Speechless review – has political correctness really made us all mute?

Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds by Michael Knowles (Regnery Publishing), £22.

The premise of Michael Knowles’ intriguing book, Speechless, is that politically correct language distorts reality. By this, he means that it is not merely a polite way of saying something, such as how you might say “Michael Knowles’ intriguing book” when what you mean is “Michael Knowles’ deceptively tricky book”. No, political correctness twists our sense of the world. 

If you were being politically correct, “Michael Knowles’ intriguing book” would mean something else entirely. It would mean, perhaps, “Michael Knowles’ astutely targeted money-making scheme to exploit the culture war and further his ambitions on America’s wealthy conservative networks”. Something like that. Except I’m not interested in being politically correct.

But to begin, not with the beginning, but the bit before the beginning… If you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, you can at least judge a man by the friends he keeps. Speechless has no fewer than 22 recommendations, including those from Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, Anne Coulter, Mike Pompeo, Charlie Kirk, Dave Rubin, and Andy Ngô. And if you know anything about contemporary American politics, you would know the only names missing are that of Roger Stone’s and Donald J. Trump’s. This is a book written for a specific demographic, and if you belong to that demographic, you’re sure to love Speechless.

The book is in no way poorly written. One could even say it’s infinitely better than Knowles’ first, Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide, but unless you know that it contained 256 blank pages, you won’t get the joke. No, the obstacle here isn’t the writing but the arguments.

When Knowles fills a page, his logic runs away frantically, waving its arms in the air while oblivious to the fact that its flies are undone. It reads somewhat like those awfully brilliant / brilliantly awful books in which some radical PhD looks at the pyramids and proves that they were built by Sand Smurfs from the nth Dimension. Every bit of supporting evidence is thrown into the mix, a narrative builds, and the argument seems credible… so long as you don’t go and read any other historian who can tell you why Sand Smurfs do not exist.

Knowles doesn’t offer any nuance. He just accepts that the reader shares his semantic ground, and yet, the book sets itself up as a fair-minded treatment of political correctness. Is “political correctness” just an objection to people with whom you happen to disagree?

History is littered with language that has adapted to a more nuanced understanding of the universe. That’s pretty much what language does. It is intimately tied up with our ability to think and remains one of those great mysteries that intrigue cognitive linguists. 

The bulk of this book isn’t about politically correct language, then, but about epistemology and in those terms, it’s less than successful. Knowles is too certain, and every point is self-evidently straightforward. He talks correctly but too crudely about the “Christian religion on which our culture rests” and, elsewhere, insists that “the radical skepticism on which political correctness relies collapses under even the slightest scrutiny”. 

Even if he were right to dismiss so much of western thought post-Descartes as “radical skepticism”, that is still a bold statement given his argument seems to largely rest on some Biblical notion of the moral good.

Knowles quotes polls “conducted in 2015 by Fairleigh Dickinson University and the Pew Research Center [which] found that most Americans count political correctness among the nation’s most pressing problems”. The obvious question somebody writing seriously about the subject should ask is, “why would most Americans count political correctness among the nation’s most pressing problems?”

Go to the source material, and the numbers are more nuanced. The 59 per cent to 39 per cent skew is weighted by political affiliation. 78 per cent of Republican voters believe that people are too offended by language (83 per cent among Trump supporters). That number is only 37 per cent among Democrats. Could the solution to this riddle be that conservative news outlets have spent decades trying to convince America’s Right – of which Knowles himself is a lauded member – that political correctness is the nation’s most pressing problem? Might that be reflected in the poll? Isn’t this cognitive bias?

One might argue that it is, which makes it troubling given the book grapples with bias at the scale of the culture war. Instead, he provides a familiar narrative found on America’s Right, sometimes made toxic by antisemitic tropes. Knowles is clever enough to know what critics will say and anticipates the pushback. He expects:

“my critics to charge me with propounding a “conspiracy theory.” […] They will deny that Marxist philosophers ever considered matters of culture, as Wikipedia does when it defines “cultural Marxism” as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. They will deny the influence of certain thinkers upon others. They will deny the existence of political correctness itself.”

His answer to that charge?

“I fear that in this book I have, at times, made such extensive use of quotation and citation as to approach pedantry and dullness […] But whatever damage those references have done to readability, they should preclude any credible claim of conspiracy theorizing.”

Except copious quotation does no such thing. It is an academic trick to disguise weak arguments. And that really is the takeaway here. 

If you do want material to throw around in the pie fight of the culture war, Speechless contains plenty of custard. If you want a book saying something new and interesting about language, thought, or the way cultures move, then perhaps look for a book that doesn’t begin with 23 people telling you how good it is.