But to return to the sources of political correctness: Robespierre, Mao, 1984--what a grisly confraternity. Is it too grisly? In some ways. It does not seem quite right to describe Robespierre as "PC." Or does it? How about Mao? Or Orwell's enforcer O'Brien? Were such sinister figures "PC" within the usual meaning of the term? Not quite, perhaps; and yet, almost. Certainly they represent one important strand of the phenomenon: the moralizing, virtue-intoxicated side--bolstered, as many garden-variety PC-ers are not, with abundant means to impose their will on others. The dissonance we feel about describing such figures as PC is matched, I believe, by the eerie sense that they are, after all the qualifications, defining examples of the species.

Nevertheless, it seems a long way from Robespierre or Mao to what we mean by political correctness. Today, the phrase "political correctness" is generally accompanied by a smile--an uneasy smile, but a smile nonetheless. The phrase describes some exaggerated bit of left-wing moralism--so exaggerated that it is hard to take seriously. We smile when we read about an elite American college that has enrolled the sin of "lookism"--the unacceptable belief that some people are more attractive than others--into its catalogue of punishable offenses. We laugh when hearing that a British academic has condemned Frosty the Snowman as a white "male icon" that helps "to substantiate an ideology upholding a gendered spatial/social system." We scoff when we hear about the University of Michigan professor who complains that J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books "conventionally repeat much of the same sexist and white patriarchal biases of classical fairy tales." We smile, we laugh, we scoff. But most of us do so uneasily.

Why the uneasiness? There are several reasons. In the first place we know that such strictures, though preposterous, are not without consequence. Indeed, the phenomenon of political correctness is a great teacher of the often overlooked lesson that the preposterous and the malign can cohabit happily.

There is also the fact that the odor of malignity, of thuggishness, is never far from the lairs of political correctness. The student accused of lookism can be severely penalized for the offense, as can the student accused of racism, "homophobia", or "mis-directed laughter." In some cases, the academic thought police even attempt to regulate what is not said, as when an editor of a student newspaper was removed from his post because he had given "insufficient coverage" to minority events. We laugh when we read about poor Frosty, but the laughter dies when we consider that the professor who would have us melt Frosty is also someone responsible for the education of students. It is amusingly ludicrous to burden Mrs. Rowling's entertainments with feminist rhetoric, but then we remember that books can be banned or slighted for less.

PC's Allergy to Humor

Milan Kundera's novel The Joke traces the fortunes and amours of a young student, Ludvik, after his exasperatingly earnest girlfriend decides to show the authorities a postcard he had written to her as a joke: "Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!"

As a result of this whimsy, Ludvik finds himself expelled from the Communist Party and the university and is eventually conscripted to work in the mines for several years. Among other things, Kundera dramatizes the dynamics of political correctness. He is especially good at portraying one of its signal features, humorlessness. One of the points of The Joke is that totalitarian societies cannot abide a joke; humor is anathema; political correctness is a kind of geiger counter that registers deviations from the norm of earnestness. Any deviation is suspect, any humorous deviation is culpable.

The allergy to humor that is integral to political correctness is one reason the art of parody has suffered in recent years. Then, too, a parodist, to be successful, must be able to count on his audience's ability to distinguish clearly between the parody and the reality being spoofed. The triumph of political correctness has long since blurred that distinction. Whose ideological antennae are sensitive enough to register accurately the shifting claims of victimhood and entitlement? A mayoral aide in Washington, dc, uses the word "niggardly" in conversation with a black colleague; the colleague takes offense because he thinks "niggardly" is racist; the aide promptly offers his resignation, which is accepted. True? Or parodic exaggeration? True, all too true.

What Kundera gives us is a fiction about--at least in part about--political correctness. But documentary evidence is also near at hand. One can consult Solzhenitsyn, for example, or study the pronouncements of British think tanks like the Runnymede Trust, whose 400-page report on "The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain" a couple of years ago contained the surprising news that the word "British" has "racist connotations." Even worse, it turned out, is the word "English." "To be English", the report informed us, "is to be white. Britishness is not ideal, but at least it appears acceptable when suitably qualified, such as Black British, Indian British, British Muslim and so on." The report continued with this alarming announcement:

Britishness, as much as Englishness, has systematic, largely unspoken, racist connotations. Whiteness nowhere features as an explicit condition of being British, but it is widely understood that Englishness is racially coded. The unstated assumption is that Britishness and whiteness go together like roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. There has been no collective working through of the imperial experience.

The absence from the national curriculum of a rewritten history of Britain as an imperial force, involving dominance in Ireland, Africa, the Caribbean and Asia, is proving to be an unmitigated disaster.

Note that phrase "rewritten history." If the people who gave us the Runnymede Trust report have their way, history will be subject to a lot of rewriting. Among the many recommendations made by "The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain" was the demand that British history be "revised, rethought or jettisoned" in order to meet the requirements of "inclusivity." The report makes many other recommendations--it calls, for example, for race equality and "cultural diversity" inspections in schools, and suggests that television franchise holders be required to appoint a specified number of Black and Asian staff.

Such examples multiply themselves a hundred-fold with the greatest of ease.

Item: A school board in San Francisco seeks to require that 70 percent of school reading be books by "authors of color." One board member explained: "Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, for instance, has a bias against African-Americans. And Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, while a great work, has an economic bias. It characterizes people based on their class."

Item: A mid-level executive at a large bank is overheard wishing a colleague "Merry Christmas." Her superior takes her aside and gravely tells her that such language might be construed as offensive and warns her against indulging in such public displays of religious sentiment.

Item: A doctor I know at Good Samaritan Hospital outside Chicago writes a letter to the hospital's "Cultural Diversity Team." He points out that their Diwali Festival celebrating Hindu culture neglected to mention the appalling abuse of women that is a prominent feature of that culture. A firestorm erupts. The president of the medical staff informs the letter writer that "many individuals reading your words . . . have found them disturbing, insulting, and ... elitist" and warns further that "continued correspondence in the same vein . . . will be viewed as harassment and contributing to a hostile workplace environment." In other words, cut it out or get out--which is not, incidentally, a bad characterization of the PC understanding of dialogue.

On an even more ominous front we have the activities of the European Union, that bastion of political correctness, whose tax-exempt ministers are appointed, not elected, who seem to be accountable only to themselves, who meet in secret and issue binding diktats that affect the daily lives of people all over Europe. It is nice work if you can get it.

A few years ago, the eu made it illegal for journalists to criticize its policies. Last year, it decided that racism and xenophobia were crimes that could carry a prison sentence of two or more years. "Racism" and "xenophobia" they defined as harboring an aversion to people based on "race, colour, descent, religion or belief, national or ethnic origin." I do not love thee, Dr. Fell, the reason why I cannot tell--but it is certainly not because of your race, nationality, skin color, religious beliefs, sexual preferences, or any physical or mental disabilities--sorry, differences--from which you may suffer.

As these examples suggest, contemporary political correctness, though it may have originated and matured in the academy, is not only an academic product. It thrives in the academy, true, as bacteria thrives in rotting flesh. But political correctness has metastasized. It now thrives outside academia wherever a certain type of intellectual congregates: In the corridors of the European Union, for example, or in anxious bureaucracies like Oxbridge, the bbc and the United Nations.

I hasten to add that by "intellectual", I do not mean "bookish"; I do not mean "intelligent." I mean characterized by a certain lofty moralism--smug, progressive, abstract, activist. Writing in the June 2003 issue of The New Criterion, the political philosopher Kenneth Minogue anatomized this attitude as a form of "Olympianism." "There is", Minogue wrote,