The PC MC Structure: Still Standing, With No Legs To Stand On

The PC MC structure (or template, or paradigm) is remarkable for its longevity.  Not that it has lasted that long, in the long view of history (in mainstream dominance only a little more than a half century thus far); but considering its untenable incoherence cobbled together out of a complex mechanism of every logical fallacy in the book, it should not have lasted more than a couple of years -- particularly considering that it thrives hooked up on artificial life support in the greatest most advanced civilization in all history.

Over the years on The Hesperado (I started this blog nearly a decade ago, in the summer of '06), I've taken various stabs at describing and explaining PC MC (Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism).  Out of my total of nearly a thousand essays so far, perhaps several hundred delve into the problem of PC MC -- what I have termed "the Problem of the Problem" (where the primary problem, of course, is Islam, and the secondary problem is the West's persistent myopia about that primary problem).  One example would be this essay I wrote back in January of 2007, "Islamonausea" and PC Multiculturalism.

What I'll do in this essay here may well have been repeated in various ways, from various angles, in some of those past essays. My intent here is to begin to lay out the nuts and bolts of this monstrous contraption I call PC MC, in order to show how Alice-in-Wonderlandishly logical its complexity is and how, in turn, that complexity serves its primary function -- to continue to immunize Muslims and Islam from all substantive criticism (let alone the condemnation they so richly deserve).

To begin, as we look at the object under consideration, it's difficult to figure out where to start.  Any given nut, bolt, spring or sprocket of the whole seems pivotal, and seems to function in a tightly woven web to engage all the other gears (if I may mix metaphors; and one must mix them, madly, to match the madness of the phenomenon under study). 

My instinct is to focus first on what I have come to conclude, over the years, is the very heart of the whole enterprise:  Reverse Racism.  Perhaps if we latch on to this, the rest will fall into place -- in terms of deconstructing the full catastrophe.

The obverse of reverse racism is excessive self-criticism of our own West. If my theory is correct, that this is the crux of the construct, it might explain the other behaviors of the PC MC, insofar as everything is said and done ultimately in service of protecting the non-Western non-white "Other".  Protect from what, one may ask?  Why, to protect them from us, of course.  Being Western and white, we are naturally predisposed to be racist bigots who want to hate Muslims, lynch them, round them up and put them in camps in order to genocide them -- or so goes the implicit narrative operating as the underlying engine, so to speak, of the entire PC MC machine. 

And it is richly ironic that this PC MC paradigm is Western through and through.  Is the modern West the first culture or civilization in all world history to develop such a rich and massive worldview of morbid self-criticism coupled with an irrationally excessive admiration for the Other?  It certainly seems so.  This particular facet of the paradigm I have examined at length and in detail in several essays, perhaps most extensively in my study of Montaigne.

My tentative conclusion as to its origin is that it simply derives from what's good about the West, its philosophical and cultural health.  It may seem paradoxical that health can produce disease -- which is essentially what I argue here -- but I think that is not so outlandish an idea.  The logic of it becomes clearer when we examine which healthy virtues have morphed into their diseased mutations.

The one that most readily comes to mind:

A respect for the Other. 

Only actual racists and xenophobes (e.g., Muslims) would oppose this idea as a matter of universal principle.  The point, and the problem, is when this idea becomes distorted and followed dogmatically, no matter what evidence is presented.  I.e., the rational form of this idea would cultivate it as far as feasible, as a good idea, but would modify it whenever any particular Other shows signs of no longer being tolerable.  Now, some in the Counter-Jihad would counter-argue that there must be something wrong with the idea itself, making it liable to morph into its diseased form.  This probably cannot be proven or disproven; and since it can't, we should not err on the side of an explanation that would lead to darker indictments of the West.  For, if we conclude that this excessive respect and deference for Islam cannot derive from a good virtue taken to irrational excess, how do we explain its rather rampant and massive manifestation in our time, other than to imply, or impute, conspiracy-theorish explanations to fill that vacuum? 

At any rate, if we follow the logic that does not succumb to the conspiracy theory, and if we agree that a respect for the Other is essentially a virtue, it is not inconceivable, and it is plausible, that a culture that cultivates that virtue in a matrix of other virtues (such as, for example, the virtue of reasonable self-criticism) consonant with it, and continues to progress robustly in the context of this civilizational health, may well take that virtue to an irrational extreme, whereby that culture develops an unwillingness to criticize any and all Others -- even when an Other comes along that threatens the West's core values (not to mention threatens its people's lives).

If this were the only factors of this particular dynamic, I agree that such mass irrationality might seem to stretch plausibility; but it's more complicated, involving centuries of development whereby this respect for the Other has become enmeshed with other ideas and virtues. My aforementioned essay on the 16th century thinker Montaigne, along with my series on When Did PC MC Begin? -- indicating that in fact it seems to have a long provenance in Western history -- supposes how organically this process grew over time.  Furthermore, my series on Voegelinians (academic philosophers who study the writings and lectures of eminently conservative philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-1985)) -- showing them to evince discomfittingly significant spasms and tics of PC MC -- indicates that we cannot delimit the Problem of the Problem to mere "Leftists".

Not only is the process organic and longstanding, but it has a tendency to rigidify over time (a feature perhaps of most ideas).

Muslims are not the only Other.  There are plenty of other Others out there.  Why then does the PC MC West seem to treat them so specially?  This brings up another ingredient that has to be included in the explanation: Muslims are the only Other who use violence to a remarkable degree -- not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively in terms both of grotesque extremism and of a broader, systemic strategy of expansionist supremacism.  Thus is revealed another crucial mechanism in the complex:  Auster's First Law of Majority-Minority Relations.  In a nutshell, this Law articulates the curious dynamic prevalence in the PC MC West whereby:

The worse any designated minority or alien group behaves in a liberal society, the bigger become the lies of Political Correctness in covering up for that group.

Every machine has a center, even one as monstrous as PC MC.  And let us not forget the dismal, dismaying fact that it works all too efficiently.  I think it's safe to say that this is its very heart: the coin whose two sides are, to put it bluntly, Self-Hatred/Other-Dotage.*

All the other complications we notice in its monumentally incoherent deployment, I maintain, are the logical cogs and levers that radiate out from that center, not central themselves, but pivotal in their diverse roles all calculated to protect that center, and to deflect any cogent challenges to it that, once fairly received and intelligently assimilated, would bring the whole house of cards, this "fabulous invalid", crashing down.

One example of this mad logic I plumbed in my essay, The Paradox of Tolerance.

Afternote:

In subsequent posts, hopefully, I will adduce & adumbrate as many of these annoying cogs and levers as come to mind (I should keep notes on this from all the occasions I have had to butt heads with various PC MCs, for when they react to any criticisms of Islam, they invariably generate a multitude of permutations of them). 

A collection, probably incomplete, of my essays revolving around this maddening memeplex.    

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* Dotage:  "3. Excessive fondness; weak and foolish affection."