But an end to political correctness in the arts and entertainment cannot come from the right. It can come only from the left. All the organs of entertainment and art in America, from Broadway to Hollywood, through Netflix , the museums and onward, are entities of the cultural left. They are run and populated by the cultural left.
They have the pertinent power. When conservatives write or speak against limits on free speech, what they say is heard by the left as mere reaction, a cover for intolerance, and so dismissed.
. . .The turnaround might begin—just one idea—when some powerful cultural entity produces a documentary featuring great figures of entertainment and the arts saying how they feel about limits to artistic expression. What their personal experience with political correctness is, how it has limited what they do, what the implications are. It would require significant cultural figures who are not identified with the right to speak their peace.
That hypothetical scenario would be part of what I call vomiting the Social Justice authoritarianism out of the system. Meanwhile, those on the left who agree with Noonan on this issue end up in the Intellectual Dark Web.
Political Correctness is the left’s greatest invention. Having no logical limits, it’s a bottomless well from which outrage can be endlessly drawn. Its lack of limiting factor is both a strength and a weakness. There is virtually no action or comment for which an imaginative individual can’t find a plausible excuse for righteous indignation. Even statements that were politically correct yesterday can elicit feigned outrage today as leftists jockey for position.
But even left-leaning professors have become terrified of their progressive students. Stand-up comics are refusing to perform on college campuses. People live in fear that evidence of heretical thought will be discovered in their old tweets. How long will even the most hard-core progressive want to live in a virtual police state in which their own thoughts may betray them at any moment?
How does she define “political correctness?” I don’t have a wsj sub atm.
Link: https://outline.com/eTdFV4 (thanks outline!)
Noonan is being rhetorical of course, because it’s a very naive hope. It is expecting a kind of epiphany of hypocrisy which encourages people to resolve a tribal double standard with a general prohibition but a personally beneficial exception, and then abandoning one and embracing the other as a single, universal norm. Sometimes this happens, but the risk is that you’ll get the wrong norm!
So, for example, what she describes has already happened, and if anything only made things worse.
Several prominent comedians, mostly left of center, have already made such arguments in public over the past few years, to no avail. These include Jerry Seinfeld, Mel Brooks, Dennis Miller, Gilbert Gottfried, Chris Rock, John Cleese, Kevin Wilson, Austen Tayshus, and Vince Sorrenti.
Indeed, the responses from progressive commentators were almost uniformly dismissive, doubling down on propriety of highly restrictive woke speech norms. They often went so far as to call the complaints a right-wing fantasy, panic, and myth, and asserted that the real problem with comedy was the terrible type of people who tend to be prominent comedians.
At any rate, arguments about ‘artistic freedom’ seem to be another species of the order of out-of-date beliefs older conservatives have about progressivism, as if the liberalism of the 60’s had frozen in place. “Oh, the left tends to care about free speech, a free press, free inquiry and open debate in the academy, the right of artists to free expression without (conservative) social restraint or compelled obedience to bourgeois norms and mores.”
As I keep pointing out, it’s been 50 years now, and it’s not like that anymore. Those were the circumstantially expedient arguments about a movement gaining power, struggling against social rules used against it. Now that this movement is entrenched in power, everything has reversed, and it naturally wants to use social rules against its opponents, and so favors their application and implementation everywhere, to include against journalists, academics, and yes, even ‘artists’ too.
Having to argue for free speech in general by exploiting a special sympathy for the needs of members of a peculiar and particular professions is a pretty lame way to go about it. Either we all benefit from freedom, or just they do.
Consider this line: “The left will listen only to entities of the left who say: Enough. Art needs air, and that air is freedom.”
A arguing “please stop” to B makes A to the right of B, hence insufficiently “of the left”, and on the wrong side of history.
And does art actually need air? Consider all those Renaissance masterpieces produced under strict restraints. The freer artists got, the worse the art became.
The art world (and not just art by any means) currently suffers from it’s own Social Failure Mode and thrives best when artists face the equivalent of ‘ideological sumptuary laws’ which channel their energies and desire for fame into developing ever higher levels of skill and aesthetic accomplishment. This is only possible is they are prevented from competing via ever more obnoxious signals of commitment to the high-status belief system, and/or by social gamesmanship and gaining entry into the cliques and cabals which control access to the field.
To a progressive, the idea that a lot of people ‘hate’ political correctness merely translates as meaning that most people are openly or secretly deplorable bigots who would create even more social injustice were it not for the woke SJWs’ constant efforts, which merely confirms what the progressive already believes about the world.
What Noonan has not done is explain why these people are correct in their hate of PC, and why progressives are wrong on some fundamental level to insist on the speech policing.
Right on cue: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/jan/19/is-standup-comedy-doomed-future-of-funny-kevin-hart-louis-ck-nanette
Art wasn’t better in the Renaissance.
Thank you Handle.
There’s a Charleton Heston speech to the NRA in 1999 about the culture war. He decries political correctness yet at the same time has this to say about a controversial rap song (lyrics by Law and Order regular Ice-T) released in 1994:
“…What I did was against the advice of my family and my colleagues. I asked for the floor. To a hushed room of a thousand average American stockholders, I simply read the full lyrics of “Cop Killer” — every vicious, vulgar, instructional word:
‘I got my 12-Gauge sawed-off. I got my headlights turned off. I’m about to bust some shots off. I’m about to dust some cops off.’
It got worse, a lot worse. Now, I won’t read the rest of it to you. But trust me, the room was a sea of shocked, frozen, blanched faces. Time/Warner executives squirmed in their chairs and stared at their shoes. They hated me for that. Then I delivered another volley of sick lyrics brimming with racist filth, where Ice-T fantasizes about sodomizing the two 12-year-old nieces of Al and Tipper Gore:
‘She pushed her butt against my –‘”
One persons freedom of speech is another persons hate speech.
Peggy Noonan claims a certain Randy Newman album “couldn’t be made today.” This is silly. There are many examples of songs being banned from the radio in Newmans time. I dont see any of this as being something new that is sime imminent threat.
I don’t know how to link. The Heston speech is here. The more things change…
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/charltonhestonculturalwar.htm
The openness on the ‘left’ to ‘free speech’ was only a way to break down the restrictions it didn’t like; and once it did that, there is the imposition of restrictions it does like. The question is whether that can go back the other way, opening up to close down again with other values in place of the identity politics values. And which values would those be?
Related: https://arcdigital.media/two-studies-at-the-same-college-16-years-apart-show-less-openness-to-free-speech-8083c0a45874
What’s wrong with being on the IDW? I don’t know how much he makes on it but Joe Rogan numbers his podcasts and they’re in the thousands. It doubtless serves as support for his live shows. The IDW practitioners seem to think they’re at the vanguard. I’d be hard pressed to argue with ’em.
There’s quite a lot of nominally “conservative” film directors, actors and producers. It does occur to me that we might not have quite the left-leaning entertainment industry if not for the 1950s Red Scare – after the Blacklist, it became a marque of honor for people like Dalton Trumbo.
The Coen Brothers make pretty good fun of this state of affairs in “Hail Ceaser!”.
The problem isn’t so much left-right as it is “no center”.
I think a path back to sanity starts with satire. For about a decade, in Hollywood the hacker and scientist characters have mostly been black; the fast-talking petty criminals are increasingly Asian. Satirically heightening those tropes would help people see the distortion.
She’s right you know.
I think a lot of the left turned off by SJWs are people that liked the benefits of some “noble lies” but wanted to fill their lives with “unprincipled exceptions” to the logical extension of those noble lies. However, the longer we preach those noble lies, the more sacred they become in everyones hindbrain, and the more changes in demographics reward rather then punish extensions of those lies principles, the more people are going to apply those noble lies to their logical conclusions and strike down “unprincipled exceptions” like “free speech” which logically becomes “hate speech”.
It’s hard to see what a rejection of SJWs by the left would look like. Fundamentally, you have to prove they are wrong, because if they are right then anything is justified in the name of justice. But proving they are wrong requires convincingly using facts that are beyond the Overton Window (which they control). I see no evidence of how the IDW plans to change the Overton Window (so that a person can state something openly and not lose their job, not hide opinions on the web from the inquisition). I see a lot of speculation, but ultimately it’s all very defensive and pleading. Asking instead of taking.
Politics is downstream of culture. Art influences culture, as do comedians.
“The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (I’m just a sweet transvestite, from, transsexual, Transylvania ah ah ah …), perhaps the film I’ve seen most often (certainly most often in theatre), was likely a much bigger influence on me and many late/boomers.
I was thinking of watching it again .. but cringing at the idea.
Christians, especially pro-life Christians, are beginning, slowly, to organize and support a real counter-culture, counter to the PC establishment. The “PC religious excesses” will only lose culture wars when opposed by some other culture.
(Building a Border Wall has become a heresy to the PC-god, and PC-believers.)
The Benedict Option suggests Christians getting stronger in their own, more Christian communities.
The Academy is another huge influencer on culture, and likely one that can be adjusted much much more easily by politics. Thru lawfare and changing laws.
For many decades now, there has been an “open secret” discrimination against Republican Professors. Those institutions should ALL lose their tax exempt status, immediately. Conservatives need to use the anti-discrimination laws that already exist, but use those laws against the colleges who have been discriminating.
More focus needs to be on tax-advantaged Harvard, Stanford, Yale, rich orgs that discriminate. There should be a lot more lawsuits against Google. See how the gov’t Nat. Labor Board said Google’s lawsuit was legal (in Feb, 2018):
https://www.wired.com/story/labor-board-rules-google-firing-james-damore-was-legal/
That lawyer should be fired, and the internal decision overturned. These are the small anti-Gramscian changes in the power institutions that need to happen. But probably won’t, without a bigger revolution. Like more than 70 pro-life Rep Senators, and a large majority of Rep (Conservative) House Representatives, and a real conservative President.
I don’t see that happening.
I see the possibility of yanking the tax-exempt statuses of college — but more because Harvard is a huge tax-exempt hedge fund, which also has a college, rather than because of its poisonous discrimination and hypocrisy.
All should focus where they think they can make the most positive change — tho my own focus here with Neo is a pure pleasure of “infotainment” and thinking and a bit of light writing. Rather than any of the harder work that “somebody needs to do”, before it’s too late.
Ha, here on Askblog with Arnold Kling, rather than on TheNewNeo.
http://www.thenewneo.com/
Getting my Sunday infotainment mixed up.
Look up Neo, you’ll probably like her. More culture, less econ.
I suspect that the excesses of PC will die off of their own accord when the problems it addresses cease to exist. Some of what is going on right now is that exact thing happening – people running out of actual racism to confront and so focusing on “microaggressions”, and getting ever more hypersensitive to perceived sleights.
Trump and the alt-right don’t help though. Just when it seems like the left is going overboard in seeking out instances of racism to confront, along comes a group of people explicitly stating that black people are genetically inferior and it should be totally ok to discriminate against them. This merely serves to confirm the left’s worst suspicions about the right – that it’s full of closet racists so they have to be hypervigilant about signs of racism in other people’s speech.
There are too many people with a vested interest in finding ever more minute vestiges of racism to let it go. People in government agencies, universities (grievance studies professors), and in corporate America (graduates from grievance study programs working in HR departments) all have salaries that depend on racism staying alive and well. And their activities will spark resentment that keeps movements like the Alt-Right alive and well.
Eventually less PC artists and studios are more profitable. That is how extreme PC ends.