Trump, from the campaign to the inauguration, has been a hot topic in Chinese cultural circles, sparking countless polemics and splits. From the standpoint of enjoying a good spectacle, I actually quite welcome Trump taking office; after all, he has set off several fires just a few days into his term, and it’s been lively enough. Of course, I only want to watch the show; I do not want to take sides.
If I had to say so, then from a personal standpoint I certainly look down on Trump as a person. The key issue is not so much his opposition to political correctness as his anti-intellectual tendency. But as an American president, Trump’s election may not be worse. It should be noted that Trump is not the cause of the many contradictions and divisions in American society, but rather their consequence. These contradictions will not automatically disappear just because Hillary takes office, and Hillary’s policies also make it hard to see any trend toward gradually bridging those divides. Since conflicts are always difficult to resolve easily, it is better to expose them earlier and bring the differences out into the open.
The greatest advantage of democracy lies precisely in exposing differences. The essence of democracy is not one person, one vote, but broad debate. Giving the masses the right to vote without an environment of free debate makes that ballot inevitably hypocritical; whether one is electing regional representatives or directly electing the top leader, there is no real difference.
Chinese people like “harmony,” and think that disputes are a bad thing, that everyone being in one big happy family, all speaking with one voice, is the good thing. But this is nothing more than self-deception. How could a complex society possibly have no conflicts? Covering up and avoiding differences does not mean they do not exist; it can only mean that those differences are even harder to reflect on and respond to in time. Fundamentally speaking, politics is conflict. A good political system should institutionalize the open expression of all sorts of conflicts, encourage people to clarify differences through free speech, to declare differences through free demonstrations, to solidify differences through free association……
The ultimate dissolution of differences is of course also a good thing, but that has never been the government’s mission. In a free society, the differences between A and B should of course be resolved by A and B themselves, rather than adjudicated by some elevated C standing above them. Such a one-sided ruling not only fails to dissolve the opposition between A and B in the end; it also increases the opposition between C and A, and C and B. So in a society pursuing “harmony,” all disputes large and small will ultimately be diverted into conflicts between government and people, and the authorities will have no choice but to rely on ever-stronger measures to maintain stability in order to suppress conflict.
It is not easy to get both sides of a difference to resolve it consciously. This requires sufficient mutual understanding—understanding each side’s needs and difficulties—so that each can compromise and give way. Even if the final compromise is often hard to reach, a good institutional environment can at least limit the expression of differences to the level of “words, not hands,” so that the existence of differences does not lead to bloody violence, but instead adds plural colors to society.
In this sense, I oppose an overgeneralized “political correctness,” because it suppresses the expression of contradictions; many conflicts and oppositions are merely obscured in discourse and can no longer be laid out in the open. It is precisely in this sense that Trump’s rise to power is a good thing for Americans. Trump’s victory had already exceeded the expectations of countless experts and scholars, and the immigration ban he issued encountered layer upon layer of resistance. But it cannot be denied that even those things that, in the eyes of many cultural elites, are utterly absurd still have the support of large numbers of Americans. The key is not whether one should or should not support Trump; the most fatal point is that before this, such levels of support had been beyond people’s expectations. In other words, the conflicts and oppositions that existed among the American people had originally not been sufficiently public, had not yet been made explicit. Trump is not the cause of these conflicts; on the contrary, he is one of their consequences. Trump did not and could not create such profound conflicts; at most he has pushed them to the surface.
During the campaign Trump himself explicitly aimed his fire at “political correctness,” arguing that Obama’s and Hillary’s efforts were not serving the American people, but serving political correctness. Many viewers, whether they support or oppose Trump, also take political correctness as the focal point of controversy. But what, exactly, is political correctness? I oppose an overgeneralized political correctness, so what counts as overgeneralization? And what, then, is the proper limit of political correctness?
First of all, it should be noted that the term “political correctness” is very new; it basically did not become popular in the United States until the 1990s. According to Wikipedia, its contemporary meaning first began to appear roughly in the 1970s, and in its early period it was a self-mocking expression within the New Left. By the 1990s, the right began to use the term to attack the left, arguing that political correctness was in fact a kind of tyrannical thought censorship. Put simply, “political correctness” was never a complimentary term to begin with; it appears more often in the mouths of critics.
Second, political correctness is mainly a measure directed at language. What is called “correct” is always a “conformity” relative to some “standard answer”; but since there is “political correctness” rather than only one kind of “correctness,” that already suggests that the “standard” by which speech is judged right or wrong is not singular.
We more easily understand that “wrong” can take many forms: for instance, a simple “slip of the tongue,” a “logical error,” a “factual error,” a “political error.” Likewise, an official may commit “economic mistakes,” “style-of-work problems,” or “political problems.”
Correspondingly, “correct” also does not always have a single standard; it must be judged in different contexts. For example, the statement “the sun rises in the east and sets in the west” is correct in common sense, but not correct in astronomy. “Two straight lines will always intersect” is not correct under Euclidean geometry, but is correct under Riemannian geometry. “The English are taller than the Japanese” may be correct in overall statistics, but not necessarily correct when applied to individual groups. “Stir-fried vegetables are healthier than French fries” may be correct for an overweight person, but not necessarily correct for a famine victim……
To talk about “correctness” always makes sense only when, within the corresponding context, one refers to a specific standard. “Political correctness” designates precisely one such context and standard for discussing whether something is correct or not.
In contemporary American usage, “political correctness” is often first judged at the level of rhetoric. For example, terms such as “nigger,” “black,” “Negro,” and “African American” may all be used to refer to the same object; logically these references are all fine, but rhetorically they carry different implications. The basic requirement of “political correctness” is to speak using neutral, non-pejorative vocabulary.
But the term “political correctness” implies that these “rhetorical problems” are not merely “rhetorical problems,” but also “political problems,” ideological problems, problems deep within one’s worldview. When you call someone a “nigger,” this does not merely mean that you chose your words badly; it also reflects that your political stance is incorrect.
Simply put, the standard position of American political correctness is “egalitarianism”: gender equality, racial equality, sexual orientation equality, religious equality…… Anything that tends to deny equality is politically incorrect.
But “equality,” of course, also depends on context. For instance, if you ask me what kind of spouse I like, then I certainly won’t hypocritically say “everyone is equal,” “everyone is the same.” Of course I prefer Yellow women; white women with blond hair and blue eyes may be worth considering; Black women I will not accept; and of course men and androgynes and the like need not be considered at all.
This is obviously not discrimination, but merely a personal preference; there is no question of political correctness or incorrectness. Yet in fact the movement from personal inclination to public issue is a continuum, not something that can simply be split apart, as though personal matters were always separable from public matters. Public space is ultimately made up of individual people, one by one.
For example, out of my personal preference, I am more willing and more likely to fit into a group that is closer to me in kind—say, one party made up mainly of heterosexual Chinese, and another party made up mainly of Black gays. If you ask me which crowd I would rather join just to have some fun, then of course it would be the former.
Or, if I want to find a roommate to share rent with, and the options are: a cute single heterosexual girl, a gay man with multiple partners, a Shanghai native I know well, a Muslim believer of unknown origin, and so on—then of course I can very easily detect my own bias.
If I were the landlord, and the choice of the next roommate depended entirely on me, then no matter what bias I displayed, it would seem impossible to criticize. But the problem is, what if the next choice is made through consultation among everyone who is already living there? Can that decision still bear an obvious bias?
If there are already 2 people living there, and after discussion they pick the 3rd person from among the applicants, that choice’s bias seems still quite understandable. But what if there are already 3 people? 10 people? 10,000 people? More than 300 million people?
The question now is: in this big shared courtyard called the United States, which already has more than 300 million residents, can there still be bias when selecting the next new occupant?
The fact is that, beginning at some point—I don’t know from which person exactly—the existing residents suddenly have their individuality erased, while the applicants waiting to move in suddenly have their backgrounds erased; everyone suddenly becomes neutral atoms, and bias and preference turn into prejudice and discrimination.
The crucial point is that, beyond some number, the already settled residents can no longer constitute a “big shared courtyard,” that is to say, people are no longer “neighbors to one another.” New incoming outsiders will not have much interaction with most residents, so more and more people can “stand apart from the matter” and participate in the judgment and selection from the perspective of onlookers. As bystanders with no stake in the issue, they of course find it easier to transcend personal likes and dislikes, and try their best to judge from an objective and neutral standpoint; accordingly, they are also more likely to adopt the egalitarian standard of political correctness.
“Politics,” in a certain sense, is precisely about how to coordinate relations within a community. The smaller the community, the more likely an individual’s subjective bias is to exert influence in collective decision-making, and the more the negotiation among members tends toward emotion and context. The larger the community, the more likely individual subjective bias is to be submerged, and the more negotiation must become proceduralized and rule-based.
But in any case, objectivity is nothing more than the product of countless subjective judgments and individual choices wrestling and compromising with one another; it is not some thing that exists a priori beyond every individual participant. And under the influence of Christianity and modern science, modern people often mistake the “God’s-eye view” for an objective view: a perspective belonging neither to the individual nor to the collective, with no culture, no race, no national borders, a completely detached, overlooking perspective.
A community, under the constraints of a certain charter or code, communicates as fully as possible and reaches compromise; this is precisely how an organization or a state makes decisions. In any case, such decisions should reflect the sum of the wills of all members within that community, rather than reflect the will of a God standing outside the world. For example, if A prefers A, B prefers B, and C prefers C, then the result of compromise may be to give A, B, and C equal opportunity. But if A, B, and C all dislike D, then the result of compromise usually should not grant D equal standing. Perhaps in God’s eyes A, B, C, and D are all the same, but within a community made up of A, B, and C, differentiated treatment is a reasonable outcome.
On this point I agree with Trump’s view: the American government should serve the American people, and the president is merely a representative of public opinion, not a mentor, not a parent, and certainly not God.
Of course, subjective bias often means prejudice and preconception. For example, I may think that finding a fellow townsman you know well as a neighbor will be easier to get along with than finding a Black Muslim, but in fact that Shanghai fellow townsman may be a sinister villain who is not only difficult to live with but also harms you. But so what? Precisely because man is not God, he can never escape prejudice. Because man is not God, he also cannot directly face each person’s unique “soul”; he must always understand others through various “external” identities and backgrounds. So when people look at one another, they inevitably make broad “distinctions” about one another. We hope to continually transcend our own prejudices through education and learning, through expression and communication, through emotional resonance and scientific research…… but we do not, precisely, hope to eliminate prejudice through “politics.”
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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