We have two JAPCAT entries today.
In The American Scholar, William Deresiewicz aims at political correctness on university campuses (“On Political Correctness”):
Let us eschew the familiar examples: the disinvited speakers, the Title IX tribunals, the safe zones stocked with Play-Doh, the crusades against banh mi. The flesh-eating bacterium of political correctness, which feeds preferentially on brain tissue, and which has become endemic on elite college campuses, reveals its true virulence not in the sorts of high-profile outbreaks that reach the national consciousness, but in the myriad of ordinary cases—the everyday business-as-usual at institutions around the country—that are rarely even talked about.
Political Correctness and the Destruction of Social Order: Chronicling the Rise of the Pristine Self, by Howard Schwartz, is another JAPCAT installment:
Mr. Schwartz uses psychoanalytic techniques to explain perplexing recent politically correct phenomena. He theorizes that we are seeing the actions of a kind of narcissist that demands that all contacts from the world at large be loving nurturing, and affirming, and who believes such a state of affairs to be a right, of which he or she has been deprived by the social structure.
Such people subconsciously wish to live in the imaginary state of infants who receive all nurture and protection from the mother. This state of affairs, which never existed outside of infantile perception, can only exist if the entire world is maternally nurturing and loving — to them — as opposed to being objective and demanding or even, merely indifferent. It is also atomistic because each such person wishes to be the center of the loving world.
It’s fun to watch them waking up late, only now realizing their party has gotten out-of-hand.
