In his confronting and challenging book, On Offence, Richard King takes on a number of the social malaise of our time, including political correctness.
PICTURE: Unsplash
He reports the opinion of Tony Judt who spent his final years in a wheelchair suffering Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Tony’s reflection was that political correctness – aimed at making the suffer feel equal with others through terms like ‘differently abled’ – actually had the effect of trivialising the difference and the huge inequality the disabled had to overcome to be treated as equal.
So while it may help people feel nice about the inequalities of life, such “cheating language of equality” only allowed deep inequality to happen more easily.
Richard’s thesis would be that an attack on language does little to tackle the real problem, keeping language confronting keeps the problems in our face!
Paul Clark’s musings can be heard on radio across Australia and at atthetop.org.au.
