You need to look at this from a wider angle. Increased social capital provides a more favourable environment for the fostering of self-esteem. This doesn't happen overnight. It's part of a process of social change.

Made a couple of edits (now in italics) to the last paragraph of my previous post as it was an overly simplistic way to put things. Psychological explanations for social movements are never really straightforward. Re your objection @Agustino, it's only true up to a point, self-esteem is in a very real way limited by social capital.

It is an important feature of 'political correctness' that it is not a 'movement' (for want of a better word) initiated by oppressed groups but by intellectuals and academics on behalf of these groups (whether they wanted it or not). — Barry Etheridge

Necessarily so. The oppressed lack social capital, which means they themselves are generally powerless to change the terms used to define them. That's just the nature of being oppressed. The people who pushed for new words in order to even things out had to be of some social standing to have any influence over any far-reaching social change, and of some intellectual standing to have an influence over linguistic usage, ergo intellectuals and academics.

And so we had the often totally illogical kind of revisionism that turned...'spastic' into 'suffering cerebral palsy' evolving eventually into the awful blanket term 'special' (a corruption of 'with special needs'?) — Barry Etheridge

It's not a matter of logic. Neither replacing nor retaining the status quo is illogical, but that doesn't mean one choice isn't obviously preferable to the other.. When I was young the term used for the medical condition was "spastic", and that was also one of the terms commonly used to mean "a complete idiot". So, given the choice as a sufferer, you probably would have to be a complete idiot to not prefer "suffering cerebral palsy" or "special needs".

Negro became black (?) or African American (??) and so on. — Barry Etheridge

And before "negro" was acceptable, "nigger" was. So, what's the point here? The move was hardly a bad thing. Of course, it can go too far. I don't know whether "Black" or "African American" is actually the preferred term among members of that group, for example, but obviously "negro" or "nigger" isn't. And the former consideration pales in comparison to the latter.

So, to get back to the original question, I do not think it fruitful to go looking for psychological explanations for PC other than the comfort of identity and the simple belief that you are morally correct which is pretty much a given for any and all social, cultural, political and religious groups. — Barry Etheridge

The psychological explanation for PC is largely the recognition of the desire for self-esteem among those who would be denied it due to their position in society, and the willingness to help provide the circumstances under which it can be more easily fostered by those who see that as a gift without a price.

Well observed.

I'd much rather live in a society where people are free to say what they think than one where we can't say what we really think. People who are easily offended are the ones who were raised in such a way that they end up having a depleted self-image and any speech that affirms that is offensive — Harry Hindu

It's not simply a matter of being personally offended or not, it's a matter of the relative distribution of social capital to the group you belong to. If your group gets less of that, you as a member lose out whether you are offended in a particular instance or not. It might be that you don't get the job you went for, or that you get ignored at a bar, or, yes, that you get ridiculed in a social situation and that depletes your self-image. But regardless of how you were raised or your ability to withstand that kind of treatment, you are on average better off as a minority having more of this capital redistributed in your favour, and political correctness is definitely an element in that equation. That doesn't mean we are not free to say what we think, what it means is that there is a penalty for saying things that are reflective of a less equal distribution of social power. In other words, your reward for stigmatizing or denigrating others is to experience the same sort of thing yourself.

Sure, you can even join me, Hanover and Banno at our next soirée. :D

So, at risk of being extremely non-PC, here is how that pans out in respect of gay rights - that gay advocacy has appropriated the language of human rights, by equating 'being gay' with other cultural identities such as 'being black' or 'being Jewish'. — Wayfarer

It pans out the same for every group that has traditionally had low social capital; you use whatever means available to rebalance power relations and thus increase your relative capital. In other words, you take the social stigma imposed on you for being a minority and make use of another social stigma that attaches itself to the deployment of the original social stigma, which makes such deployment counter-productive. You can talk about rights, intolerance, lack of compassion, whatever. It's like putting a plug in a pistol that's pointed at you.

So this enables gay advocacy to turn the opprobrium which used to be heaped on gays back against their critics, who are now portrayed as, and widely accepted to be, the enemies of human rights and natural justice, just like those who used to oppose racial integration. — Wayfarer

Pretty much.

The intended function of political correctness is to redistribute social power from the dominant to the dominated by imposing a social penalty for the use of the type of language or behaviour that was traditionally employed to reinforce power structures the proponents of PC seek to rebalance in the service of social harmony (just as progressive taxation functions to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor by imposing a monetary penalty on wealth in order to maintain a balanced economy). Unsurprisingly, both political correctness and progressive taxation tend to be opposed by the same kind of people, i.e. those that refuse to acknowledge that there is any potential for imbalance in social structures or the economy that outweighs their "freedoms" in terms of speech or property or whatever other form of capital they wish to retain while exercising their (usually) God-given "rights".

So, the real question is not "Why are people taking offence?"

The answer to that is obvious. They are taking offence because their social capital (or that of the group to which they belong, associate with or sympathize with) is being depleted. The real question is "How far do we want to take political correctness?". Just like the real question is not "Why are people against regressive taxation?" but "How far do we want to take progressive taxation"? We need some of both in order to maintain balanced social structures / economies, but too much of either may provide a disincentive for creative expression / wealth creation that creates more of a drag than a boost.

To the extent we believe in our opinions, we can't but will them, and humility of any positive value is a strategy in this regard along with everything else. So, the humble person deals with the philosophical bigot by graciously offering him their spade to dig his hole, but steadfastly refusing to join him there.

I went in wet season and got sunburnt. Cycled it. Most of my pictures were of tourists.

There is a time and a place for pessimism, and a time and a place for optimism. Then and there was that for pessimism; now and here that for optimism.

I would add as a time for pessimism any ménage à trois involving you, me and Banno.

I have a king sized bed, so I can fit 2, maybe 3. It's not weird as long as you sleep face to face like I insist. — Hanover

How do 3 people sleep face to face??...Oh... :-O

Fuck it. All round good egg. Or that Katy Perry song where she goes on about tigers.

Not being scribed, I see no reason to.

Welcome (Y)

My citation of Douglas Adams was meant to add a veneer of wryness to my remarks. — mcdoodle

I gotcha. The article just seemed a bit click-baitish to me. People tend to want to believe stuff like this,
and the media is ready to fill that need even on the dodgiest of premises.

Still, I think some animals are more cultural than you imagine, and even quite small-brained animals pass skills and knowledge on to their young and their fellows. I've had an abiding interest in the great tit, partly of course because of the provocative name, and partly because of the famous period in the 1920's when the tit population of Britain seemed to learn how to open the bottle tops of milk left on the doorstep at remarkable speed. Here's a Nature piece from a couple of years ago about cultural transmission among great tits, which have been observed over many generations now: — mcdoodle

Yeah, I read about this a while back. What interested me more though was recent news that a tribe of chimpanzees were observed (and filmed) carrying out what appeared to be ritualistic behaviours that could shed light on the early development of religion.

Although to be honest I didn't really follow this up much, so again it might just be part of the ongoing anthropomorphic wild goose / ape / dolphin chase that we humans can't seem to get enough of.

It seems dolphins might have a language as complex as our own. — mcdoodle

They almost certainly don't. There are dozens of aspects to human language that make it unique including novel word formation, word modification, negation, questioning, abstraction, temporal displacement, the ability to make counterfactual, hypothetical and fictional utterances, open-endedness, recursivity, stimulus freedom and so on. And we can thank all that for the enormously complex social structures we have in place as humans. If dolphin language possessed even a handful of the attributes above, the first thing they would be able to do is to preserve information from generation to generation. And one of the first bits of information they would likely pass on is "Stay away from humans!"

If that were to happen, the annual Japanese dolphin drive hunt at Tajii, for example, would be a lot less bloody.


It's interesting news, and dolphins may turn out to have some very rudimentary form of language that makes human language somewhat less unique than we presently understand it to be. But, really, I'd be extremely surprised if it were to be anything more than that.

It seems like they lose something even if they cannot (objectively) condemn the Nazi's privately. — shmik

I get you now.

Do you mean the power of "reason"?

Maybe heaven is stretching your legs. O:) >:)

Can we kill Hyde without destroying Jekyll? (Or "How to play with the animal without biting your own face off?")

It does feel as though you lose something when you lose the 'Wrong' and end up with just a 'wrong'. What exactly is it that we lose, and why are we so reluctant to give it up? — shmik

We lose the ability to call on a power greater than ourselves that we can legitimately appeal to the other to recognize. Otherwise, we are left only with the sort of subjectivity that we feel has led our opponent astray. We point to a stable platform from undeniably shaky ground rather than merely invite the other over to our side of the fault line.

Of course, it only has any effect if they accept the premise that there is something stable to rest on.

I don't know. That's kind of saying nothing. Maybe there's more to it than that...

Both and neither. Banno embodies fuzzy logic. Or at least his beard does.

Banno is busy proving that the law of the excluded middle doesn't apply to the concept of life. He is neither alive nor dead, but undead.

Slavoj Zizek playlist. (Mostly his more accessible stuff.)

Harvard lectures on Justice. (Beginner level).

Oxford University lectures on general philosophy given by Peter Millican. (Introductory overviews).

I've noticed my posts sometimes appearing at the bottom of one page first and then later at the top of a new page that has suddenly appeared. Never disappearing though.

That link takes me to one of Wayfarer's posts (with one of yours just above). I don't see any posts in your comments list that aren't in the discussion anyway. So, maybe it did appear later. Did you try multiple devices, browsers when looking for it?

I may have interpreted my Bible incorrectly, but is the apocalypse now upon us?

Oh @Banno, @Banno! Wherefore art thou, @Banno?

We could also use a bit of @180 Proof and a few others from the old crowd.

OK then. For the love of God, man, don't create a video! Problem solved. :P

The Partially Examined Life. Broad range of philosophical topics discussed in an often informal style.

Conversations on the great philosophers with Bryan Magee and guests. (Click on the top left to access the playlist.)

No, I don't assume that absolute identity. But I'm not going to re-litigate the whole thing again here. I'm not dismissing everything you said either. There is certainly a place for socialized habit in motivating and modulating behaviour, and some of your recent posts make more sense to me than previous ones. But we're in danger of going around in circles and never getting back to the OP, so I'll take it up with you by PM.

This is where we meet the vagueness of the external/ internal boundary. I don't see how an erection is external. My penis is part of myself, just like my hands, feet, lungs, and heart. Why would you single out the penis as part of yourself which is external? — Metaphysician Undercover

The penis is classified as an "external sex organ" (for obvious reasons). I didn't just pluck that out of the air. Of course, it's not external to myself in that it's part of my body but it's a part where the physical manifestation of the sex drive is obviously apparent.

Having a sexual desire does not mean that you are aware that you have a desire for sex, nor does it mean that you are aware of a deficiency of sex, because this would require that you know that the erection is a desire for sex. That's why we have sex ed. in school. You and TGW want to jump this chasm, to proceed on the premise that if you have an erection, you are aware that you have a desire for sex. — Metaphysician Undercover

The awareness is a desire for sex / the sexual hunger is a form of awareness. If it wasn't, it wouldn't work too well. Evolution may not know what it's doing but it ain't stupid. So, you're still a long way from solving the problem of my paradoxical sex life. I guess I may have to ask Dr. Phil.

There is. Dumb works.

Generally speaking, I have found this forum to be congenial and the moderating pretty light. — Wayfarer

Glad to hear it. That's exactly what we want - to be in the background keeping things ticking along so you all can get on with what you do best i.e. filling this site with high quality content, and in the process making it the best place to do philosophy on the net.

Just don't expect us to be any more angelic than anyone else if you drag us out of the shadows. ;)

Badly phrased maybe, but the crux of the argument is not about the sexual hunger causing the erection, it's about the internal event, the sexual hunger, of which we are aware, motivating the action of sex.

As in:

That is the point of my argument, eating is the result of an awareness of external objects, not the result of an awareness of an internal hunger. Sex is the same. — Metaphysician Undercover

MU wants to cut the link between sexual hunger and sex. But without the physical manifestation of the sexual hunger, you cannot complete the sex act.

No worries.

Come on, guys. His statement very clearly indicates that he has no interest in what anyone "likes to see" other than himself and the other moderators. You think I misunderstood him?

Really? — Mongrel

I see your objection caused more by the style of what un said than the substance. But again, un can speak for himself.

No, I don't see a problem here. The successful completion of eating requires an external physical object just as much as the sex act. That is the point of my argument, eating is the result of an awareness of external objects, not the result of an awareness of an internal hunger. Sex is the same.

We cannot deny the role of the external object here. When we eat there is a particular external object which is eaten, and in the sex act, there is also an external source of tactile stimulation. So, we can start from the fact that a particular object is the object of desire because it is particular objects (persons in the sex act) which end up satisfying the desire. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'll go through the rest of your response later, but I wanted to address this because you've misunderstood what I meant. When I said external physical effect (in males) I meant an erection, which is required to complete the act of sex. And sexual hunger is what causes the erection.