author was attempting to provoke genuine discussion, that attempt would be clear in their choice of words. I'm not particularly keen to write this article for the author in a clearer manner than the one they managed.
I'm sorry if that came across as accusing. I meant to imply that the author would benefit from more charitable language, not that the reader had failed to supply it. I now see that it could also be read the other way.
I think we agree.
It does seem that respect is lacking more and more these days.
The survey question reported in the so-called "Hidden Tribes" report, from which the article derives its statistics, does not explain what is meant by 'political correctness'. It means whatever the respondent thinks it means.
I would say that the report is actually pretty muddy on what Americans as a whole think about PC culture (no surprise, both because the term isn't well-defined and, more importantly, because studying PC culture wasn't the point of the Hidden Tribes study).
I would thus say it's pretty dangerous to try to extrapolate from Mounk's extrapolation of Hidden Tribes to conclusions about "grievance" politics.
The way I read the article is that yes in every society some speech is deemed acceptable and some is not. But 80% of respondents think the pendulum has swung a but too far.
"Nowadays, too many ordinary behaviors are labelled as sexual harassment"? 51/49 in favor, not 80/20.
"Many white people today don't recognize the real advantages they have"? 52/48 in favor.
"Many people nowadays are too sensitive to how Muslims are treated"? 49/51 against.
"Today's feminists fight for important issues"? 54/46 in favor.
Yes, a clear majority agree with "Political correctness is a problem in our country". But a similarly clear majority, plotted on the same graph, also agree with "Hate speech is problem is our country". And, again, "political correctness" isn't defined and is a fuzzy concept.
It sounds to me like yes, the problems like racism and sexism do exist, but the way they are used to bully and shame one's political opponents is unacceptable.
Or may be I simply have fallen into this exact trap: put my own meaning into a fuzzy article and then hastly proceeded to passionately agree with myself.
My objection is to the article's (really, two separate layers of articles!) claim to have clear empirical support for that premise, when the data is anything but clear.
E.g. 30% think PC has gone too far for topic A, 30% think the same about topic B and 20% think both topic A and B are negatively impacted.