the origins of political correctness
expressed their tight-lipped disapproval in the same kind of all-toofamiliar clichés. The other group stared at the first in amazement, puzzled above all by how anyone could be so obsessively blinkered and so humourlessly intolerant. But this is not the first time in history that we have seen society divided in this way.
the new puritanism
Few groups in the history of Britain or America have been given a worse press in later centuries than the Puritans, the members of that ideological movement combining religion with politics which played such an influential role in English and American society in the first half of the seventeenth century. Our image of Puritanism associates it with a peculiar kind of rigidly unforgiving mind-set: an overpowering sense of collective self-righteousness, and a fierce determination to sniff out and punish anyone who did not subscribe to its strict codes of belief and moral conduct. Until comparatively recently, it would have seemed unthinkable that anything similar could reappear in our own time. But in the wave of ‘political correctness’ which has swept the Western world in recent years, we can see striking parallels to the fanatical intolerance of those seventeenth-century Puritans. We see the same sense of collective moral superiority, and the same readiness to take offence at anyone or anything which does not conform to its own strict articles of faith. It has indeed become our own contemporary version of what used in the old Soviet Union to be ruthlessly enforced as ‘correct thinking’.10 I first described the psychological similarities between political correctness and Puritanism in my book on the psychology of storytelling, The Seven Basic Plots: why we tell stories (Continuum, 2004). After describing the ‘“feminization” of men and the “masculinization” of women’ as having ‘become a central feature of that new ideological orthodoxy which was sweeping the Western world under the name of “political correctness”’, I called this ‘the new secular Puritanism’, and discussed how ‘the kind of intolerance once associated with the more puritanical forms of religion and the more extreme forms of socialism now reappeared to promote the “rights” of women, homosexuals, racial minorities, the disabled and any group of people who could be portrayed as being “below the line” and therefore discriminated against’. 10
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