Is Political Correctness the enemy of Universalist Philosophy? [closed]

Question

Political Correctness, was a sociocultural movement that began more than 30 years ago in the American Academy-(primarily within various the Humanities and Social Sciences). However, in the past few years, the term, "Political Correctness", has been sidelined by newer (and more confrontational sounding) language, such as, "Cancel culture" and "wokeness". Whether one chooses to use the older term, Political Correctness or the more contemporary terms, Cancel culture and wokeness, they all seem to share one common characteristic; each of these sinister sounding terms, has been and is very much, preoccupied with particularity, as well as being equally contemptuous of...the Universal.

As a former History Instructor, I am quite aware of how cultural particularities have evolved over the ages, though the field of Philosophy, is, in many ways, the opposite of History.

Philosophy, (without sounding overly simplistic and juvenile), was and is, a discipline which strove and strives for an understanding of the universal, the idealistic and the sublime; not necessarily what has been accomplished, but what COULD be accomplished and why it SHOULD be accomplished. Yet, having watched the degeneration of Political Correctness over the years, it seems to have gone further away from the universalistic aims of Philosophy and instead, welcoming the pettiness of cultural particularities-(i.e. a more hyper nationalistic understanding of Philosophy's origins, as well as its historic strives and purposes).

To put it more bluntly....Is Political Correctness-(and its "Woke" allies), inherently anti-intellectual, as well as the enemy of Philosophy?

Answer 1

The core idea behind all of these monikers is that public discourse should be civil, respectful, and non-alienating. That is the basic grounding of all intellectual discussions. Anti-intellectuals want discourse to be violent, laden with emotions, reactive, ignorant, etc., because they gain power when others cede their rationality.

Answer 2

For starters, cancel culture is a barely real phenomenon, or at most is little more than a novel form of boycotting. There is nothing definitively anti-philosophical about boycotting. As for being "woke," well, that's the goal of philosophy, after a fashion, after all! Major philosophers have often been at the forefront of "woke"-like stances (for their time): Bertrand Russell convened a major investigation into US atrocities during the Vietnam War, and going back much further, Kant held the conquest of the Americas to be morally wrong.

More broadly, though, the "opposite" of particularity is not universality but generality. And identifying philosophy with generality would not be to identify the philosophical perspective very well. A quick look at the table of contents in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy should testify very well to that fact: it's not like the only articles there are about general logic and abstract metaphysics, but we see entries on individual philosophers, philosophies of individual kinds of science, reflection on individual questions (like about whether holes are real), analysis of fairly particular moral topics, and so on and on.

Particularity and generality form a broad spectrum (anyone familiar with biological taxonomies can appreciate this fact). And I think that PC/woke/cancel-culture/virtue-signalling attitudes, to the extent that these are real at all in the first place, are not about denying generality altogether, but are about being honest about the difficulty in adopting a truly general perspective, and acknowledging when people falsely claim to portray a general perspective.