Collapse: The Blog

The Six Lamest Arguments for Atheism Ever Conceived

I recently had the misfortune of coming across Geoffrey Berg's The Six Ways of Atheism, intended as a counter to Aquinas' Five Ways: a series of positive disproofs of God's existence.

I have never before read something so bereft of merit. What sloppy solipsism this man passes off as "proving beyond conceivable doubt that God cannot exist," as he has the temerity to claim in the book's conclusion.

As soon as I'm done with the series on usury, Berg is getting a six-part series of his own. Familiarize yourself, in the meantime, with the book's arguments as he presents them on his own Web site. And trust me when I say that nothing in the book itself improves on the arguments presented there.

God, save man from his follies!

Abolish Usury, Part I: Introduction

That the West has a debt problem, it goes without saying. We're addicted to it. Not merely individually, though of course we are individually addicted to debt, as well -- seriously, try integrating yourself into the community productively without taking on absurd amounts of debt (student loan, car loan, home loan, etc.). Our economy is addicted to it, as well. Every minor hiccup in credit creation has the potential to detonate instantly all of the West's economic progress for the last several decades, if not longer, hence the constant and incessant need to bail out insolvent banks, prop them up by inflationarily impoverishing the poor, cover up their wrongdoing and protect them from criminal and even civil charges. Keeping the credit creation Ponzi scheme going has required that young people be sold into the perpetual and inescapable bondage of student loan debt at alarming and increasingly rapid rates. I need not go into the horrors that banks intentionally inflict on downtrodden people, including the hiring of thugs to break in and change the locks of homes not yet in foreclosure, in total contravention of the law), all with the tacit blessing of the political class, in order to boost their balance sheets.

In short, usurious lending has helped to produce a society that is grossly unjust, depraved, and corrupt. Revitalizing society will necessarily require that usury be curtailed. In fact, to the greatest extent possible, it ought to be abolished. By "usury," I mean not the commonly-understood practice today of lending at exorbitant interest rates: I mean it in the traditional sense, that of lending at interest, period.

Strict anti-usury laws will be necessary to ensure that future economies are stable. Our debt-based monetary system will, if left unchecked, produce an ever-tightening spiral of weak booms and crippling busts culminating in a catastrophic repeat of the Great Depression (when at last the mathematical chickens come home to roost) from which we may well not recover. Unstable economies produce unhealthy societies: they destroy and impoverish families, smash the traditional institutions around which communities are built, and contribute (by way of the "Government, do something!" impulse) to the totalitarianization of our political systems.

An economic system in which debt must constantly increase to avert catastrophe is one that necessarily must tolerate injustice. To hold bankers accountable to the law -- to shut down insolvent or corruption-riddled firms, to throw executives in prison, to allow the desperate to escape the burden of their debt via bankruptcy -- is to disrupt the credit creation process, and every minor disruption to that process threatens to explode and take down the world with it. Thus, every outrageous abuse of human dignity offered by the banks, whether stealing people's homes, bilking local communities, or harrassing debtors into an early grave, must be suffered in the name of economic progress.

Finally, our generous policy toward usury has contributed to the materialization of society, to the reorientation of society's goals away from spiritual, moral, cultural, and communitarian goods toward atheistic, hedonistic, nihilistic, and individualistic ones. Usury has become a cancer, and society is desperate need of emergency surgery.

Unfortunately, it won't be as simple as passing one or two laws. Creating a generally anti-usury program will require dramatic changes to our present way of life. More on that later.

Death Wish

I recently came across Just Thomism, run by James Chastek. It's a great philosophy blog, and Chastek's musings are deeply insightful and very intelligble, even to a numbskull like me. Of particular interest to me was his recent post about the West's death wish, a phenomenon which my own blog has probably inflated by approximately 8 million percent:

But to call it a death wish is to name it after what is most dramatic in [it] and not what is most real. Nature doesn’t think about death, and our desire doesn’t terminate in it. We want the new birth on the other side of the collapse. This desire for a new birth has been building at least for the last century, and it is most apparent in our contemporary art. We have spent the last century trying to destroy the very idea of art. Warhol’s soup can or Duchamp’s urinal are brilliant pieces of art, if reckoned according to their goal, which was to infect the popular imagination with the idea that art was anything you called art – in other words, that there was no art. Taken as pure nihilism, both are trite and pointless, but they are more than that, which is why they fascinate. The desire is to kill art altogether, all the way down to its foundations, so that we might come out on the other side with a clean slate and a pristine consciousness.   The civilization has grown tired. Let’s burn down the forest to clear the path and fertilize the earth. Philosophy has run on a path similar to art – we have destroyed all the systems by critique, and we strive to deconstruct and complicate thought to the point where the life of the mind stops altogether. All the sciences and humanities strive to complicate, to befuddle, to leave anyone who wanders into them in a complete state of bewilderment. The degree of truth in all fields is measured by the degree of specialization, and the degree of specialization by the extent to which no one can understand what you are saying – including yourself. It would be one thing to say that all of this just happens – there would be nothing confusing in that. But we want this to happen, and are horrified that the whole thing might not hit its consummation. Why?

Read the rest.

Debt, Money, and Morality

Philip Pilkington has a fascinating interview over at Naked Capitalism with economic anthropologist David Graeber, which among other things, reveals the vast anthropological lie on which the entire modern conception of money is built:

Philip Pilkington: Let’s begin. Most economists claim that money was invented to replace the barter system. But you’ve found something quite different, am I correct?

David Graeber: Yes there’s a standard story we’re all taught, a ‘once upon a time’ — it’s a fairy tale.

It really deserves no other introduction: according to this theory all transactions were by barter. “Tell you what, I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow.” Or three arrow-heads for that beaver pelt or what-have-you. This created inconveniences, because maybe your neighbor doesn’t need chickens right now, so you have to invent money.

The story goes back at least to Adam Smith and in its own way it’s the founding myth of economics. Now, I’m an anthropologist and we anthropologists have long known this is a myth simply because if there were places where everyday transactions took the form of: “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow,” we’d have found one or two by now. After all people have been looking since 1776, when the Wealth of Nations first came out. But if you think about it for just a second, it’s hardly surprising that we haven’t found anything.

Think about what they’re saying here – basically: that a bunch of Neolithic farmers in a village somewhere, or Native Americans or whatever, will be engaging in transactions only through the spot trade. So, if your neighbor doesn’t have what you want right now, no big deal. Obviously what would really happen, and this is what anthropologists observe when neighbors do engage in something like exchange with each other, if you want your neighbor’s cow, you’d say, “wow, nice cow” and he’d say “you like it? Take it!” – and now you owe him one.

...

DG: One could tell the history like this: eventually the Egyptian approach (taxes) and Mesopotamian approach (usury) fuse together, people have to borrow to pay their taxes and debt becomes institutionalized.

Taxes are also key to creating the first markets that operate on cash, since coinage seems to be invented or at least widely popularized to pay soldiers – more or less simultaneously in China, India, and the Mediterranean, where governments find the easiest way to provision the troops is to issue them standard-issue bits of gold or silver and then demand everyone else in the kingdom give them one of those coins back again. Thus we find that the language of debt and the language of morality start to merge.

In Sanskrit, Hebrew, Aramaic, ‘debt,’ ‘guilt,’ and ‘sin’ are actually the same word. Much of the language of the great religious movements – reckoning, redemption, karmic accounting and the like – are drawn from the language of ancient finance. But that language is always found wanting and inadequate and twisted around into something completely different. It’s as if the great prophets and religious teachers had no choice but to start with that kind of language because it’s the language that existed at the time, but they only adopted it so as to turn it into its opposite: as a way of saying debts are not sacred, but forgiveness of debt, or the ability to wipe out debt, or to realize that debts aren’t real – these are the acts that are truly sacred.

How did this happen? Well, remember I said that the big question in the origins of money is how a sense of obligation – an ‘I owe you one’ – turns into something that can be precisely quantified? Well, the answer seems to be: when there is a potential for violence. If you give someone a pig and they give you a few chickens back you might think they’re a cheapskate, and mock them, but you’re unlikely to come up with a mathematical formula for exactly how cheap you think they are. If someone pokes out your eye in a fight, or kills your brother, that’s when you start saying, “traditional compensation is exactly twenty-seven heifers of the finest quality and if they’re not of the finest quality, this means war!”

Money, in the sense of exact equivalents, seems to emerge from situations like that, but also, war and plunder, the disposal of loot, slavery. In early Medieval Ireland, for example, slave-girls were the highest denomination of currency. And you could specify the exact value of everything in a typical house even though very few of those items were available for sale anywhere because they were used to pay fines or damages if someone broke them.

But once you understand that taxes and money largely begin with war it becomes easier to see what really happened. After all, every Mafiosi understands this. If you want to take a relation of violent extortion, sheer power, and turn it into something moral, and most of all, make it seem like the victims are to blame, you turn it into a relation of debt. “You owe me, but I’ll cut you a break for now…” Most human beings in history have probably been told this by their debtors. And the crucial thing is: what possible reply can you make but, “wait a minute, who owes what to who here?” And of course for thousands of years, that’s what the victims have said, but the moment you do, you are using the rulers’ language, you’re admitting that debt and morality really are the same thing. That’s the situation the religious thinkers were stuck with, so they started with the language of debt, and then they tried to turn it around and make it into something else.

Also of interest is Graeber's note that Nietzsche's musing about morality being founded on the violent extraction of debt was probably an ironic following-through of Adam Smith's absurd premises, and his observation that the history of money is one characterized by swings between a conception of money as a medium of commodity exchange and one as an instrument of debt, and what the ever-swinging pendulum means for us today:

What’s been happening since Nixon went off the gold standard in 1971 has just been another turn of the wheel – though of course it never happens the same way twice. However, in one sense, I think we’ve been going about things backwards. In the past, periods dominated by virtual credit money have also been periods where there have been social protections for debtors. Once you recognize that money is just a social construct, a credit, an IOU, then first of all what is to stop people from generating it endlessly? And how do you prevent the poor from falling into debt traps and becoming effectively enslaved to the rich? That’s why you had Mesopotamian clean slates, Biblical Jubilees, Medieval laws against usury in both Christianity and Islam and so on and so forth.

Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the population that they would start selling family members into slavery, or eventually, even themselves.

Well, what happened this time around? Instead of creating some sort of overarching institution to protect debtors, they create these grandiose, world-scale institutions like the IMF or S&P to protect creditors. They essentially declare (in defiance of all traditional economic logic) that no debtor should ever be allowed to default. Needless to say the result is catastrophic. We are experiencing something that to me, at least, looks exactly like what the ancients were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of disaster.

And, I might add, if Aristotle were around today, I very much doubt he would think that the distinction between renting yourself or members of your family out to work and selling yourself or members of your family to work was more than a legal nicety. He’d probably conclude that most Americans were, for all intents and purposes, slaves.

Read the whole thing. This has fueled some more thoughts about debt on my end, so expect the possibility of a post or two in the future on the topic.

Hell and the Modern Mind: A Review of Bruce Charlton's Thought Prison

The best books are the ones that are simultaneously familiar and novel -- familiar in that they conform intuitively to reality; novel in that they expose, for the first time, heretofore unarticulated intuitions to the light of day. Thus, the best books provoke the reaction: "Of course!" They set the heart aflutter with wonder that you had never thought to put it that way before, had never recognized  what was right in front of your face.

This is exactly the kind of book Bruce Charlton has written in Thought Prison: The Fundamental Nature of Political Correctness, which I previously discussed briefly here and of which Dr. Charlton was kind enough to forward me a proof copy. By "political correctness," Dr. Charlton means not merely the irritating tics of leftist speech (with which the phrase is normally associated) but the general worldview of the leftist mind, a worldview predicated on the assumption of the universe's irrationality and which a priori admits no possibility of God, truth, or reason. It confronts the existential void with constantly-elevating hedonistic self-distraction. This primarily accounts for the unprecedented collapse of Western morality in recent decades, as generation after generation of nihilism-addled degenerates derive diminishing pleasures from progressively more obscene behaviors.

Charlton is at his best when describing how the various peculiarities of PC behavior and thought patterns unavoidably derive from this worldview. The leftist is fashion-sensitive precisely because it provides the stimulating novelty that, alone, provides him with analgesia to dull the pain of life in a Godless, meaningless universe. He is obsessed with enemies but cannot engage them rationally because to submit to rational evaluation is to admit PC's falseness: thus, he can only destroy his enemies, hysterically tarring, shutting down, attacking or even killing them. (Nevertheless, the leftist would prefer to deal with enemies that cannot actually challenge it, so he is perfectly content to tilt at windmills with poorly-painted papier-mâché tentacles hastily glued on to them). What matters to the leftist is not who its enemies are but merely that it has enemies; without something to rebel against, the whole flimsily-constructed charade falls apart. Even the degenerate flashiness of modern news media stems from the PC worldview, as it simultaneously provides a constant stream of novelty and stimulation while glorifying the PC in its battle against its (largely illusory) enemies.

He's at his most alarming when he devotes a few chapters to following PC through to its logical conclusion.

There's much more to be said, but I'd hate to spoil it, so buy the book yourself and read it. It's a quick and easy read; Charlton's style is terse and expressionistic, and his chapters are brief and to the point. It's a book thankfully bereft of excess, an anorexic antidote to the ponderous but ultimately meaningless tomes largely produced these days. I read most of it in an afternoon, and I've always been a slow and easily distracted reader.

I titled this post "Hell and the Modern Mind" for two reasons. First, because Hell is exactly where the modern mind currently is. Its atheism, its nihilism, its utilitarianism are all the hallmarks of souls preparing themselves for the fire; to them, life itself is Hell, a meaningless, absurd, and painful void which cannot be escaped but the pain of which can be dulled, if only by dangerously increasing doses of stimulation. And second, because Hell is exactly where the modern minds are leading us. I was amazed, really, by the overlap between this book and Peter Drucker's The End of Economic Man. Dr. Charlton's description of the average PC intellectual and Drucker's description of the average German under the Nazi regime are appallingly similar. If he is right about what PC is and what it means for the world, than the conditions are very much right not only for a second outburst of totalitarianism but for our entry into the final stage of the cancerous progression of the modern project: the suicide of an entire culture; perhaps the suicide of an entire race.

Truly, the world is fallen -- and still falling -- and nothing short of miracle can save it.

One Bank to Rule Them All

Douglas A. MacIntyre has the skinny on a rumor circulating around Wall Street this morning:

There is a rumor circulated on Wall St. that JP Morgan (NYSE: JPM) will take over Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) within the week. The government will support the deal with a $100 billion investment in preferred shares issued by the combined entity. Alternatively, the government may guarantee the value of a large pool of Bank of America assets. The word is that Treasury Secretary Geithner has discussed the transaction with JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon.The “merger” would completely destroy the value of BAC’s common shares.

The government feels that the deal may be necessary as Bank of America struggles unsuccessfully to close several transactions to bolster its balance sheet. The Wall Street Journal reported that Business Insider speculated that the financial firm will need to raise $200 billion which would be another possible event that would wipe out common shareholders.

...

Under federal law, JP Morgan and Bank of America could not combine because together they would have too large a share of several financial markets in the US. Treasury would apparently work with other government agencies to have those rules suspended and then the new combined bank would sell assets to get back into compliance later.

The government’s preference for a deal with JP Morgan rather than a federal takeover may be because it does not want to set the precedent of Washington owning one of the world’s largest banks “paid for” with taxpayer money.

Why don't we just declare Jamie Dimon the High Priest of the American Cult of Mammon and get it the hell over with already?

The Muddling of Language

One of the peculiarities of the modern condition is its corruption of language. Concepts that were once readily intellectually accessible are now cloudy and muddled to the vast majority of people because the language we use to discuss them has been warped. Although the general effect has been to draw a veil of uncertainty over knowledge of pretty much everything premodern, the exact nature of this muddling varies depending on the word.

In some cases, words have acquired contrary meanings. "Faith" was once understood to be something more akin to "trust": trust in what one's reason has revealed to be true, no matter how much one's senses may scream out against it. You have faith, for instance, that a rope and hook tested on 10,000 pounds weights will hold your comparatively meager frame when you go mountain climbing: you know it's irrational to believe there's much more than a vanishingly small chance you'll die, but still you must force yourself to let go and swing. But today, faith is understood to mean something quite different: a kind of blind, irrational, groping hope against hope, utterly unmoored from any basis in reality. I'm assuming this probably comes from the triumph of fideism in the larger body of religious thought, although it's certainly wound up a convenient means of denigrating a perfectly rational dogma.

In other cases, words or phrases that once would have been understood to be nonsensical have acquired meaning, carrying along them with particular ideas. For instance, the phrases "good person" and "bad person" are ontologically meaningless: the former a tautology, the latter a non sequitur. Yet they're widely bandied about today, especially in service to liberal causes, e.g., "homosexuality can't be immoral, I know plenty of gays that are GOOD PEOPLE." At best, the phrases are heuristics: "good people" really means "people who do good things." But that hardly means those same people don't also do bad things, or even principally do bad things. The problem with even talking that way is that, since everyone does some mix of good and evil, the judgment that one is a "good person" is necessarily subjective and informed entirely by what you've witnessed of them. Thus we're always surprised when some seemingly nice, quite fellow snaps and kills people, and the common refrain is heard (but never listened to) that he seemed like such a good guy. Our understanding of good and evil itself is made hazy with such talk.

There are also curious cases in which two perfectly innocuous words acquire some other (usually sinister) meaning when juxtaposed. I'm reminded of some vaguely right-wing columnist (I think a National Review type) remarking that "social" was a word which, in modern parlance, had the remarkable ability to completely destroy the meaning of any word joined with it, so that "social justice" is typically grossly unjust, "social engineering" lacks the methodological rigor of traditional engineering fields, and "social studies" usually involves the unstudious distortion of history to fit the official modern narrative of slavery/genocide/bigotry/oppression/intolerance rememberance.

Even "modernity" itself is a bizarre word. When I first started to develop an inkling that there was something fundamentally wrong with the world (back in my last year of college), I started looking up what I could about the concept. Unfortunately, much of it had been written by art historians, who seized on the concept of modernity and developed from it the grotesque visual abortion that is modern art. Much of the rest was unintelligible gobbledygook written by pondscum sociologists. Nowhere was I able to find a clear and succinct explanation of what modernity actually was, what it meant, when it started, who was responsible for it, and so on; that realization came gradually as I read more history and philosophy. I almost wonder if that obfuscation isn't intentional, at least in the sense that the whole modern project has been intentional, as if the moderns are deliberately hiding the fact that there is an antiquity against which modernity can be contrasted.

Some words have had additional and previously unheard of meanings attached to them, so that, for instance, "duty" is honored as a virtue rather than simply acknowledged as a fact of human life arising from nature.

Other words have been severed from their traditional connotations, so that "illegitimacy" is seldom thought of as a problem (and the fact that previous generations saw far lower rates of illegitimacy than we have today as a source of concern is simply baffling to most people). No one talks or cares about "divorce" as a problem anymore. On the topic of sex and marriage, that which is "natural" has ceased to mean "that which accords with human nature" (a definition that logically excludes, for instance, homosexuality) and come to mean "that which occurs in nature" (a definition that excludes nothing). Relatedly, "disorder" has come to mean merely "dysfunction," to the exclusion of its more traditional connotation relating to the use of a healthy and functional faculty in a manner that does nto accord with human nature.

The fact that words themselves have fallen victim to modernity's ever-spreading poison just goes to show how deeply the modernist/leftist project has triumphed. I don't even have to make the obligatory 1984 reference. The rot has, at last, reached the heart of the world, and salvation for many people is impossible simply because the language needed to communicate the core concept of it is rapidly disappearing.

The Centre Cannot Hold

Bank of America is on the verge of failure and its insurance costs are going parabolic. The Richmond Fed reports the ongoing, gradual collapse of the Atlantic economy, with new order and shipments, backlog, capacity utilization and average workweek all in freefall. Moody's is shot through with corruption and S&P's President has been fired for doing the right thing by exposing America's utter credit unworthiness (and replaced, of all people, by a Citibank executive!).

Bank of America is the big wild card in this. When it goes, it will be the Lehman Brothers of 2011 -- but neither the political will nor the money are there to bail out the banks again. It could blow up at literally any time.

Things are getting very dangerous, indeed.

Unreason in the Service of Falsehood

I was talking with an anti-Catholic individual recently about the Church's teachings on contraception, trying to explain to him that the basis of its teachings are not arbitrary fiat or divine revelation but a simple evaluation of the facts.  I made the natural law argument that the goodness of a thing consists in the degree to which it instantiates its essence: that, for instance, a "good" pen can meaningfully be said to be one which is most "pen-like," and that what we consider "pen-like" is necessarily informed by the pen's telos, which is writing. Thus, a "good" pen is one that writes very well.

Now, this isn't some subjective value judgment; it's simply a statement of truth. We have pens that we may write. A good pen writes. A bad pen doesn't. A thing which is intrinsically incapable of writing, not because, say, its run out of ink but because it was never designed to write in the first place, isn't really a pen at all. I can use a bad pen to scratch that little spot on my back I can't quite reach, and if it's good at that, I may say, "This pen makes a good back scratcher." But it's still a bad pen.

Anyway, this fellow's response was that the idea that objects have essences is more or less made up and corresponds to no objective "scientific" reality, as bland an assertion of nominalism and positivism as could be asked for. The latter objection is dispatched with easily enough. But I was amazed that a person in thrall to the cult of science would actually object to the idea of essences.

There's nothing magical about them; no one believes in them like Plato did, as insubstantial things in some separate plane of existence, of which concrete instantiations are just a pale shadow. The essence of a thing is simply that aspect of it without which it would not be that thing. Thus, a pen that's had its tip fall off is not really a pen at all anymore; it's simply an empty plastic tube. To say that there are no essences is to say, therefore, that nothing is what it is because it possesses some feature inherent to all such things; it's to say that there is no real basis for distinguishing between a pen and a pencil, or a dog and a cat, or a starfish and a skyscraper, or a turnip and an asteroid. It is, in a very real sense, to say that our tendency to classify things is necessarily arbitrary and unsound; that human knowledge, and especially the senses, are necessarily unreliable; that the entire field of scientific inquiry is itself an exercise in profound stupidity.

And all this to avoid the uncomfortable conclusion that contraceptive sex is inherently immoral!

Such rank unreason is not uncommon to people in thrall to the modern philosophical project. Whatever its claims to the contrary, modern thought is not only irrational; it's positively antirational. I was surprised that conversation went as smoothly as it did: the vast majority of times, nominalists cannot even submit their beliefs to rational evaluation because they would collapse instantly into dust, like a vampire exposed to the sear of daylight. Instead, they resort to hysterical theatrics, preferring to tar and slander and shut down;  this is exactly why most modern leftists would prefer to tilt at windmills with crappy papier-mâché tentacles hastily glued on to them than actually engage their opponents as equals.

It takes a tremendous amount of gall for such people to swaddle themselves in the cloak of reason while attacking Catholics as mere fideists.

Unfortunately, if the modern philosophical project can be said to exemplify anything, it's unreason in the service of falsehood. Against such stubborn and intentional ignorance (and, indeed, evil), we can do virtually nothing -- and given the entrenchment of our opponents, we risk our livelihoods even by trying.

Is Political Correctness Merely Niceness?

Commenter David mentioned the following in a recent post, in response to which I promised a later follow-up:

Left-wing political correctness embraces very simple values that were once conservative values as much as liberal ones: talk to people using respectful language whether you agree with their actions and attitudes or not. Do not stereotype the actions of a whole group by those of an individual.

I've actually heard this argument before. Suffice to say, I'm not convinced that political correctness is simply niceness. The best evidence for this is that we use two different words for them; if PC were merely niceness and nothing else, we'd have no reason to have invented a new phrase.

The context in which I referred to PC in the earlier post was the sense used by Bruce Charlton in his new book, Thought Prison: The Fundamental Nature of Political Correctness, by which he simply means leftism in general (or, perhaps more specifically, the leftist/modern philosophical project). David clearly means it in the sense in which it is more commonly understood today, to refer to a program of speech controls enforced by social sanction.

So what is PC if not identical to niceness? Is it deficient in some respect, or does it add something to niceness that niceness itself does not require? PC is similar to niceness in that it exists to limit respectable discourse and thus to protect the existing social order from excessively severe attacks. That is where the resemblance, I'm afraid, really ends.

For where niceness is concerned with protecting a social order concerned with community, PC is concerned with protecting a social order that is explicitly anti-community (indeed, one that parcels up community into competing and hostile groups, some of which are entitled to PC protection and others subject to explicitly PC nastiness). Both require conformity to socially-established norms but order these norms toward different ends. The order which niceness seeks is fundamentally cooperative, communitarian, and traditional; it is pious and humble. Political correctness seeks an order that is noncooperative, individualistic, and revolutionarily novel as a matter of principle. It regards desecration and shock as a means to that end.

PC is therefore a direct competitor to mere niceness; both seek the protection of a social order, but the social orders they envision are irreconcilable. Niceness has no interest in protecting the manifold absurdities of modern liberal society. Political correctness has no interest in what it sees as the stultifying, arbitrary, and suffocating rules of traditional society.

(In fact, in PC there are not even really "norms" in the strictest sense of the word. PC nominally proscribes racist speech or actions, yet these are officially PC-approved when the offender is a higher-status victim group than the race being slandered, as when California homosexuals exploded with savage racist rage following the passage of Proposition 8, banning homosexual marriage, with strong black support. The politically correct, being utilitarians and consequentialists all, see the end as universally superordinate to the means, so that grossly un-PC behavior is encouraged provided it culminates in a more broadly PC gestalt). There are plenty more examples of PC being not kind but still definitively PC in the strictest sense of the word; a casual Googling reveals many.

PC also reacts in comparatively more severe ways to violations of its sanctions than do the merely kind. Because kindness is simply a disposition whereas PC is an institutionalized ideology, violations of the former are treated with, at worst, coldness and avoidance where violations of the latter are subject to often quite devastating and disproportionate retaliation. PC is therefore far more overtly coercive than mere niceness.

In their respective extremes, PC and niceness differ again. Niceness taken too far is deficient: either in justice (e.g., allowing injustice to occur because one is too nice to intervene) or in charity (e.g., allowing a person to persist in bad habits because one is just too darn nice to correct them) or in courage (e.g., allowing oneself to be bullied by others because one is too nice to stand up for oneself). PC, taken too far, is excessive, ruining people's lives and pitting entire cultures against one another. It is the injustice, the uncharity, and the cowardice against which excessive niceness is too feckless to do anything.

It goes without saying that, while both niceness and PC proscribe certain behaviors and manners of speech, PC's scope is comparatively limited; it protects with greater intensity many fewer people (and does not because they are people but because they belong to the groups they do), where niceness protects everyone. Niceness prohibits meanness; PC prohibits insensitivity.