PC HUMOURLESS

As Buckley observes, since the rise of political correctness in the 1970s, our culture has increasingly been dominated by moral relativists. Moral relativists cannot laugh at anyone's foolishness or evil, for laughter is necessarily judgmental — hence the ubiquity of humor in the military, that most comfortingly judgmental of professions, and its near-absence on university faculties. Buckley, who directs the Economics and Law Center at the George Mason School of Law, knows first-hand the humorlessness of academe and its consequences: "The loss of a sense of humor has impoverished academic discourse, where nonsensical theories that could not survive the test of ridicule are now taken seriously."