The press has recently reported on the banning of a conference in a public Spanish university for reasons of ideological disagreement. It reminds me of past times that I happily thought we had finally overcome. Those who demanded that the conference be banned used the sole argument that the presenter in question suffers from homophobia. Before allowing him to speak, he was diagnosed with a disease and many proclaimed, “be careful, he is homophobic.” And unlike other patients, with whom we have to sympathize and offer support and solidarity, those afflicted with homophobia should be pointed out, labeled, and quarantined so that others know they are contagious and to be avoided.

The strategy of pathologizing those who disagree with the dominant view on ideological grounds is not new. The former USSR and Nazi Germany made extensive use of it. What is strange is that, even today, and in university circles, this form of rejection without argument is practiced with impunity and is so common when it comes to political correctness. In labeling certain ways of thinking as pathological behavior, those who think differently are rejected and excluded from civil society without taking the trouble to reason and argue. It is a matter of question whether this is done because the dominant view lacks arguments or because of herd mentality or intellectual laziness. In any case, it is a resource employed in an era that, even in universities, denigrates rationality. As Rosaria Champange Butterfield said, “Where everybody thinks the same nobody thinks very much.”

And this is where a new disease— homophobia— is diagnosed and coined, making it, at the same time, an insult. The politically correct inquisition tends to insult, to disavow, rather than to argue and it is just another, very toxic way of polluting the social atmosphere, hindering communication between people. In addition, insulting words, as Kafka argued, precede violent actions because playing with words is playing with truth, and playing with truth is playing with life.

Perhaps the most revolutionary thing that we can do today is to entirely ignore the thousands of gimmicks found in the manuals of political correctness. This is what everyone does anyways when they turn off the microphone and get off the stage.

Is this kind of allergy to rationality— to continue with the medical metaphors— a kind of affectation in the era of post-truth and post-thought (Simone) that we apparently live? We will always have the consolation of a euphemism that allows us to say, with T. S. Eliot, that we live in a world that "advances progressively backwards."