Political correctness run rampant

[Rawedge Rim]

I read Huck Finn as a kid, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The word and the use of the word "Nigger" is certainly authentic to the way people spoke then. Hell, the word was used pretty much the same and as frequently by real people when I was a kid.

The decision to edit the word out of the book is ludicrous. Might as well remove the word "God" out of the Bible.

[Vraith]

Wow! Am I mistaken? Or is there an entire page PLUS of peoples who usually can't agree on whether salt is in fact salty all on the same side?

Although, I don't think "based on" or "retold" is sufficiently honest.

How about "Plagiarized from the Mark Twain original by a twit who can barely read."

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Wow! Am I mistaken? Or is there an entire page PLUS of peoples who usually can't agree on whether salt is in fact salty all on the same side?

I disagree completely with your assessment of the situation. We are disagreeing with each other; however, we are simply being subtle about it.

but not really

[sindatur]

Wow! Am I mistaken? Or is there an entire page PLUS of peoples who usually can't agree on whether salt is in fact salty all on the same side?

YEa, I've already begun stowing away canned foods and supplies in preparation for the inevetible collapse of society

[rusmeister]

Wow! Am I mistaken? Or is there an entire page PLUS of peoples who usually can't agree on whether salt is in fact salty all on the same side?

I experience this here all the time, Vraith. :wry grin:

[rusmeister]

This BBC article made some really good points. Some excerpts:

... the novel satirises Southern attitudes on race and slavery.

"The book is an anti-racist book and to change the language changes the power of the book," said Cindy Lovell, executive director of The Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum in Hannibal, Missouri.

"He wrote to make us squirm and to poke us with a sharp stick. That was the purpose," she told Reuters news agency.

"Trying to erase the word from our culture is profoundly, profoundly wrong," said Randall Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor.

Dr Sarah Churchwell, a lecturer on American literature, told the BBC that it made a mockery of the story.

"It's about a boy growing up a racist in a racist society who learns to reject that racism, and it makes no sense if the book isn't racist," she told BBC World Service's Newshour programme. "You can't make the history of racism in America go away."

"What makes Huckleberry Finn so important in American literature isn't just the story, it's the richness, the detail, the unprecedented accuracy of its spoken language," the New York Times said in an editorial. "There is no way to 'clean up' Twain without doing irreparable harm to the truth of his work."

In the UK, an editorial in The Times called the new edition "a well-intentioned act of cultural vandalism and obscurantism that constricts rather than expands the life of the mind".

Exactly. You can't make unpleasant facts of history go away by pretending or denying that they were ever there. It would be like becoming a Holocaust denier because one is worried that the Holocaust is offensive to Jews. Crazy.

I agree, Z (Surprise! Are the skies falling?).
But I see this in all forms of political correctness - which I define as the practical expression of pluralism. Changing all texts from saying "Indian" to saying "Native American" to the point of pretending that the word "Indian" didn't exist or as if everyone was talking about the treaties with "Native Americans" (a term I personally object to because that makes me non-native to my own country where my ancestors had been established for quite a few generations). I use the word "Indian" with my kids and explain the term "Native American". I think even histories which recast language to the point where we don't know how our ancestors saw or expressed things, so that we can't even see how our ancestors saw things. This has the effect of making their view seem strange and difficult to understand, and tends to make us feel superior, as if "they were (ignorant, racist, sexist, xxxist, etc) but WE know better".

As to the word "nigger", Russians look on it with some amusement. They know intellectually that it is connected with slavery, but the word itself is pre-slavery, andis simply a low form of the word "Negro" - in Russian "negr" /NYEGG-er/, the normal word to describe black people. And that is part of the trouble today - that we are not to describe anyone at all. From 'fat' to 'heavy', from 'black' to 'African-American (and what, pray tell, is "African" about them today, and why not call me a "European-American"? - something Europeans will snicker at), from crippled to disabled to 'differently abled', we are to call everything anything but what it is - as far as people will tolerate, to NOT call a spade a spade. (Of course people will immediately say that "Indian" is also a misnomer - and they are right, but as a historical mistake, it has not been rectified - we still have a misnomer today. We have traded one misnomer for another. I think it better to go with a mistake that has been accepted by all people for centuries, and was not pejorative, than with a different mistake thought up by an intellectual minority oligarchy and imposed on all via schooling and the media over just one generation.) It's a kind of hypocrisy that insists on precise language, and then is itself imprecise.

Of course, my views, being politically incorrect, tend to get slammed as much as Clemens/Twain's did... :what's-a-guy-gonna-do?-shrug:

[duchess of malfi]

This BBC article made some really good points. Some excerpts:

... the novel satirises Southern attitudes on race and slavery.

"The book is an anti-racist book and to change the language changes the power of the book," said Cindy Lovell, executive director of The Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum in Hannibal, Missouri.

"He wrote to make us squirm and to poke us with a sharp stick. That was the purpose," she told Reuters news agency.

"Trying to erase the word from our culture is profoundly, profoundly wrong," said Randall Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor.

Dr Sarah Churchwell, a lecturer on American literature, told the BBC that it made a mockery of the story.

"It's about a boy growing up a racist in a racist society who learns to reject that racism, and it makes no sense if the book isn't racist," she told BBC World Service's Newshour programme. "You can't make the history of racism in America go away."

"What makes Huckleberry Finn so important in American literature isn't just the story, it's the richness, the detail, the unprecedented accuracy of its spoken language," the New York Times said in an editorial. "There is no way to 'clean up' Twain without doing irreparable harm to the truth of his work."

In the UK, an editorial in The Times called the new edition "a well-intentioned act of cultural vandalism and obscurantism that constricts rather than expands the life of the mind".

Exactly. You can't make unpleasant facts of history go away by pretending or denying that they were ever there. It would be like becoming a Holocaust denier because one is worried that the Holocaust is offensive to Jews. Crazy.

This.

"Nigger" and all of its historical weight and connotations is a hideously ugly word.

Race based slavery was a hideously ugly thing that tore apart the country and ending it led to a war which caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. (Not even talking about how many deaths and destroyed lives came from the slave trade and slavery themselves).

The following century of segregation and racism caused untold pain for those subjected to it and cost everyone else inestimable losses of brilliance in not allowing all people in the society to freely contribute to the greater good of all (in science, art, literature, invention, engineering, leadership etc. etc.)

This book is a classic in large part because it confronts the ugliness head on and condemns it. The language is part of that.

In attempting to neuter the language you would also neuter some of the impact of the ugliness of slavery and racism. You would be in part neutering the strong stand the author takes against the racism.

And that is just plain wrong.

[rusmeister]

I quite agree, Duchess. (No one's surprised, are they?)

I gather there are no serious objections to what we commonly agree on?

What I would proffer is that all of this seems to me to be the logical end result of modern pluralism (as it is practiced, not theorized). As I said, political correctness is simply the practical expression of pluralism.
This intro from an article from Gilbert magazine by Nancy Carpentier Brown puts it pretty well:

Our current culture holds
the twin paradoxical views
that racial diversity is gloriously
wonderful, but racial
descriptions of individuals
are taboo. Celebrating diversity is
good; describing diversity is bad. We
should acknowledge that people are
of different races and be glad, but not
glad enough to wonder what those
races are.
All people are to be celebrated
as humans—well, most people: not
those in the womb, those with severe
and irreversible head injuries, those
with mental competency issues,
and the terminally old or ill, but I
digress—not as the product of their
racial heritage. Racial heritages and
diversities can be celebrated, but only
in the abstract—not as though any
one individual actually is a member
of a particular racial family. Racial
diversity must be taken into consideration
when taking standardized tests
in school; racial descriptions must be
hushed in the classroom.

[Vraith]

There's a fair amount of truth in that, in how it IS practiced...
But I would say how it is, in practice, is an illogical and non-practical expression of pluralism. It doesn't come from the reasonable thought part of considering diversity, it comes from the emotional side. [both for those who are rabidly PC under all circumstances, and those fanatically opposed to being PC in any circumstance]
There are very good reasons that any non-black person should think very carefully about using "the N-word" [and some pretty good reasons a black person might want to think it over, too].
There are no good reasons for editing "nigger" from that book.

[rusmeister]

There's a fair amount of truth in that, in how it IS practiced...
But I would say how it is, in practice, is an illogical and non-practical expression of pluralism. It doesn't come from the reasonable thought part of considering diversity, it comes from the emotional side. [both for those who are rabidly PC under all circumstances, and those fanatically opposed to being PC in any circumstance]
There are very good reasons that any non-black person should think very carefully about using "the N-word" [and some pretty good reasons a black person might want to think it over, too].
There are no good reasons for editing "nigger" from that book.

I agree here.
I do not think diversity a categorically bad thing - but it is certainly an equally bad mistake to treat it as a categorically good thing - as an end goal in and of itself, and that is exactly how it is spoken of and treated today.

I'm probably a poster child for people who were brought up culturally, ethnically, etc "mono" - a white boy of totally mixed mutt American heritage, English-only, lower class, no jet-setting travels - who came to diversity as an adult. I value what is good in it more than most - enough to actually get off my butt and move on a more-or-less permanent basis to another country, where my kids are being raised more Russian than American, never mind my world-travelling and the dozen-odd languages I've studied, so it's really hard for people to accuse me of being "anti-diversity". When I was a teacher in CA, I taught and cared deeply for my Hispanic and African kids, who everyone else seemed to consign to a future at Classic Car Wash (TM).

Nevertheless, this craze to achieve diversity as an unqualified good, while benefiting certain groups, above all economic imperialists, aka globalists - no one benefits more than the oligarchy that runs our economy and by extension our government. And what it works to create is NOT true diversity, but a bland uniformity with a surface smear passing as diversity. True diversity is obtained by being small and local - when Clifton Park is as different from Menlo Park as Australia is from Iceland. When the people, their views, their goods and services are locally homogenous, they are strategically diverse. When the doughnuts or wine made in Fremont or Chula Vista can be found nowhere else, when Poughkeepsie is intensely Catholic and Palm Springs intensely Buddhist, then you can be said to have diversity.
But when they are all dominated by Wal-Mart, McDonald's the Gap and Bank of America, and in all places public discussion or debate of beliefs is in bad taste, their identicality strikes far more than their diversity.

The main thing I'd beat people over the head with is that diversity CAN be bad, and so can tolerance, and intolerance and monoculturalism CAN be good things. The automatic knee-jerk reactions trained into people like Pavlov's dogs to not think about this is the unreason here - it is the absence of thought, which has been replaced by rhetoric. I think there is a huge public instinct which knows this, if only on an instinctive level, and thus we see kicking back against PC, which is imposed by a minority via public education and the media, two monstrous influences controlled by tiny minorities (to the extent that institutions can be said to remain 'under control' at all).

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Too much of anything can be bad for you.

[Avatar]

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

--A

[rusmeister]

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

Virtue --even attempted virtue--brings light; indulgence brings fog.

Mere Christianity, Sexual Morality

[Avatar]

Oh look, two competig quotes. However shall we decide which is right?

(Actually, I'm personally a believer in moderation.)

But maybe excess brings wisdom through experiencing the drawbacks of excess?

--A

[rusmeister]

Oh look, two competig quotes. However shall we decide which is right?

(Actually, I'm personally a believer in moderation.)

But maybe excess brings wisdom through experiencing the drawbacks of excess?

--A

Judging from most obese people, alcoholics, recidivists, etc etc, - and even simple hangovers, I'd say not.

We could moderate between the propositions that 2+2=4 and 2+2=5 by agreeing that 2+2=4 and a half...
Or put in a better way by someone better than me:

If I am made to walk the plank by a pirate, it is vain for me to offer, as a common-sense compromise, to walk along the plank for a reasonable distance. It is exactly about the reasonable distance that the pirate and I differ. There is an exquisite mathematical split second at which the plank tips up. My common-sense ends just before that instant; the pirate’s common-sense begins just beyond it. But the point itself is as hard as any geometrical diagram; as abstract as any theological dogma.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Judging from most obese people, alcoholics, recidivists, etc etc, - and even simple hangovers, I'd say not.

This is true only because some people lack the maturity and willpower to quit overindulging in certain behaviors.

[rusmeister]

Judging from most obese people, alcoholics, recidivists, etc etc, - and even simple hangovers, I'd say not.

This is true only because some people lack the maturity and willpower to quit overindulging in certain behaviors.

Well, since we are speaking about excess, then obviously it is not excess which brings wisdom, but something else. Thus, the above quote remains false, and Lewis's much more correct. Blake was clever - but not clever enough. He had talents - but logic was not among them.

[Avatar]

Blake wasn't a logician, he was a poet. I'm sure you're not particularly sympathetic to him.

"THE GARDEN OF LOVE" by William Blake

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And "Thou shalt not" writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore,

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

--A

[rusmeister]

Blake wasn't a logician, he was a poet. I'm sure you're not particularly sympathetic to him.

"THE GARDEN OF LOVE" by William Blake

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And "Thou shalt not" writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore,

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

--A

I think that poets can be reasonable, even when they are being sentimental. But not when they are simply illogical or ignorant.

"The Tiger" is a wonderful example by Blake of the former. "The Garden of Love" is of a tired variety of ignorance that at its very best interprets local experience as universal truth - the assumption that "thou shalt not" is a forbidding of desire, rather than its true intent of "Thou shalt not stick thy finger in the electrical socket, drink poison, play in the middle of a highway", etc. - that there are logical reasons for the fairly short list of "thou shalt nots" that anyone who actually inquired could discover.

[Avatar]

If you want to stick your finger in an electrical socket or drink poison, I'd try to dissuade you. If you persisted in your illogical desire, well, your life is your own. you can do whatever you like with it.

--A