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PCism...is about manipulating public doctrine for private ends. The form it takes depends on the nature of national values. In America, PCism derives… - J. C. D. Clark
" "PCism...is about manipulating public doctrine for private ends. The form it takes depends on the nature of national values. In America, PCism derives from three unchallengeable ideals. The ideal of equality is used to promote the interests of women and racial minorities, often ending in very inegalitarian provisions such as quotas. Collective moral improvement is used selectively to deny people what will supposedly harm them, formerly alcohol, soon tobacco. The sanctity of the individual is interpreted to demand parity of esteem for unconventional lifestyles, especially homosexuality, and can be exploited in all sorts of ways through the new sexual harassment industry. In Britain, the pattern is different. None of these things have gained nearly as much ground as in the United States, but the same technique of making a sectional self-interest unchallengeable and using totalitarian methods to inhibit criticism is used in favour of regional cultures against metropolitan culture; used in our endlessly various class war by plebeians against patricians, and, especially, used in that strange crusade of denigration of our national institutions.
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About J. C. D. Clark
Jonathan Charles Douglas Clark (born 28 February 1951) is a British historian of both British and American history. He was an undergraduate at Downing College, Cambridge. Having previously held posts at Peterhouse, Cambridge and All Souls College, Oxford into 1996, he has since held the Joyce C. and Elizabeth Ann Hall Distinguished Professorship of British History at the University of Kansas.
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J C D Clark
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Jonathan Clark
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Jonathan Charles Douglas
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Jonathan Charles Douglas Clark
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Additional quotes by J. C. D. Clark
Indignation is a powerful weapon. With it, the English empiricists saw off the continental system-builders: Comte, Hegel, Marx, Croce, Treitschke, Braudel. The best English historians, by contrast, have been superbly negative and slashingly reductionist, ripping down airy continental nonsense with sharp, scholarly hooks.
The monarchy is not the only target: from right to left, across a spectrum from the police via the church to the BBC, such bodies seem to be valued chiefly as targets. Yet institutions such as these are peculiarly important in the social fabric of unrevolutionised Britain just as they are peculiarly unimportant in societies such as America that have had the slate wiped clean by a great social upheaval... [N]o nation can exist without some modest pride in its institutions and its achievements, and Everyman as well as the Prince has an interest in being free to feel at one with what he coolly and neutrally observes. Political correctness does to our national culture what the architecture of brutalism did to our urban landscape. The Prince was right again.
The love affair of the British with their national institutions is no limp romanticism but an appreciation of the way that institutions embody and perpetuate, as well as symbolise, a certain way of doing things. That is why a predilection for hereditary peers and against high inheritance taxes is an affirmation of family integrity. That is why an established Church is widely endorsed, even by other Christian denominations, as an official acknowledgement that law is more than technical convention. That is why the national history curriculum has become a potent symbol of society's right corporately to affirm a vision of itself.
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