If you like Tom Wolfe - and I do a lot - don't miss this interview with him in the National Association of Scholars.
He manages to find something good in political correctness:
But political correctness can take credit for one great achievement. It is not “social justice.” I am talking about the respect that is now shown to what had been, to use Max Weber’s term, “pariah people”: Jews, blacks, homosexuals, and today’s equivalent of lepers, namely, AIDS sufferers. I’m not saying everybody now feels sympathy for them, much less embraces them and sheds tears for them or has the slightest desire to have them over for dinner. I’m talking about respectful treatment in public encounters and in public utterances. This is an enormous change, and it’s of utmost importance. It’s more important than higher wages, professional advancement, bigger houses, or any other worldly improvements. It’s about the most important thing in the life of any human being: his status.
Political correctness is, as I say, a faculty obsession. It rarely changes the political outlook of an undergraduate. It just rolls off his hide, unless he comes from a family that felt that way to begin with. But it has created a certain new social atmosphere. Among educated people throughout the United States it has become a blunder, a gaffe, to show open disrespect toward any group classified under the heading “minority.” It makes one seem ill-bred. That’s all to the good.
What Larry Summers should have said when Nancy Hopkins got the vapors over his speculation that evolutionary differences may account for the reason there are so few women in high-level positions in science and engineering and the Harvard faculty erupted insisting Summers must go.
No question about it. They weren’t attacking him on intellectual grounds but on religious grounds. They were treating him as a heretic, a transgressor. They were assaulting his character. We learned how to deal with that one in our sophomore year at St. Christopher’s. If someone impugns your character, you can’t waste time trying to defend it.
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Attack the attacker. Attack his—in this case, their—character. All he had to say was, “I cannot…believe…what I am now witnessing…members of the Harvard faculty taking a grossly anti-intellectual stance, violating their implicit vow to cherish the free exchange of ideas, going mad because a hypothesis that has been openly discussed for almost half a century offends some ideological passion of the moment, acting like the most benighted of Puritans from three centuries ago ransacking all that is decent and rational in search of witches, causing this great university to become the laughingstock of the academic world here and abroad, sacrificing your very integrity in the name of some smelly little orthodoxy, as Orwell called beliefs like the ones you profess. I’m more than disappointed in you. I’m ashamed of you. Is that really how you see your mission here? If so, you should resign…now!...forthwith!...and take to the streets under your own names, not Harvard’s, and forbear being so small-minded and egotistical as to try to drag Harvard down to your level. Ladies, gentlemen…kindly do not display your ignorance…on these hallowed premises…while holding aloft the flags, the standards, of this university. Be honest with yourselves, even if you can’t be honest with Harvard. Look…think…and see…what you have become.” That would have taken care of the whole thing.
His interest in neuroscience comes from his observation that most everyone and everything is connected to status.
Before Weber, the term status had never referred specifically to social position. All at once the scales and motes fell from my eyes—I think that’s the expression—and I felt I could see life clearly for the first time. I soon realized that this concern about social status, about where you rank, absolutely saturates life
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to me, ...status, is everything. It’s the key to understanding everything humans do.
On the Academy today
People in academia should start insisting on objective scholarship, insisting on it, relentlessly, driving the point home, ramming it down the gullets of the politically correct, making noise! naming names! citing egregious examples! showing contempt to the brink of brutality! The idea that a discipline should be devoted to “social justice” is ludicrous. The fashionable deconstructionist doctrine that there is no such thing as truth, only the self-serving manipulation of language, is worse than ludicrous. It is casuistry, laziness, and childishness in equal parts.