Leftwing but not PC

Censorship prevails in a society that would rather suppress public reminders of social ills than address the root causes of those ills.

If you’ve read my article, “Can We Separate the Art from the Artist?”, I hope you will see that I am possessed of decent, moral, and progressive political convictions, but also capable of separating art from artist in terms of how the negative behavior of the artist affects the “value” of the art.

There are those who conflate “leftism” with “political correctness.” This conflation assumes that every idea or ideal, cultural remnant, or political outlook which conflicts with current value systems and is espoused in a fictional work completely deprives that work of any “value.” Pursuant to this degradation of the art’s status as “art,” the artist who created it is similarly deprived of any social worth and, ultimately, shunned.

In my previous post, I attempt to balance progressive political values with a separation of the flawed, perhaps even vicious artist from their art, and not view my enjoyment of that art as a reflection of my greater political outlook.

My position has three main benefits.

One is that I am able to enjoy or appreciate a work despite knowing that the behavior of its creator outside of their art to be unacceptable, reprehensible, or even heinous to me.

Two, I don’t have to duplicitously advocate for the “political correct” censorship or disavowal of the art (duplicitous because I may actually enjoy it) due to my own emotional discomfort, nor expect that advocacy from others.

Three, I can understand, appreciate, and in some cases even share someone else’s distaste for the work, and if my disgust does, at some point, exceed my enjoyment, I can change my mind and decide that I don’t want to see it anymore.

Initially or even over time, I can assess and reassess the work as good or not good, based both on formal factors (for example, story consistency, thematic complexity, or technical aspects) and impressionistic ones (how the work makes me feel; emotional involvement), and THAT determines my appreciation or evaluation of it.

Separately but relatedly, I can judge its author as being completely separate from the work, pointing out and criticizing the bad behavior or outlooks and theorizing about their potential reflections in the work. As I hinted in Point Three above, this can, in some cases, negatively affect my emotional involvement in it, which represents a diminished “value,” even if the formal factors remain unimpeachable.

Regardless, my enjoyment of the work does not mean I endorse, a) the author and his or her life or achievements/crimes, or b) the objectionable, unacceptable, bad, or regressive content or ideas in or related to the work.

On the contrary, my ability to critically analyze the work and its author, to explore the historical context in which they exist[ed] and the relation of that context to the present, the enduring impact of its technical or creative achievements, and other theoretical factors can, indeed, enhance my enjoyment of it from an intellectual perspective.

But the fact that I found “Triumph of the Will” to be a fascinating experience does not mean I think nazis are cool, anymore than loving the movie “Network” prevents me from admitting that the Arab-phobic elements of the script are definitely “problematic,” unacceptable, and regrettable.

And like all regrettable things, there is something to be learned from them.

By contrast, concern for political correctness often involves the removal of such offensive material (such as the Criterion Collection removing the n-word from the film, “The French Connection”) and the censorship or marginalization of old or “problematic” works.

It is practiced by “both” political “sides,” and obscures the more troubling truth of our human cultural legacy: that that legacy was secured and consciously reproduced by a bunch of slavemasters, genocidists, pedophiles, homophobes, rapists, misogynists, criminals, capitalist bootlickers, and other dehumanization-minded, zero-sum, machiavellian, might-makes-right-believing human scum.

And yet, here we are, with films and photography and art and telephones and computers and “freedom of speech” and a vote and so on. All of which—limits, unfulfilled promises, and all—are “good things” that nevertheless resulted from that sick, deranged, violent history.

While it may be tempting to suppress the ugly reminders of American and human history, to do so also suppresses our ability to analyze the causes of the attitudes which ultimately shaped it, attitudes which their espousers believed were morally informed. By not understanding these attitudes, it becomes that much harder to understand how they may STILL AFFECT AND EXIST IN our society, thereby limiting the potential of the “good things” such as freedoms and votes to reach their greatest and most humane evolution.

Accordingly, suppression inhibits any redress of the social ills caused by the dominance of these inhumane ideologies. I support addressing these social ills separately from art, which is not to say they ARE a priori “separate” from the art, but that they are to be *handled* separately from it. The social ills should be addressed directly through political action, rather than trying to hide them from art and by extension from the audience.

“Political corrections” of this sort alter the work’s intended purpose: from that of the aspiring artist who, while being inescapably a product of the corrupt system and all of the errors in outlook that entails, nevertheless hopes to enlighten, uplift, challenge, or otherwise compel the audience to explore the deeper levels of their own psychology, to that of the nationalist propagandist, who seeks to direct and retain them at only a surface level, obscuring their deeper levels of inquiry and reaction and replacing these human instincts with dictations regarding how they should view the society and themselves: with fewer questions and with less “offense” taken.

In this way, and often unintentionally, “leftwing”-minded preoccupations with safety, inclusion, being against racism, et cetera, yield more repressive, puritanical ends closer in line with the “book-burning” mentality of extreme rightwing ideologies. More on this in a moment.

But even granting that “all art is propaganda” as Orwell said, or that “all art is inherently political” as Orson Welles more accurately put it, I think we would all agree that works of art (such as film) that depict American values in idealized ways—such as exaggerated ideas of diversity, international benevolence, or equality of justice—are overt propaganda intended to convince working people domestically and in other countries to overlook their lived experience of America. And that such works are probably low-quality, as far as “art” is concerned. (Which doesn’t mean they’re not enjoyable).

That is to say, I don’t approve of art which depicts the values of a given society as wholly honorable, consistent, and moral when they are, in practice, contradictory, arbitrary, and destructive. Even if SOME good does exist within that society, I don’t approve of exaggerating or romanticizing it, or treating it as universal or as the rule rather than the exception. That extends to goods such as the right to vote (a bourgeois hallmark of liberal democracy) as well as the “soul of the working class,” which, while easily glorifiable, can be just as ignoble, shortsighted, and avaricious as it can be heroic, brilliant, and revolutionary.

I believe the good elements of western society—such as the liberal value of free speech, according to which one cannot be locked up for criticizing the government—should be celebrated to the extent that they prevail. But they should also be criticized to the extent that they come up short, right along with the purely destructive elements of that society such as poverty, incarceration, income inequality, and neoimperialist wars.

These destructive elements, their interrelationships and intercausality, and the degree to which they exist at violent odds with society’s proclaimed values, must be better understood in order to grasp why and how these “freedoms” so often fail to live up to their status as “ideals” through their violation or selective application, despite their uncritical celebration by members, benefactors, or apologists of the “liberal” political establishment.

Moreover, the history of these conditions must be articulated so that their mechanisms of reproduction can be similarly understood, along with understanding who benefits from that reproduction.

To that end, I support the critique, analysis, undermining, and ending of the social and political conditions which create real-world injustice, the morally squalid social class which benefits from it, and the flawed or even morally repugnant people who create art and everything else in that society.

The puritanical tendency of “leftwing”-minded political correctness is what allows even the book-burning rightwinger to point to communism as the pinnacle of repressive ideologies. As leftists, we cannot afford to be against expression, because our suppression of these ideas in our own history and culture is a reflection of our failure to overcome them.

In a word, censorship within capitalist society is an admission that our previous tactics have failed.

It is a sad admission that argument and logic and hope and love and compromise did not succeed in ending systemic injustice. Censorship can be an act of cognitive dissonance: we know that only by fighting injustice directly and collectively, and offering an alternate vision of human society and progress, can it be overcome, but we settle for acts of censorship, censure, repression, and ostracism because they can be actuated passively, individually, for the gain of social capital online and in the workplace, and without the need for airtight logic that we would happily accept were it applied to us.

That is, if censorship were applied to us, we would not accept it, just as our class enemies who espouse “might is right” ideologies would not accept it if a superior force were to grind them into dust. They wouldn’t say, “oh, you’re more powerful than me? Oh, okay. Go ahead. Kill me. After all, might is right.” Indeed, there’s a good chance they would “find it in themselves” to fight back just as we would, thereby exposing the fatuousness of both overarching “belief systems.”

Ultimately, it serves our class enemies by connecting the meaning of “leftism” or “progressivism” or “socialism” or “communism” to repression, when it is supposedly repression or illiberalism that we seek to combat.

It is not unlike Israel using ultra-rightwing ideas of “anti-Israeli” sentiment—couched entirely in antisemitism rather than anti-imperialism or humanism—to justify perpetuating mass repression of Palestinians on the basis that all critiques of Israel are couched in antisemitism, and that the end of Israel would mean the triumph of antisemitism.

When, in fact, the opposite is the case.

In addition, though this may sound “prolier-than-thou,” I am tempted to think, and I have often found, that those who would perseverate on such things as the “problematic” words or actions of this or that individual are often notably lacking in their critical analysis towards systems of capitalism, imperialism, neoliberalism, and nationalism, socioeconomic and cultural dynamics which, again, are what PRODUCE the bad art AND the bad artist. It doesn’t mean that individuals should NOT be critiqued, but that they would rather criticize single persons and single identities, and identify that person and/or identity with the greater political and social system.

They would rather direct degrees of outrage proportional to the overall system at single persons or identities, whereby it takes on a grand and impactful character, than direct it at the system itself, against which it seems meek, miniscule, unheard, and futile. By that token, they direct only degrees of systemic analysis proportional to the individual at that system, if at all.

To reiterare, degrees of analysis and criticism proportional to the greater society are leveled at the individual, while degrees of analysis and criticism that should be directed at the individual are leveled at society.

The operative (false) assumption is that the society is the result of the individual, and not the individual of the society. Hence, it is the individual they must condemn. This represents an inversion of values, in which the larger and more monolithic entity is effectively “let off the hook” and viewed as beyond redress, while the individual and his or her expression is viewed as the cause of the greater societal injustice.

This is what I mean by characterizing political correctness as cognitive dissonance: it is easier to emotionally manage outrage towards one person or one identity, or to act against them and to feel like one is having an effect, than towards an entire system. I can relate to that.

However, such PC-minded people would rather defend that system, implictly or explicitly, by for example arguing that “we need” more minority CEOs or women-owned businesses, while condemning the problematic expressions or reflections of systemic injustices that issue from that system rather than speak one clear word about the degraded and destructive system itself which CREATES the injustice, and how THAT system might be meaningfully combated.

They do this partly because they don’t know any better. In the combined advent of postmodernism (a social and cultural movement which [rightly] challenges the idea of individualism as a social construct while also dismantling the “grand narratives” of religion, authority, and other means of social cohesion) and neoliberalism (an economic doctrine which hyperfixates on individualism to the detriment of all social goods and proletarian collective identity), our modern society has never been more atomized, disconnected, “privatized,” “entrepreneurial,” tribalistic, and emotionally driven.

But PC-minded people also cling to their “retail” form of proscription simply because it is easier to condemn both the artist and their work, or single identities—while vociferously supporting the political party that “stands for justice” and defending American empire on the grounds that “it’s better than the alternatives”—than it is to hold two differing ideas about the same person, party, or nation in their head at the same time. Censorship and political correctness remove this moral and intellectual complexity, and allow one to feel “certain.”

This is the same system that, through erosion of public education among other means, has rendered so many of its adherents “unable” to critically integrate problematic ideas into their worldview—such as that good people can also be bad people, or that a bad system can also have good elements (like the ideal of free speech)—and articulate their own feelings about them. It has alienated them so greatly from their own interpretive powers that they “can’t be trusted” to safely and rationally interpret or “handle” difficult, challenging, or complex material that reflects the extreme complexity of daily life.

It is in this way that a person’s inability to separate the art from the artist is a reflection of their inability to separate themselves from the systems of oppression that have informed their perceptions of reality; to separate ideas from ideologies and personal convictions from nationalisms; to separate, not what is good from what is evil, but what is progressive from what upholds the status quo.