The war on noticing in modern Britain
How DEI initiatives and the worldview behind them dull people’s natural perceptiveness
Latest article in The Critic on “the war on noticing”. First paragraph below, head there to read the rest. The Critic doesn’t allow comments, so feel free to make any here.
“Political correctness is a war on noticing” is my favourite Sailerism, as it perfectly captures what our ruling social ideology boils down to at the level of everyday life. His adage is now over a decade old and political correctness as a concept has been subsumed within that of woke, but Sailer’s characterisation is as valid as ever. In today’s Britain there is more to notice than ever before, while simultaneously the taboo against it keeps growing stronger. What this means is that people’s natural perceptiveness about the patterns of human behaviour they observe is dulled, either subconsciously, by their own self-censoring mechanisms, or deliberately, by those of the institutions they inhabit.
One recent example is the General Medical Council’s “targets to address areas of inequality”. The GMC aims to “eliminate two areas of inequality affecting doctors” which are that “ethnic minority doctors are twice as likely to be referred to us by their employer than white doctors” and that “doctors who gained their medical degree outside the UK are three times more likely to be referred to us than doctors who took their medical degree in the UK.” If you were into noticing things, you might be able to think of some valid reasons why doctors who qualified outside the UK are more likely to be referred to the UK regulator than those who qualified in the UK, and then to consider perhaps whether this disparity is an indictment of our policy of importing medical staff rather than training sufficient numbers of our own. If you were not into noticing though, or more likely if you were forbidden from noticing either by self or organisational censorship, then you would view this statistic as merely “an area of inequality to be eliminated”, as the GMC appears to.
Full article here.
