The Gift (an atheist's religious moment)

The recent arguments over the political correctness of Christmas celebrations have again made political correctness itself an issue.  Though many people would wish political correctness away, the reality is that it has always been with us in one form or another, sometimes with a name, and sometimes without.  For example, at some point during the 1960s, people in North America stopped calling Afro-Americans “Negroes,” and started calling them “Blacks,” though no-one thought of the switch as “politically-correct” – it just seemed the right thing to do.

So it may be more productive to try to understand how and why ideas and concepts become politically incorrect, because the process is usually a symptom of an underlying problem – a problem that the battles over political correctness frequently prevent a solution of, and simply mask by creating new names and concepts.  For example, the real problem with the word “Negro” was that it categorized a section of the population in a negative way – that is, the word did not add any positive information to one’s ideas about a particular person.  It simply signified that the person was not “White” – which, in reality, means nothing.  Americans, rather than dealing with the word’s negative stereotyping, simply replaced it with another word – Black – that had the exact same problem – although one would not have dreamed of saying so in the ‘70s, for fear of being labelled a racist.  In other words, objecting to the board “Black” on the grounds that it was a label that arbitrarily put a wall of exclusion around a large section of the population – this objection would have made one an exclusionary racist!

On similar grounds, one would quite reluctantly propose that the labels “Afro-American,” Afro Canadian,” and so on have very little positive content, and primarily save to exclude.  The point is so obvious that did resists getting pinned down.  An Afro-Canadian, an Italian-Canadian, a Chinese-Canadian, and so on, is doubtless the beneficiary of a rich cultural heritage.  But as soon as each of those individuals is labeled in the customary way, their positive cultural heritage becomes a wall that separates them from the rest of society.  An Afro-Canadian, etc., is much more than just an individual who has been influenced by two cultures.

So, as hinted before, it may be more productive to try to understand how concepts become politically correct, rather than trying to invent concepts that are completely correct –not to speak of the fact that such concepts may be so neutral as to be meaningless.

A concept’s job is to unify a number of individual items into a totality.  For instance, as soon as an object is called a tree, it becomes a member of the established community of trees.  It is no longer just an object with a wooden trunk and green leaves.  It is now an object that share the characteristic of “treeness,” and everything that implies, with a large number of other objects of various sorts.  The name, however, forces our attention to certain aspects of the object, at the expense of other aspects.  For instance, we now tend to pay less attention to the fact that a tree is also a living being, a part of the same evolutionary chain we ourselves are a part of, an integral part of the biosphere oh, and so on.  Names begin by embracing, and end up rejecting and excluding.  The problem is that names begin by making a thing more than what it was, but then make it less than what it was.

Another example is the word “civilization.”  It originally signified an improvement on the state of nature, and a concept that unified the diversity of human achievements, imbuing them with singular significance.  But the very same process of making the human “a better nature” made the human something other than and opposed to nature.  Hence “civilization” became merely that which is not nature.  The rise was also a fall.

Social phenomenon turn from being acceptable into being unacceptable and politically-incorrect as they change from being something positive and affirming into something negative and excluding.  For example, discrimination against gay people and gay families became politically incorrect, not because some “wicked liberals” pushed for it, but because heterosexuality, from an affirmation of the love between a man and a woman, turned into a means of excluding and stigmatizing a large part of the population.

It is true that every affirmation and inclusion is also a negation and exclusion.  This is the essence of the human tragedy.  Yet the other side of the coin is that every negation and exclusion prepares the groundwork for a higher affirmation and inclusion.  A concept, at one point being of current significance and relevance, later becomes anachronistic and irrelevant, because it no longer tends to affirm and include.  The concepts Mrs and Miss at one point conferred a certain status on women.  Later, they served only to exclude women from the circle of independent human persons.  But the very concepts Mrs. And Miss served to focus attention on the dark side of the issue, and to prepare the groundwork for the next step.  Now, the positive concept Ms, as it serves to focus attention on the fact of human persons are merely divided by the excluding labels Mrs. And Ms., may serve as groundwork for a higher synthesis.

Another good example is Christmas, that is, its concept and what it means and used to mean.  From a time of sharing with the whole community and affirming one’s unbreakable ties to it, it became a time of rejecting those bonds through an affirmation of the self and of those directly bound to the self – that is, family and friends.  So it became a time of affirming the self, rather than affirming the Gift.  Long before it became politically incorrect, Christmas was a celebration of something received as a gift –with no money paid.  Christmas, from the exact opposite and negation of commercialism, has metamorphosed into the opposite.  It now divides and excludes – by ranking people into those who can afford expensive “gifts” and those who cannot, those who “care” and those who do not – turning love and caring themselves into commodities.  After all, those who  love the least, will care the least, are the ones most deserving of the Gift.