One of the advantages of being older is that sometimes you can personally witness how language evolves and changes, and how words and phrases undergo changes and sometimes outright reversals of meaning.

One of the interesting evolutions is that of the phrase “politically correct.” It was originally used as a kind of scornful in-joke within Marxist political groups to sneer at those members who seemed to have an excessive concern with political orthodoxy and who seemed to be more concerned with vocabulary than with the substance of arguments and actions.

But later it became used against those who were trying to use language as a vehicle for social change by making it more nuanced and inclusive and less hurtful, judgmental, or discriminatory. Such people advocated using “disabled” instead of “crippled” or “mentally ill” instead of “crazy,” or “hearing impaired” instead of “deaf” and so on in an effort to remove the stigma under which those groups had traditionally suffered. Those who felt such efforts had been carried to an extreme disparaged those efforts as trying to be “politically correct.”

The most recent development has been to shift the emphasis from sneering at the careful choosing of words to sneering at the ideas and sentiments behind those words. The phrase has started being used pre-emptively, to shield people from the negative repercussions of stating views that otherwise may be offensive or antiquated. This usage usually begins by saying “I know this is not politically correct but….” and then finishes up by making a statement that would normally provoke quick opposition. So you can now find people saying “I know this is not politically correct but perhaps women are inferior to men at mathematics and science” or “I know this is not politically correct but perhaps poor people are poor because they have less natural abilities” or “I know this is not politically correct but perhaps blacks are less capable than whites at academics.” The opening preamble is not only designed to make such statements acceptable, the speaker can even claim the mantle of being daring and brave, an outspoken and even heroic bearer of unpopular or unpalatable truths.

Sentiments that would normally would be considered discriminatory, biased, and outright offensive if uttered without any supporting evidence are protected from criticism by this preamble. It is then the person who challenges this view who is put on the defensive, as if he or she was some prig who unthinkingly spouts an orthodox view.

As Fintan O’Toole of The Irish Times pithily puts it:

We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, “I know this is not politically correct but…..'” in front of the usual string of insults in order to be not just safe from criticism but actually a card, a lad, even a hero. Conversely, to talk about poverty and inequality, to draw attention to the reality that discrimination and injustice are still facts of life, is to commit the new sin of political correctness……… Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for every sort of curmudgeon or crank, from the fascistic to the merely smug.

Hate blacks? Attack positive discrimination – everyone will know the codes. Want to keep Europe white? Attack multiculturalism. Fed up with the girlies making noise? Tired of listening to whining about unemployment when your personal economy is booming? Haul out political correctness and you don’t even have to say what’s on your mind.

Even marketers are cashing in on this anti-PC fad, as illustrated by this cartoon.

Perhaps it is my physics training, but I tend to work from the principle that in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we should assume that things are equal. For example, physicists assume that all electrons are identical. We don’t really know this for a fact, since it is impossible to compare all electrons. The statement “all electrons are identical” is a kind of default position and, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, does not need to be supported by positive evidence.

But the statement “some electrons are heavier than others” is going counter to the default position and definitely needs supporting evidence to be taken seriously. Saying “I know this is not politically correct but I think some electrons are heavier than others” does not make it any more credible.

The same should hold for statements that deal with people, because I would like to think that the default position is that people are (on average) pretty much the same in their basic needs, desires, feelings, hopes, and dreams.

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I love movies but am not a big fan of Tom Cruise’s films. I was surprised, though, by the way people went after him (and his Church of Scientology) for his recent comments on psychiatry and mental illness. I was first bemused that this topic arose in the interview with him, and then by the subsequent reaction where it was as if people felt that he had no right to his views on this subject. Even if people disagree with him, why do they get so upset? Why do people even care what his views are about psychiatry? I was thinking of writing something on this incident but then came across this article which covers some of the ground I would have, and also raises the problematic role that the big pharmaceutical companies have played in this issue of treating illnesses with drugs.

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The invaluable website Crooks and Liars website has posted a funny The Daily Show video clip about the Valerie Plame affair. Since I do not have cable and don’t watch too much TV anyway, I depend on Crooks and Liars and onegoodmove to alert me to TV segments that I otherwise would miss. These two sites are well worth bookmarking.

I have always believed that people tend to behave better than one might expect them to when placed in positions of trust where high standards of behavior are expected of them. One particular kind of occupation exemplifies my belief, and that is judges.

The public expects members of the judiciary to act according to higher standards than the rest of us and I think that this expectation generally tends to be fulfilled. I believe that whenever someone enters a profession that has a noble calling, the very nature of the office tends to produce an ennobling effect.

This is particularly so in the case of the higher levels of judiciary. A person who becomes a Supreme Court judge, for example, is well aware that he or she is occupying a select position of great trust and responsibility, and I cannot help but believe that this will rub off on that person, making him or her strive to be worthy of that trust. This does not make them superhuman. They are still subject to normal human weaknesses and failures. They may still make wrong decisions. But I think that in general they behave better by virtue of occupying those positions than they might otherwise, and try to live up to the standards expected of them.

But this works only if the judges feel they are entering a noble calling and that they are expected to live up to it. If the prestige and the dignity of the judiciary is undermined by treating judges as if they were just political hacks, then they will behave accordingly. This is why I view with concern attempts by people, especially political leaders, to undermine faith in the judiciary. There are two ways in which this happens.

The first way is to personally attack judges whenever a decision does not go the way they wanted it to go. This tendency has accelerated in recent years in the US, as can be seen by the ugly venom heaped on the Florida judge in the Terry Schiavo case. We have seen similar invective hurled at judges when they have ruled in ways that people have not liked on hot button issues, ranging from First Amendment cases involving religion to flag burning to abortion. The judges have been decried as being “judicial activists” and worse.

The second way to undermine the judiciary is by clearly seeking to appoint judges precisely because they have a particular political agenda, and not because they display the intellect and independence of thought that a good judge should have.

Sri Lanka again offers an unfortunate precedent for this degeneration. It used to have a fairly independent judiciary whose members were nominated by a Judicial Services Commission, whose members were at least one step removed from direct political influence. It was expected that the JSC would nominate people who had serious credentials and hence there was the belief among the general public that judges were, on the whole, impartial although individual judges here and there may have been suspect. But again beginning in the 1970s, the government started to severely criticize judges who ruled against the government, even sending mobs to demonstrate in front of judges’ homes and try to intimidate them.

After that, it was only a short step to create a more overtly political process for the selection of judges, in order to ensure that decisions would be more acceptable to the government. Despite this, the ennobling effect that I spoke of earlier helped to make the judges better that one might expect, but it was a losing battle. When I was in Sri Lanka last month, I was told that faith in the impartiality of the judiciary had been badly undermined by the cumulative effects over the years of such negative policies.

This is a real pity because this kind of credibility, once lost, is hard to regain. Undermining the judiciary in this way a dangerous trend for any nation that values the rule of law. When you undermine faith in the impartiality and honesty of judges, you are just one step away from mob rule.

As I said above, the US seems to have already started down this unfortunate road. The upcoming battle for the Supreme Court vacancy created by the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor will provide a good indication of the shape of things to come. It will be unfortunate if people focus on the nominee’s views on specific issues. I would much rather see an examination of whether the person shows a scholarly mind, whether he or she has shown an independence of thought, whether the person bases judgments and reasoning on evidence and on universal principles of justice and the constitution, whether the person shows compassion and understanding of the human condition in all its complexity, whether he or she listens to, understands, and appreciates the arguments of even those whom he or she rules against, and appreciates that the judiciary is the ultimate safeguard of rights and liberties for individuals against the massive power of governments and corporations. In other words, does the person have what we might identify as a “judicial temperament.”

If you speak with lawyers, they can often identify those judges whom they respect, even when those judges rule against the lawyers. Identifying what makes judges respected despite their specific opinions on specific cases is what the discussions about selecting a new Supreme Court justice should be all about.

But if the discussion ends up being (as I fear they will) about the nominee’s views on the Ten Commandments, abortion, gay marriage, flag burning, and the like, then we will be continuing to cheapen the whole Supreme Court.

The nature of the nominee and the discussion around it will tell us a lot about how we will be viewing the judiciary in the days, and perhaps generations, to come.

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Are you interested in having thoughtful discussions on deep topics? Consider attending the Socratease discussions. These are open to anyone and held every second Tuesday of each month (next one is on June 12) at Night Town restaurant on Cedar Road in Cleveland Heights (in the Cedar/Coventry area). The discussions are from 7:30-9:30pm. You are under no obligation to order food or drink from the restaurant.

The format is that all the people present who wish to can suggest a topic for the night’s discussion, then a vote is taken, and the winning topic becomes the focus for that night.

The second parallelism I saw between political developments in Sri Lanka and in the US has been the breakdown in the usual rules of behavior regarding building consensus.

To some extent, politics in both Sri Lanka and the US are insider’s games. The people in the leadership of the two main parties tend to be members of the same elites, representing two wings of the same political and social class, and the same interests. Hence they tend to adopt ‘rules of the game’ that are usually civil and polite. One benefit of this civility is that the interests of the minority party at any given time is not completely ignored because the ruling party understands that it might be in the minority after the next election. The disadvantage is that the two parties do not challenge the basic status quo and the ruling elites, since they are both members of that same class.

Looking only at the positive side, the protection of minority interests in consensus-style governance has the effect of providing some political continuity, especially in parliamentary systems, where the legislature is a collection of individuals, each elected to represent a given geographic area. Under such a system, it is possible for a political party with just a bare majority of voters to have an overwhelmingly large majority in the legislature. In multiparty systems, it is even possible for a party that does not have even a majority of the popular vote to have a majority in the legislature. This can lead to wide swings in legislative majorities after each election (without a corresponding swing in actual votes or voter sentiment), so having rules that enable people to function both in and out of power becomes important

In Sri Lanka, this sense of following unwritten rules that benefited both sides existed until around 1970 and then started falling apart as each of the major parties started using raw political power to ram through policies that tended to ignore the interests of the opposing party. In 1970, one party (the SLFP) got a huge (more than two-thirds) majority and used that majority to change the constitution using a device of somewhat dubious legality. They even used their majority to unilaterally extend the life of the parliament by two years, so that instead of elections falling due in 1975, they were next held in 1977.

But in 1977, there was another big swing of the political pendulum and the opposition party (UNP) came to power with a huge (also more than two-thirds) majority. They too enacted sweeping constitutional changes, a chief one being replacing the old system of individual seats by a proportional representation system. Since the proportional representation system tends to provide a parliament that reflects more accurately the percentage of votes a party receives, it also had the effect of ensuring that future parliaments would be unlikely to have the two-thirds parliamentary majorities needed for undoing the constitutional changes that the UNP had put in place.

But since the huge majority that the UNP obtained in 1977 was still in place until the next election, the UNP was free to make constitutional changes freely, and this they proceeded to do, sometimes in the most self-serving way, making a mockery of democratic principles. For example, the government extended the life of the parliament (with its huge majority) by using a simple-majority referendum.

Another example of using raw power was how political defections were handled. It used to be that governments could be toppled if enough members of parliament switched allegiance from the government party to the opposition. Members had done this in the past for a variety of reasons, for political principles, as a mark of protest, or merely for personal ambition or other similarly ignoble reasons.
The post-1977 constitution eliminated this threat to the government’s stability by saying that if a member switched parties, that person automatically lost his or her seat and was replaced by someone from the party being vacated, thus maintaining the party status quo. This was a huge disincentive for any member to switch, since nothing would be gained. But then some members of the opposition said they wanted to switch to the government side. Since the government wanted to encourage this defection for propaganda purposes, the government used its huge majority to make a constitutional change that said that people could switch sides without losing their seats provided parliament voted to approve each such switch. This guaranteed that only party switching that favored the government could place, since only the government side had the votes to approve the switch.

This kind of frequent and ad-hoc changes to the constitution to serve narrow partisan ends resulted in a devaluation of the respect that a constitution should have. At one time, a joke made the rounds in Sri Lanka that had someone entering a bookstore and asking to purchase a copy of the constitution and being told that “Sorry, we do not sell periodicals.”

While I have observed this trend in Sri Lanka politics over the last three decades or so, its parallel development in the US is much more recent. The fight over the use of the filibuster, the attempts to enshrine a flag-burning amendment in the constitution, the battles over judicial nominees, the attempt to breach the establishment clause of the first amendment, are signs that using raw political power to gain short-term goals is gaining ground here too. The argument seems to be that political power is there to be used in whatever way possible.

There are two views on this trend. Some disapprove, saying that achieving consensus government is preferable, since that avoids nasty partisan battles and wild swings in policies. They appeal for ‘bipartisanship.’ Others argue that the problem with consensus politics and bipartisanship is that the politics of the most reactionary elements wins out, since bipartisanship usually results in the most intransigent person or party getting his or her own way. Also bipartisanship can be a symptom that the two major parties are in fact colluding to protect their common interests at the expense of the excluded classes. Such people argue that at least with using raw political power, there is a chance that your side will someday be in the ascendant and able to use it to pursue politics that you like.

This is a tricky question to which there is no simple answer, at least one that I can see.