At a diplomatic reception in Beijing a few years ago, the former president of Harvard, Larry Summers, dropped a spicy chicken wing into the turn-up of his trousers and continued to make small talk with finger food bobbing closer to his toes than is generally considered decent. A man who displays such a lack of social graces and either does not have enough friends to tell him or enough humility to listen to them can still go far.
But in some jobs such flaws can be a serious handicap. And so it was last month that Summers resigned from Harvard having alienated much of the faculty, who were about to pass the second no-confidence motion against him in a year. During his short presidency Summers notched up some notable successes but even more enemies. Clashes with one of the nation’s most prominent black academics, Cornel West, prompted West to defect to Princeton.
Meanwhile Summers supported the army’s right to recruit on campus. And most famously, last year he argued that women were genetically ill-equipped to excel at the highest levels of maths and science. To some this is a story about a boss with poor leadership and communication skills who failed to take his staff with him and so eventually had to go. But to others Summers has become a martyr — a man “daring” enough to “challenge the pillars of political correctness,” who caused “would-be feminists [to get] the vapors.”
In other words Summers’s problem was not that he blundered, but that he was brave. Quite what is brave about suggesting women are not as clever as men, supporting the US Army or hounding out a black academic is not clear. True, Summers lost his job. But he went down defending privilege and power and the ideas that maintain them. In so doing he lost the support of his peers. Shot by his own troops, some are now nominating him for a medal of honor.
But the days when courage referred to those who take on the mighty against all odds and face the consequences are, apparently, over. For, when it comes to attacking the weak and backing the strong, “bravery” has somehow become the mot du jour. A couple of years ago a British journalist won a major award for columns supporting the Iraq war on the grounds that to do so was “brave.” Whether the award was deserved is irrelevant; the judges’ adjective is the issue.
What, after all, is “brave” about supporting the policies of both your government and the sole global superpower against a country that posed no threat? Likewise, when David Goodhart, the editor of Prospect magazine, published his blueprint for racial exclusion two years ago (“To put it bluntly,” he wrote, “most of us prefer our own kind”), he was praised for being “bold.”
As though maligning diversity constituted an act of courage in a country where black people are overwhelmingly more likely to be stopped, searched, jailed, murdered in jail, unemployed and marginalized. It is not the validity of these arguments that is at issue here but the characterization of those who make them as audacious that is problematic.
To align yourself with the powerful and then take aim at the powerless takes not one ounce of valor. To prop up prevailing hierarchies and orthodoxies rather than challenge them demands not a scintilla of bravery. True, like Summers, you may run into trouble. But just look who’s covering your back. With the prevailing winds of war, prejudice or the state on your side, the odds are with you. Since the privileges you are defending are inherent in the commentariat — how many women, blacks, working-class people or Muslims get to speak, let alone be heard? — your worldview is constantly being reinforced.
It may still be the right thing to do — the weak should not be protected from criticism nor the strong denied praise solely on the grounds of their relative material strength. But those who choose Goliath’s corner cannot then claim underdog status once David gets out his slingshot.
Take the Danish cartoons. They were first printed in a country that supports the war in Iraq, where the far-right Danish People’s party receives 13 percent of the vote and where, according to the Danish Institute for Human Rights, racially motivated crimes doubled between 2004 and 2005. Barely had the ink dried on sermons extolling Western civilization last month than scenes of colonial barbarism involving British troops beating Iraqis filled our screens. Soon after came more images from Abu Ghraib, showing a handcuffed Iraqi with mental-health problems taunted by US soldiers. We saw him pounding his head on a cell door and hanging upside down from a top bunk, clothed only in his faeces.
These cartoons did not appear in a vacuum. In publishing them the editor of Jyllands-Posten had illustrated not just an insensitive Islamophobic jibe but a racist mindset that has consequences for Muslims worldwide. He had a right to print them. But to do so in this context was an act of bigotry, not bravery. Underpinning this peculiar notion of courage is the feeble-minded obsession with political correctness — the ultimate refuge of the baseless argument and the clueless commentator.
Over the last month “political correctness” has been used in the British press on average 10 times a day — twice as frequently as “Islamophobia,” three times as “homophobia” and four times as “sexism.” Its ubiquity is due in no small part to its flexibility. During that period it has been used to refer to the ill-treatment of rabbits, the teaching of Gaelic, Mozart’s opera La Clemenza di Tito, a flower show in Paris and the naming of the Mazda3 MPS. But it’s most commonly evoked to suggest that honest conversations are being curtailed by a liberal establishment intent on imposing its ideological beliefs on an unwilling public.
Quite where this establishment resides (other than in the minds of the right), where it gets its power and how it exercises it is far from clear — given the reactionary state of the world it is doing a terrible job. Since only about 5 percent of daily newspapers bought by people in Britain could be described as progressive, there is plenty of room in the national discourse for rightwing people to say whatever they want. And they do.
But once this straw man has been invented, you need only knock him down to earn your medal of valor. It is true that some ways of behaving and speaking that were once mainstream are no longer acceptable.
There was a time when such words as “darkie,” “Paki,” “puff,” “spastic” and “colored” were common currency. We have abandoned them for the same reason we no longer burn witches at the stake or stick orphaned children in the poor house. We have moved on. That’s not political correctness but social and political progress. Not imposed by liberal diktat, but established by civic consensus. Those who are unwilling or unable to move on are welcome to those words and views. But like anyone else who engages in antisocial behavior, once they act on those impulses they must live with the consequences of those actions. They might be crude, crass or contrarian; insensitive, ignorant or in denial. But whatever else they are, they are not brave.
