Political correctness in science and politics

The New Scientist of 18 November 2023 had a book review of Noah Whiteman’s Most Delicious Poison. The review included the following:

“[A] history of the societal impact that toxins have had. . . . their use has been defined by exploitation of Indigenous people.

Those living in the Amazon basin, for example, were never compensated for the sophisticated knowledge they passed to Westerners about curare, a toxic preparation that colonisers and settlers called ‘flying death’. Yet the tubocurarine within found profitable use during the 20^th century as a muscle relaxant during surgery.”

But was the knowledge “passed on” by some  deliberately intended action that would call for gratitude, or did the colonizers just observe that  spear- or arrow- tips held a highly toxic substance? In any case, knowledge of the toxicity hardly constitutes anything “sophisticated” — that stems from what Western science and medicine discovered through chemical-molecular manipulations of which the Amazonian Natives knew and understood nothing.

Innumerable volumes have been written, of course, about the exploitation of resources in underdeveloped regions by the actions of more advanced nations. The very word “exploitation” tends to pass moral judgment; but in many cases the indigenes had made no use of such resources as ores or diamonds. Attempts to have indigenous people treated in an equitable way are surely not helped by misguided discourse about “sophisticated” indigenous knowledge.

Another mark of politically correct absurdity is the capitalization of “indigenous”, presumably to indicate that these people are respected as fully as are Westerners. That sort of thing seems to have begun when the New York Times decided, a few years ago, that the adjective “black” needed to be capitalized whenever it might apply to certain people.

Does all this matter?

Does it matter only to academic pedants who are sticklers for accuracy, logic, and universally agreed language?

I think it does matter, because such absurdities are so visible an accompaniment to the incessant official emphasis on race in the United States with an asserted societal obligation to recompense, somehow, contemporary individuals, some (though not all) of whose ancestors had suffered discrimination and deprivation as a result of slavery.

But giving official preference to some particular groups inevitably means preferring them to all other groups in the society. Thus affirmative action in academe has demonstrably discriminated against people of Asian or Jewish ancestry.

The disappearance of well-paying manufacturing jobs in the Rust Belt and elsewhere has not led to any “affirmative action” on behalf of families that slipped from the economic middle-class to a lower economic class, through no fault of their own and owing demonstrably to the contemporary actions of the society in embracing globalization without safeguards for American workers, thereby so weakening unions that the former middle class lost all leveraging power.

In my view, salient aspects of social and political events of the past couple of decades or so have their root in some significant part in the espousing of politically correct propaganda and actions inspired by largely left-of-center, Democratic, “elites”, the very groups that complain about the political climate that their own efforts largely helped to create.

Or, plainly: the continuing widespread support for Donald Trump owes a great deal to aggravation over excesses of political correctness brought by soft-headed wishful thinking. As it’s said, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, when facts of reality are ignored.