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The Age: The Trouble with political correctness - Martin

Flanagan, January 30, 2016
Political correctness is to this age what Victorian morality was to the mid and late 19th century. I am
not saying that both sets of belief are the same although, in some respects, they are remarkably
similar as, for example, when a female journalist wrote in The Guardian last year that a man putting
his arm around a woman's neck implied "ownership". A middle to upper-class woman in Victorian
England would, I suggest, have agreed with that.
Nor am I putting Victorian morality down. Victorian morality grew out of the victory evangelical
Christians had in ending the British slave trade in the early 19th century. The campaign to end the
slave trade was the first time in British political history that people had campaigned for the political
rights of people other than themselves. An idea grew that societies could progress morally and
socially and, for what they achieved in areas such as education, public health, child labour and
women's suffrage, the Victorians deserve a measure of respect.

My problem with political correctness is that it's humourless.

Political correctness springs from different but, again similar sources. It, too, comes from the idea
that societies can progress morally and socially and has led to improvements in many areas. My
problem with political correctness is that it's humourless. (I always recall a story about the English
novelist D. H. Lawrence telling his first lover, "You have no sense of humour. Your values are too
fixed.") When political correctness amounts to literalism or dogma, it deserves to be challenged.
As the coverage of the new Australian of the Year made clear, diversity is our new buzzword. The
word has both a moral and political meaning since if you question it politically you will be met with a
moral argument. Diversity is otherwise known as equality. To be opposed to diversity can therefore be
taken to mean that you support the marginalised people in our culture remaining marginalised and
who's going to argue that, apart from rabble-rousers such as Britain's Katie Hopkins?
But I have an objection to diversity being seen as an absolute moral value which we all must hold as
an article of political faith. As an end in itself. Just as there has to be diversity, there has to be unity of
some sort or shape. Otherwise we just end up with a universe of jostling subjective viewpoints or what
Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson calls "soulless cosmopolitanism". In this country, "soulless
cosmopolitanism" amounts to what I call Terra Nullius Mark 2.
So what unites us in this country? Notwithstanding its many faults and failings, this country is still a
healthier democracy than most. That's one reason people are dying to get here literally. Along with
everything else that arrived with the British in this country in 1788, there came a vitally alive
democratic tradition, then building to a climax with the anti-slavery movement, and a relatively strong
legal system. We would be fools not to value them.
The other thing that unites us is the land. And the stories of the land, all the stories of the land, and
the oldest of those stories are Aboriginal. I'm not big on Australia Day awards as a friend used to
say: "No one should get an award for doing what they're paid to do." But I was chuffed to see the old
Goanna man, Shane Howard, get one. For 40 years, he's been out there on the road, a whitefeller
engaging with black Australia in so many ways, a living exemplar of what diversity might mean in this
country while also embodying the hope of a new unity.