Political correctness is showing its first cracks after more than thirty years of dominance in the Western world: Robert Hughes’ essay “The Culture of Whining”, which we can take as a chronological starting point, was actually released in 1993. A brilliant art critic, he immediately made clear a key element: when we say “politically correct,” we mean corrected by politics and its desires. There is nothing neutral about the obsession with (sometimes real, but almost always perceived) discrimination against minorities that has come through language, the real instrument of power. Marxism has adapted to the new times. The class struggle was buried by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Therefore, it was necessary to turn it into a tribal struggle against bourgeois society. The tribes included women, immigrants, homosexuals, and so on. Not everything should be rejected, politically correct people also point out real problems. But the solution, which was to introduce special laws for each group, was worse than the problem, because it gave the state, and therefore politics, the right to discriminate: yes, let’s reward this battle; not that other one, let’s ignore it. Too many exceptions, read about it Giovanni Sartori, destroy the rule of law and centuries of liberal battles. On a trivial level, at the level of the media, political correctness has become a deadly concentration of fanaticism and blatant ignorance. It doesn’t take much, one wrong word, to be sentenced to life imprisonment as a scoundrel. The reasoning (so to speak) applies even to the past: and therefore to all racists, from Thomas Jefferson to David Hume. Let’s remove them!
However, now the mechanism seems to be jammed, let’s see if this is a temporary phenomenon or the end of an era. Here are some recent news. Let’s take the books. Gen. Roberto Vannacci dominates the ratings with the now bestselling “The World Upside Down,” an essay in which he affirms the common man’s point of view (although even the common man may have stupid or misguided points of view) on issues politically correct, from immigration to family. Do we want to remember the only comparable case in numerical terms? We’ll have to go back to the Oriana Fallaci trilogy (three million copies sold). Do we instead want to remember who is the queen of the top ten? J. K. Rowling, LGBT spokesperson, horrified by “terrible” claims like sexuality is a biological issue first and a cultural issue second. The same is supported, among others, by Alice Cooper, symbol of rock transgression, and Carlos Santana, symbol of rock spirituality. Cooper said that gender ideology is primarily harmful: “You have a 6-year-old boy who just wants to play, and you confuse him by saying: yes, you are a boy, but you can be a girl if you want. It’s not right.” Instead, Santana had to apologize for the line: “When you grow up, you start to believe that you can be somebody, which sounds good, but you know it’s wrong because a woman is a woman, and a man is a man.”
Metoo has gone full steam ahead to clean up the film world where women are treated like objects. It’s a pity that good intentions turned into a witch hunt with sentences handed down by the public in the courts. And here too: there are criminals like Harvey Weinstein. And then there are the likes of Kevin Spacey or Johnny Depp: careers ruined while awaiting sentencing, all in their favor. End of method. Political correctness has the following characteristic: it starts with the right concept, takes it to the extreme, and ends up hurting the categories it wants to protect.
Walt Disney puts a lot of emphasis on “inclusiveness”: however, reports say that changing the sex or skin color of the most famous characters is causing a (significant) part of the public to flee. In the series of every streaming service, especially Netflix, there is an unwitting comedy in the representation of every race (but how do they exist?) and every sexual taste. It’s okay if the old British nobility is half black. Could this be the reason why the giants of the industry are not doing as well as they could?
Finally, the Venice Film Festival. The opening film “Commander” with a patriot in the title role, not to mention the hero in a black shirt. Guest directors: Woody Allen and Roman Polanski. Both under a magnifying glass, for different reasons and also completely different seriousness.
Is something changing?