Few people like political correctness. Yet even its greatest detractors will, in mixed company or in front of an audience, use words and ideas that have a politically correct blessing. In this it resembles the rules of manners, and in fact political correctness can best be described as a system of manners pertaining to race, gender, culture, and other labels a person is born into. Like manners, political correctness is concentrated among the upper classes and the intelligentsia, while almost entirely absent among the poor and less educated. It is also mainly a product of America, perhaps because of our strong convictions that everyone deserves their fair chance, regardless of their sex, color of skin, and so on and so forth.
To one of the uninitiated-a foreigner, say, or someone from a working class background-political correctness can pounce in mid-conversation with bewildering speed and vehemence. I remember many years ago mentioning the colored writers of the Harlem Renaissance in a conversation at a party. A young woman was visibly upset by my using the word "colored." In vain I tried to explain that this is what the writers called themselves, that "colored" at one time was an accepted word and not at all derogatory. The young woman had the best of intentions, but political correctness had closed her mind to any broader interpretations.
I'm certainly not the only one to have noticed foibles with our elaborate system of manners. It's been a fruitful topic for social novelists like Thackery and Austen, fodder for comedians down the ages, and an absorbing game for the upper classes. But manners serve a serious purpose, and we probably need them. They can paper over quite serious differences in worldviews, and allow us to communicate respectfully with people not of our own background. Indeed the respectability bequeathed by manners is so important that universities and other institutions have been known to dismiss faculty simply based on an errant idea or offhand slur (any comment, my dear Watson?).
When it comes to literature, however, the strictures of political correctness must be put aside. There are various reasons for this: the writer is attempting to create natural dialogue and situations, which are not always politically correct; modern writers often employ a familiar tone, as though the reader were an intimate friend, between which manners do not intrude; writers come from different countries and backgrounds where English is used differently and manners are different; and many classic writers lived at a time when views on race, gender and class were very different. Were they alive today, Joseph Conrad would certainly not title one of his novellas The Nigger of the "Narcissus", and Mark Twain would not have used the word in Huckleberry Finn. But when they lived the word "nigger" was simply a slang term, and the reader must bear this in mind.
Rudyard Kipling appears at the top of most politically correct hit lists, and his brand of British imperialism is difficult to forgive. A pretty good sample can be found in this stanza from his poem "The Ladies":
Now I aren’t no ‘and with the ladies, For, takin’ ‘em all along, You never can say till you’ve tried ‘em, An’ then you are like to be wrong. There’s times when you’ll think that you mightn’t, There’s times when you’ll know that you might; But the things you will learn from the Yellow an’ Brown, They’ll ‘elp you a lot with the White!
The eight brief lines are offensive to so many groups of people, on so many levels, with such feckless good will, it's almost breathtaking. What the reader should bear in mind, though, is that this is one of Kipling's "Barrack Room Ballads", poems written in the dialect of the common British soldier, and with a common soldier's outlook. Kipling himself had much more refined views. Although he works in some unsavory comments about different races in general (the Irish, for example, he declares excellent soldiers but incapable of government) he was fascinated with other cultures, especially India. In Kim or stories like "Without Benefit of Clergy", he portrays Indians with as much sympathy and understanding as his English characters.
Kipling was the most talented writer of his generation, and the first author writing in English to receive the Nobel Prize. He is still read in spite of being politically incorrect, though not necessarily in the classroom. And contemporary writers who buck the PC movement (Tom Wolfe for example) still have a wide readership. Academic presses may be leery of publishing such books, but independent small publishers still take risks on talented writers, and the larger houses know that a controversial work means big sales. Political correctness may hold sway over your cocktail party, but your bookshelf is a different matter. And that is probably for the best.
- Joel Van Valin