What is it about us humans that we think everyone should think and believe as we do? We see it in religion—every religion thinks it is the one true religion. We see it in science—if you don’t believe global warming is caused by humans than you are unscientific and are a (gasp) denier or a crook or a kook.
History is full of examples of people who used political correctness to deal with their opponents. An example is the faculty of the Catholic University of Louvain in the late 1600’s who used “the machinery of censorship to silence a dissident colleague”, a professor who questioned the Copernican system (the earth revolved around the sun). [1] It is a well-known fact that people who supported the Copernican system were also silenced or had their thinking “corrected” (e.g. Galileo).
It is unfortunate but political correctness is as old as the human race. I see two reasons for this. First, our position is short on facts and brow beating someone into submitting to our way of thinking is all we’ve got. Or second, we have the facts but it will take time to explain those facts to someone and we are in too much of a hurry to spend the time.
Using political correctness as a method of persuasion just illustrates how weak our position really is. It also illustrates our ignorance of the human condition–we are all finite and not infallible.
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[1] J. L. Heilbron, The Sun in the Church, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 217.
