Dogma amgoD

Harold Bloom, whatever his critical successes in youth, seems lately to have doddered into the role of unlucky crank. Unlucky, I mention, since no sooner had he loosed a volley at this year's literature Nobelist, calling her award "political correctness," than the New York Times unearthed a 1992 Op-ed by Doris Lessing on PC and related linguistic abuses. Lessing is more interesting than Bloom, though, so I want to consider a bit more of what she said.

A primary theme was that Communism had loosed a catastrophic pollution into language, and that that pollution had spread far beyond the left. Eli Rabbett has pointed out that the language of the rightwing nutjobs protesting Al Gore's Nobel borrows from Stalinist racial rhetoric.

More tragic than the impoverishment of language is the associated impoverishment of mind. The totalitarian mind can't bear contradiction and so must villify criticism and suck all the life out of thought.

There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual language because I see it as nursery behavior. Art — the arts generally — are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable. Literature, in particular, has always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but, at worst, persecution. It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care.

Lessing also offers up a tentative diagnosis:

I am sure that millions of people, the rug of Communism pulled out from under them, are searching frantically, and perhaps not even knowing it, for another dogma.

In a pinch, any old dogmas may have to do: political correctness, Islamophobia, conservatism, anti-environmentalism, maybe even string theory.