Sometimes I feel bad for the people whose legacy was tainted by scientific racism, especially if they lived to see its end and changed their opinions accordingly. Lovecraft is an example of this.
Oh he never stopped being a xenophobe, but he drew a line between his personal dislike and the idea that other races were inherently inferior. This is a good read: https://motifri.com/lovecraftcontext/
I like to think that if he hadn't died so young his personal tastes might have matured.
I see what you're getting at, but this is a bit of a motte-and-bailey argument. While it is literally true that widespread acceptance of racism and sexism was (and is) motivated by a desire to avoid being wrong in the eyes of prevailing politics, that's not what the specific term "political correctness" popularized in the early '90s referred to.
The NYT opinion article that popularized the term said:
> Affirmative action is politically correct. So too are women's studies, gay and lesbian studies, and African-American studies, all of which are strongly represented in the scholarly panels at such professional meetings as those of the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association. [...] Biodegradable garbage bags get the p.c. seal of approval. Exxon does not.
And Bush Sr. gave a speech shortly thereafter decrying it:
> The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones.
They and all the other media figures and conservative politicians and so forth in the early '90s would have all looked at you confused if you claimed that racism and sexism, themselves, were forms of political correctness.
If your argument is that public pressure to conform to racist and sexist cultural consensuses was bad for scientific research, it does not actually help the cause to defend opponents of "political correctness" who advocate for the freedom to express now-unpopular racist and sexist viewpoints.
> If your argument is that public pressure to conform to racist and sexist cultural consensuses was bad for scientific research
My argument is that public pressure to conform to the political norms for its time is always bad for scientific research, regardless what the political norms are. The political norms are what is called "politically correct", things that you should believe because otherwise society will become hostile against you.
Political correct pressure on science is similar to banning all smoking health research that isn't funded by tobacco companies. Sure tobacco funded research is still research, but it will be extremely biased. The same about politically pressured research. The pressure to confirm racist ideas lead to a lot of bad science in the past. The pressure to confirm modern political ideas lead to a lot of bad science today. Those two works in exactly the same way. However since I live today and not in the past I care about the problems science face today rather than the problems it had a long time ago that are no longer relevant.
I think what I'm saying is that what is called "politically incorrect" is a small slice of the things that will cause society to turn hostile. Moreover, in fact, many things that are "politically incorrect" simply won't result in hostility that effectively suppresses work at all (after all, the two quotes I gave earlier were from the most influential newspaper in the world and the president of what had just become the world's only remaining superpower).
That is, I agree with you that public pressure to conform to political norms is bad for scientific research, but I am arguing that a specific focus on avoiding "political correctness" means that you in fact succumb to a lot of other (present-day) political norms, which is the actual thing that is bad for scientific research.
Taking your tobacco-funding example - you are, of course, correct, that tobacco-funded research is extremely biased. Suppose someone says that this research cannot be taken at face value, and Philip Morris accuses that person of anti-tobacco bias, of succumbing to anti-cigarette political correctness, of conforming to political pressures about how terrible Big Tobacco is. Who do you side with? There are two accusations of bias here; how you do determine which one is correct?
The heuristic "Political correctness is bad" is clearly unhelpful in this scenario; it cannot guide you to the correct decision. If you want a more meaningful principle, you have to look deeper at things. Even your phrasing "conform to the political norms for its time" is a more meaningful phrasing - but then an obvious consequence is that opposition to political correctness was the political norm of the early '90s when the president and the Gray Lady were telling people how bad political correctness was.
> but I am arguing that a specific focus on avoiding "political correctness" means that you in fact succumb to a lot of other (present-day) political norms, which is the actual thing that is bad for scientific research.
Right, this is a really hard topic. I didn't say I had a solution, just saying it is a problem. There will always be a lot of political influence in research topic related to controversial things and people living under that influence will have a hard time identifying it. The racists 70 years ago probably didn't think they were doing anything bad etc. But today we recognize it as bad.
> but I am arguing that a specific focus on avoiding "political correctness" means that you in fact succumb to a lot of other (present-day) political norms, which is the actual thing that is bad for scientific research.
Yeah, you have counter movements and resistances. But if the context is non-stem non-economic researchers at universities then it is pretty much only in one direction. There is no allowance for the other side to do much research in those areas, meaning research in those areas is a one sided politically correct story.
If we let tobacco companies publish research, and other people publish research, then people can look at the two and make their own decisions. But if you basically only let one side research then you will get bad research.
You can take the words and use their individual meaning to come up with any definition you like to make any argument you like. However you don't win arguments by arbitrarily definition words or phrases to be what you would like them to be. You definition factually is not the definition of political correctness. As such historical racism and sexism were not political correctness.
> Political Correctness- the avoidance, often considered as taken to extremes, of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.
> In 1934, The New York Times reported that Nazi Germany was granting reporting permits "only to pure 'Aryans' whose opinions are politically correct".[2]
The definition you read there is just what is politically correct today, it isn't what the term really means. Racism was politically correct back then, it isn't politically correct today.
> However you don't win arguments by arbitrarily definition words or phrases to be what you would like them to be
> the avoidance, often considered as taken to extremes, of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.
Aren't you taking an arbitrary definition (un-sourced from google/Oxford Language) to win your argument?
Here is Merriam-Webster's
> conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated
Seems like both are acceptable modern-day usages... like other terms a difference between capital vs lowercase might help here like... "republican" vs "Republican", "democrat" vs "Democrat"
"opponents of "political correctness" who advocate for the freedom to express now-unpopular racist and sexist viewpoints."
You had me until this. What I don't like about PC isn't when actual racist comments get shouted down or whatever, which is what your comment implied. It's when non-racist statements are misconstrued as being racist in order to silence political opposition. For example when opposition to affirmative action is enough for some activists to try to get someone fired.
