December 12, 2005
Algebra
In his book, “There Is No Such Thing As Free Speech, And It’s A Good Thing, Too” [Oxford], Stanley Fish, who says he was influenced by C S Lewis, writes that political correctness is a term that has originated on the left “in a kind of self-mocking way by people raising consciousness about parts of our vocabulary that are saturated with implicit racism and sexism.”
He also says that the logic by which the neoconservative polemic acquires its force is to abstract persons and issues from the flow of history so that real-world questions can be reduced to problems in a kind of “moral algebra.”
I wonder if he means, for example, that any policy that takes race into consideration is equivalent to any other policy that takes race into consideration. On such a premise, the Nazis are equivalent to Israeli hard-liners, the KKK, to those who favor minority set-asides?
Might it be, then, that old Paul’s contention to the Galatians that all of us are one in Christ Jesus, and that there’s neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female nor whatever rather abrogates any necessity for such algebraic morality? Maybe then Christians might just get on with life, and when it comes to our current fixation about however it is God’s imagination oriented us, let it go, and tend more to our spiritual inclusiveness rather than our political decorum?