There are no blacks in America. Neither are there any Indians or Chinese. According to the government of the US, there are only African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Indian-Americans. But who are these people? Are they a race? Or an ethnicity? How are these brand names determined?

Jihad is a call to introspection, so say the “experts” of theology. Despite its use throughout history as a call to something else – violence. The Islamic veil is a symbol of female emancipation. Despite its explicit and expressive intention of serving as a wall from the outside world, a cage to place the participant in. Is this reasoning reasonable? Or is it hypocrisy at its extreme?

Who is right, who is wrong? What is correct, what is not?

What is political correctness?
Any concept can be approached from multiple perspectives. And each perspective can be expected to lead to a unique opinion, not all synergistic. It is this fundamental nature of human evolution that has led, in perhaps Orwellian fashion, to the entire concept of political correctness. Political correctness arises from an attempt to homogenize, to regularize these varied opinions into one that is considered “appropriate”. The problem with this approach is that the definition of what exactly is “appropriate” is highly subjective, and that in the process of making it “appropriate” the opinion is shorn of its uniqueness and natural origins and hence devalued. Disregarding the concept of personal liberty, political correctness requires conformity and compliance to an authorized narrative. In essence, political correctness is glorified social engineering.

How relevant is political correctness?
I have always wondered, pondered over this simple question: who, or rather what, exactly are African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Indian-Americans, Irish-Americans etc? Obviously they are not races – there is the African race, the Caucasian race, the Indian, and the Oriental, but no African-American, Asian-American or Indian-American race. And they most certainly are not ethnicities. So what exactly are they? Obviously, the answer is that they are consequences of political correctness. They are names that are expected to represent these people as being distinct from those who are very-similar in all other aspects of studied anthropology, names that have been conjured up artifically, names that carry no natural meaning from the process of evolution. If these are names that are expected to be treated as anthropological nomenclature, what is the relevance of using them as such when it is clear that they are not anthropological nomenclature? Indeed, why would I want to be part of such futile absurdity?

Raising the bogey of political correctness
It is often held that the fundamental utility of political correctness is the notion of not offending someone or something. But this very notion predicates the foundation of political correctness on a concept that is highly subjective, for what is “offensive” to one may be perfectly acceptable to another. Given this, the standards used to determine the “correctness” of an opinion need to be so restrictive as to filter out anything that might cause offense to those who are quickest to feel offended. In other words, the criteria used to deem the propriety of an opinion are based not on the intention of the opinion-giver, but on the consequence it has on the opinion-receiver. All that is necessary to raise the bogey of political correctness, then, is the perception of having offended someone or something.

To cause offense, or to take offense?
I must not say that I believe Islam is an ideology of repression and regression. For, to do so would offend those who believe in the concept of Islam. For, to do so would immediately label my comments as being “inappropriate”. But how “inappropriate” are they really?

The opinion I have stated is the consequence of a personal thought process. A thought process that I believe is well-founded, reasonable and perfectly justified. The comment I have stated is an expression of that opinion. And being a free citizen of the world, I have a right to hold an opinion, and the liberty to express that opinion. The mere expression of my opinions could not possibly cause offense to someone, for, by very definition, my opinions are my own. If someone finds my opinions unacceptable, they are free to debate it, counter-opine it or simply ignore it. However, if someone were indeed to feel offended by my opinions, it is obvious that that is so not because I caused offense but because they chose to take offense.

Clash of liberties
It is true that just as I have the personal liberty to express an opinion, other people have an equal liberty to perceive that opinion as they see fit. However, when the expression of competing liberties are mutually antagonistic, the question arises of whose liberties take precedence.

The answer to this is fairly intuitive and dervies from the definition of liberty: that personal liberty is the unfettered expression of personal thought subject to the condition that this expression does not impinge upon the equal liberties of others. In this case, the statement of a particular opinion is simply an expression of a personal thought – it need have no impact on the liberties of others. On the other hand, when a person chooses to take offense over the expression of a particular opinion, the course of action he recommends, the redressal he seeks, is essentially an impingement on the liberties of the person who expressed those opinions. Hence, the liberties of the person taking offense over an opinion can not supercede the liberties of the person expressing that opinion.

Consider this: I could choose to take offense over the fact that I am expected to work to earn my pay, and you could choose to take offense over the fact that you are expected to patiently read this nonsense. Indeed, anyone could choose to take offense over anything. Where would it all end? Wouldn’t an unchecked spiral of taking offense lead to a total elimination of the concept of liberty?

The right perception of offense
If the mere expression of an opinion can not be considered to have caused offense, what can?

The answer to this lies in evaluating whether the perception of an offense is reasonable or not. For instance, had I taken a copy of the Quran and burnt it, it would have amounted to my causing offense to those who follow the tenets of Islam. This is because the action performed here would have been performed with the expression intention of showing disrespect to a particular tradition. To perceive an offense in this case would have been perfectly reasonable. However, I did not burn a copy of the Quran, for I had no such intention in the first place. All I did was to state my opinion, and if that opinion were to have offended someone, that perception of offense is an inherently unreasonable perception.

The key to perceiving an offense, then, is to judge its validity, its reasonableness.

Learnings
Given the fact the individual thought processes are liable to be contrastingly different, it is inevitable that an opinion that is acceptable to someone could be unacceptable to someone else. The existence of different individuals is guarantee of the existence of differing opinions. To attempt to homogenize them is essentially an exercise in futility. In fact, if political correctness is a concept born out of the notion of avoiding offense and offense is a perception that needs to be grounded in reasonableness, what is the need for political correctness anyway? Indeed, if opinions and actions were to be perceived on grounds of reasonableness, they could immediately and automatically be catogorized as appropriate and inappropriate, not in the subjective sense, as defined artificially by politically acceptable standards, but in the objective sense, as defined naturally by evolutionary morals and principles.