In almost every aspect of life in the Western world there is an apparent desire for simplicity and convenience, we want things easy and we want them fast. Initially there may have been some suggestion that such rapid and limited interaction with all things was a necessary evil in our terribly busy lives, but it has in fact become a lifestyle in itself.

Not only is the speedy and straightforward promoted, but a more ponderous approach is actively discouraged. The urge to seek a deeper understanding of a situation is dismissed as impractical academia or trivial geekery, and the stigma of being boring is altogether too much to bare for some.

A response, (or maybe a contributing factor,) to this was the Political Correctness movement which drew a very simple line. Anything on one side of the line was good, anything on the other bad, words, opinions, actions, anything. What a relief to those in a rush, simple.

The downside to this polarisation is that it is utterly unrealistic. Inevitably people will find either something they don't like on the good side or something they sympathise with on the bad. These people then face the stigma of being 'politically incorrect'.

The fear of being seen as dwelling outside the accepted moral realms of society can be a very successful deterrent. Consequently people tend to either dilute their views just in case they go too far, or not bother to take the risk.

Now I was under the impression that Political Correctness was a left wing, woolly liberal type idea. An image attached to it in my mind is of a load of middle class white people deeply afraid of accidentally offending someone with different ethnicity and becoming the bigot they love to tell everyone they hate.

Funnily enough though the above consideration of PC reveals some crossover with a study in the psychology of right wing political thinking. The Guardian ran a short piece some time ago mentioning a US government study (1) that described conservatism as, "a set of neuroses rooted in," among other things, "dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity".

An inherent dislike of nuance seems to describe us aptly enough, so does this mean that our society has become increasingly right wing? Someone in the US might be tempted to wonder if everything wrong with the world is the fault of the Democrats for just being so shit. I don't believe, however, that this trend is driven by politics.

A useful question to ask at this point would be, who benefits from the establishment of such a situation? Whoever it is, though not necessarily the architect of the scene, probably perpetuates it for their own ends. Looking round I would say one candidate is obvious, capitalist consumerism.

How do the multinationals flogging us everything and anything benefit from a public dislike of nuance? Ok, example, advertising. How difficult would advertising become if, suddenly one morning, the tendency of most people became to critically analyse the information they received?

If people really listen to, and then really think about, most adverts they find they're abject nonsense. Not content with using everyday words to say absolutely nothing, advertisers now even invent new words to mean even less. An industry like this could not survive a more aware and engaging society and so it is in its interests to resist the emergence of one.

Whatever the cause of our current self inflicted handicap, the terrible toll it takes is painfully demonstrated in situations like that currently between Iran and the West. Why aren't we asking ourselves what on earth is happening that would drive ordinary people to call for another country's destruction? It's far easier for us to take the easy, and racist by the way, option of just declaring them an evil, or at least inherently angry people.

When the President of Iran makes some silly remarks it's all the excuse we need to worship the line we have drawn and glory it bestows upon us. We get so excited by denouncing him as on the wrong side simply because it reminds us that we're on the right side, meanwhile nothing changes.

Our attention spans and thirst for knowledge are waning as we wallow in what we are told is comfort. We have lost our understanding of the value of hardship and difficulty. Now I'm not suggesting that there is any great value to society in the hardship suffered by bomb victims; rather that there is indeed value in dealing with the hardship of facing difficult questions.

There are no easy answers or quick solutions and pretending that there are is only making things worse. The alternative is to face possibly some of the most difficult mental and emotional challenges that exist but it's worth remembering that the rewards for success will be correspondingly great.

footnote

(1) The paper is called: "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition"
by John T Jost (Stanford),
Jack Glaser (Berkley),
Arie W Kruglanski (Maryland)
and Frank J Sulloway (Berkley).
It appeared in the Psychological Bulletin, 2003, Vol. 129, No. 3, pgs 339-375
I downloaded the whole thing as a .pdf for free and it reads easier than I expected.