Let’s subject prepubescent children to complex gender and sexual ideas, but put trigger warnings on classic literature for university students. Brilliant!
What a world. A thirteen year-old is deemed fit to opt for an elective mastectomy and irreversible hormone regime after minimal consultation with doctors, but a twenty year-old needs a warning before he can read a children's book with “odd perspectives on gender.”
"Sadly, it appears that universities in Britain have fallen prey to the kind of corporate logic that is already firmly entrenched in the United States. This growing managerial approach with its customer-is-always-right imperative is increasingly evident in university policies."
I don't really think a "customer is always right" mindset is the primary driver for this; it's a different corporate mindset. I think it's fear of social media mobs (and their on-campus equivalent, student protests). So the corporate response? Figure out some symbolic gesture they can point at in an attempt to deflect criticism. Don't want to get sued / fined over EEOC issues? Create a symbolic "cultural sensitivity training" or similar.
Trigger warnings are easy and symbolic, so we put them in. See? Please don't try to get us fired, or sick a Twitter mob on us, or make our lives annoying by protesting outside our offices. We also put our pronouns and Black Lives Matter slogans in our bios.
I'm sympathetic to their position; there are, unfortunately, real risks for failing to do these things, for being seen as insufficiently pure or radical. However, knuckling under to these ideological demands merely makes them stronger, and the next demand they have may not be one you're willing to meet, and now they have so much power that they get you removed. Because you gave them that power.
Maybe I'm biased by being someone who's benefitted from it, but there's no doubt in my mind that the increased recognition of abuse and trauma has done more good than harm. (As Maxwell Smart used to say, "Well, it's not all gravy, Chief. You've got to take the good with the bad.") There's no way we were better off when one of America's most legendary generals thought that soldiers with PTSD are cowards who deserve to be slapped, when the first rule of sexual abuse was that you do not talk about sexual abuse, when the psychiatrist I was sent to when I was fourteen tried to talk me into reading Oedipus Rex because I was constantly fighting with my father. (You know, where Oedipus only killed his father because the guy attacked him and he was defending himself, only married his mother because she never bothered to tip him off as to who she was, and everyone takes it for granted that *he* did something wrong.) It's a good thing that people suffering the effects of abuse and/or trauma are less likely to be treated like they deserve a lower status. How did that get perverted into the idea that abuse and trauma should get you *higher* status, a status you'd lose if you healed from it? We need to remind people that there's a difference. Now. Forcefully.
Oedipus (and the tragedy of Sophocles) is a sacred tale about the vanity of trying to avoid fate and the hubris of men. Without understanding the ancient Greek culture and mythology we cannot but say awful banalities about it. I am truly sorry that you met a psychiatrist of the Freudian persuasion when that kind of psychoanalysis was not the right one for you (also, he was a very bad Freudian if he suggested you read Sophocles to deal with what Freud named the Oedipus complex, which may or may not exist but is one of the facets of our struggle with parental figures and authority -- I also had serious issues with my father, and eschewed Freud but found my solution in Jungian analysis).
The problem with the increased recognition of abuse and trauma is that it has done more good than harm -- but to a point. It is not a inevitable path, but beyond that point, it has become a place where the coddling becomes damaging. It is not just abuse and trauma, it is illness and disability, it is feeling hurt, everything that takes effort to deal with, so in order not to feel bad we should elevate it into virtue -- "I am better because I suffer" is something our Christian culture has been telling us for two millennia. Add to that Munchausen syndrome, which is a very real thing, and goes viral if there is no way to tell people that they are faking it without being silenced for being horrible harmful ableist monsters -- there was for many who displayed Munchausen a return, a reward, in being seen as sick and weak in a society that promoted the tough approach to life (because it still got them attention and justification), think then how much more incentive is there for this in a society that cares for the sick and weak more and more without discrimination -- out of a massive sense of collective guilt, I suppose. The same way as many other things, where out of a laudable effort to make things better and nicer we went all the way to cringing anarchy.
The kids who are in higher education today are a mess (a convincing explanation for how this happened and is happening has been offered by Lukianoff and Haidt -- https://www.thecoddling.com/). They are a mess which we imbued with immense power on our society, through social media that through their very structure (see Twitter) even make of adults the emotional/rational equivalent of third formers. This is where we are at.
There are many conflicting opinions about the Robbers Cave experiments. You may not agree with the take of a researcher on something, but letting this influence your opinion on the whole of his research is pretty irrational. Haidt has always been and is open to critique, to answering it and explaining his rationale. He has recently opened a Substack, so you can put up your doubts to him (https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/).
From the US...I've recently been hit with this. And it's all about CLASS. Most of my students are reasonable human beings and aren't concerned about 'triggering', 'micro-aggressions', inappropriate pronouns, or whatever. It's the minority who have pretensions--currently students in an honors class I'm teaching who view themselves as a cut above hoi polloi. 'Wokeness' is a class marker: they take hypersensitivity and all these fantasies to show that they're INTELLECTUALS and that they're POSH.
With easy credit, material possessions are no longer effective status symbols: anyone can go into hock and buy a Tesla. Neither are the standard products of high culture: they're so OBVIOUS that they can't serve as positional goods. Everyone knows they're supposed to like Bach. Posh is the latest social/political stance that marks you off from the proles and peasants. And in the US universities are selling posh, in particular, to students whose humanities and social sciences degrees aren't job qualifications.
No. They're just pulled into another universe. Whatever comes up on their social media, whatever their favorite influencers are promoting, whatever their local street gang is doing, whatever...
As pointed out below, trigger warnings are just virtue-signaling on the cheap. The entire notion of 'trigger warnings' is absurd. As the article points out, life is full of hardships and pain. Students should already know that. If they don't know it, they should not be protected from reality.
This is exactly what led to Mao's disastrous Cultural Revolution and so many official thought and media control efforts by totalitarian regimes before and since. Now that the "ideological purity" happens to be in the name of humanitarian sensitivities instead of political or religious dogmas all it is is old wine in new bottles. The sooner these bottles are smashed and the shards relegated to "museums of failed isms" the better off we will all be.
I wonder what kind of trigger warning to place on the composite visual experience of the Civil War, The Holocaust, Jim Crowe lynchings, the death of millions of horses in WWI not to speak of perhaps 50million dead in WWII.
Perhaps these late teen-age, and early twenty something students have been so sheltered and protected by risk averse helicopter parents, that the very idea of pain, suffering, tragedy, and even death that living a life visits on all of humanity is more than they can bear. The very idea that the study of humanity and its history inhuman behavior and endless pain and suffering as part of the human condition must raise in their coddled consciousness the reality that if others have suffered then, my God, might I not also.
It is understandable that some people can suffer PTSD after going through genuinely traumatic events such as bombing in war or suffering great personal attack. But the study of life has to deal with real issues, many of which are not nice, but necessary for understanding the human condition. "Trigger Warnings" do not help students grow up, and helping them mature into functioning adults is really what Higher Education is all about. Amna Khalid has managed to navigate the very difficult Pakistani society to the relative peace of Northfield Minnesota and is an exemplar of what Higher Education should represent.
More markers on the road to idiocracy; sit back and enjoy the ride!
By Edward Dutton's all-too-credible estimate, the current mean intelligence of the North American population is about one standard deviation below what it was in 1900, and at the end of this century will be at the level of people of the present time with IQs of 85. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYA-sL55W2E What could cause such a dysgenic trend? According to Dutton it's largely due to radical reduction in infant mortality, which primarily boosted reproduction by those at the lower end of the IQ bell curve. In my inexpert opinion, however, the main factor is the advent of convenient and effective birth control and the associated emergence of modern feminism -- i.e., female status-seeking through higher education and career advancement -- which has depressed reproduction by those at the upper end of the bell curve to well below replacement level.
I find nothing about this ride enjoyable. The perpetrators deserve most (but not all) of the heat they get from the anti-woke barbarians, who learn nothing from their inane attacks on mostly kind, well-meaning people except that bullying is fun and it can even work. There are no winners in these culture wars; at least not in the short term everyone loses. Let's hope that over the longer stretch our schools and society learn enough from this strife to grow up and become healthy environments to nurture lifelong learners of all persuasions.
Let’s subject prepubescent children to complex gender and sexual ideas, but put trigger warnings on classic literature for university students. Brilliant!
What a world. A thirteen year-old is deemed fit to opt for an elective mastectomy and irreversible hormone regime after minimal consultation with doctors, but a twenty year-old needs a warning before he can read a children's book with “odd perspectives on gender.”
You really can't make this stuff up.
Cue the Twilight Zone theme.
"Sadly, it appears that universities in Britain have fallen prey to the kind of corporate logic that is already firmly entrenched in the United States. This growing managerial approach with its customer-is-always-right imperative is increasingly evident in university policies."
I don't really think a "customer is always right" mindset is the primary driver for this; it's a different corporate mindset. I think it's fear of social media mobs (and their on-campus equivalent, student protests). So the corporate response? Figure out some symbolic gesture they can point at in an attempt to deflect criticism. Don't want to get sued / fined over EEOC issues? Create a symbolic "cultural sensitivity training" or similar.
Trigger warnings are easy and symbolic, so we put them in. See? Please don't try to get us fired, or sick a Twitter mob on us, or make our lives annoying by protesting outside our offices. We also put our pronouns and Black Lives Matter slogans in our bios.
I'm sympathetic to their position; there are, unfortunately, real risks for failing to do these things, for being seen as insufficiently pure or radical. However, knuckling under to these ideological demands merely makes them stronger, and the next demand they have may not be one you're willing to meet, and now they have so much power that they get you removed. Because you gave them that power.
Maybe I'm biased by being someone who's benefitted from it, but there's no doubt in my mind that the increased recognition of abuse and trauma has done more good than harm. (As Maxwell Smart used to say, "Well, it's not all gravy, Chief. You've got to take the good with the bad.") There's no way we were better off when one of America's most legendary generals thought that soldiers with PTSD are cowards who deserve to be slapped, when the first rule of sexual abuse was that you do not talk about sexual abuse, when the psychiatrist I was sent to when I was fourteen tried to talk me into reading Oedipus Rex because I was constantly fighting with my father. (You know, where Oedipus only killed his father because the guy attacked him and he was defending himself, only married his mother because she never bothered to tip him off as to who she was, and everyone takes it for granted that *he* did something wrong.) It's a good thing that people suffering the effects of abuse and/or trauma are less likely to be treated like they deserve a lower status. How did that get perverted into the idea that abuse and trauma should get you *higher* status, a status you'd lose if you healed from it? We need to remind people that there's a difference. Now. Forcefully.
Oedipus (and the tragedy of Sophocles) is a sacred tale about the vanity of trying to avoid fate and the hubris of men. Without understanding the ancient Greek culture and mythology we cannot but say awful banalities about it. I am truly sorry that you met a psychiatrist of the Freudian persuasion when that kind of psychoanalysis was not the right one for you (also, he was a very bad Freudian if he suggested you read Sophocles to deal with what Freud named the Oedipus complex, which may or may not exist but is one of the facets of our struggle with parental figures and authority -- I also had serious issues with my father, and eschewed Freud but found my solution in Jungian analysis).
The problem with the increased recognition of abuse and trauma is that it has done more good than harm -- but to a point. It is not a inevitable path, but beyond that point, it has become a place where the coddling becomes damaging. It is not just abuse and trauma, it is illness and disability, it is feeling hurt, everything that takes effort to deal with, so in order not to feel bad we should elevate it into virtue -- "I am better because I suffer" is something our Christian culture has been telling us for two millennia. Add to that Munchausen syndrome, which is a very real thing, and goes viral if there is no way to tell people that they are faking it without being silenced for being horrible harmful ableist monsters -- there was for many who displayed Munchausen a return, a reward, in being seen as sick and weak in a society that promoted the tough approach to life (because it still got them attention and justification), think then how much more incentive is there for this in a society that cares for the sick and weak more and more without discrimination -- out of a massive sense of collective guilt, I suppose. The same way as many other things, where out of a laudable effort to make things better and nicer we went all the way to cringing anarchy.
The kids who are in higher education today are a mess (a convincing explanation for how this happened and is happening has been offered by Lukianoff and Haidt -- https://www.thecoddling.com/). They are a mess which we imbued with immense power on our society, through social media that through their very structure (see Twitter) even make of adults the emotional/rational equivalent of third formers. This is where we are at.
I've had my doubts about Haidt ever since in The Righteous Mind, he distorted the Robbers Cave experiment by only telling half the story.
There are many conflicting opinions about the Robbers Cave experiments. You may not agree with the take of a researcher on something, but letting this influence your opinion on the whole of his research is pretty irrational. Haidt has always been and is open to critique, to answering it and explaining his rationale. He has recently opened a Substack, so you can put up your doubts to him (https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/).
From the US...I've recently been hit with this. And it's all about CLASS. Most of my students are reasonable human beings and aren't concerned about 'triggering', 'micro-aggressions', inappropriate pronouns, or whatever. It's the minority who have pretensions--currently students in an honors class I'm teaching who view themselves as a cut above hoi polloi. 'Wokeness' is a class marker: they take hypersensitivity and all these fantasies to show that they're INTELLECTUALS and that they're POSH.
With easy credit, material possessions are no longer effective status symbols: anyone can go into hock and buy a Tesla. Neither are the standard products of high culture: they're so OBVIOUS that they can't serve as positional goods. Everyone knows they're supposed to like Bach. Posh is the latest social/political stance that marks you off from the proles and peasants. And in the US universities are selling posh, in particular, to students whose humanities and social sciences degrees aren't job qualifications.
So the peasants apparently can actually think for themselves instead of being pulled into the posh, woke universe.
No. They're just pulled into another universe. Whatever comes up on their social media, whatever their favorite influencers are promoting, whatever their local street gang is doing, whatever...
As pointed out below, trigger warnings are just virtue-signaling on the cheap. The entire notion of 'trigger warnings' is absurd. As the article points out, life is full of hardships and pain. Students should already know that. If they don't know it, they should not be protected from reality.
This is exactly what led to Mao's disastrous Cultural Revolution and so many official thought and media control efforts by totalitarian regimes before and since. Now that the "ideological purity" happens to be in the name of humanitarian sensitivities instead of political or religious dogmas all it is is old wine in new bottles. The sooner these bottles are smashed and the shards relegated to "museums of failed isms" the better off we will all be.
I wonder what kind of trigger warning to place on the composite visual experience of the Civil War, The Holocaust, Jim Crowe lynchings, the death of millions of horses in WWI not to speak of perhaps 50million dead in WWII.
Perhaps these late teen-age, and early twenty something students have been so sheltered and protected by risk averse helicopter parents, that the very idea of pain, suffering, tragedy, and even death that living a life visits on all of humanity is more than they can bear. The very idea that the study of humanity and its history inhuman behavior and endless pain and suffering as part of the human condition must raise in their coddled consciousness the reality that if others have suffered then, my God, might I not also.
It is understandable that some people can suffer PTSD after going through genuinely traumatic events such as bombing in war or suffering great personal attack. But the study of life has to deal with real issues, many of which are not nice, but necessary for understanding the human condition. "Trigger Warnings" do not help students grow up, and helping them mature into functioning adults is really what Higher Education is all about. Amna Khalid has managed to navigate the very difficult Pakistani society to the relative peace of Northfield Minnesota and is an exemplar of what Higher Education should represent.
More markers on the road to idiocracy; sit back and enjoy the ride!
By Edward Dutton's all-too-credible estimate, the current mean intelligence of the North American population is about one standard deviation below what it was in 1900, and at the end of this century will be at the level of people of the present time with IQs of 85. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYA-sL55W2E What could cause such a dysgenic trend? According to Dutton it's largely due to radical reduction in infant mortality, which primarily boosted reproduction by those at the lower end of the IQ bell curve. In my inexpert opinion, however, the main factor is the advent of convenient and effective birth control and the associated emergence of modern feminism -- i.e., female status-seeking through higher education and career advancement -- which has depressed reproduction by those at the upper end of the bell curve to well below replacement level.
I find nothing about this ride enjoyable. The perpetrators deserve most (but not all) of the heat they get from the anti-woke barbarians, who learn nothing from their inane attacks on mostly kind, well-meaning people except that bullying is fun and it can even work. There are no winners in these culture wars; at least not in the short term everyone loses. Let's hope that over the longer stretch our schools and society learn enough from this strife to grow up and become healthy environments to nurture lifelong learners of all persuasions.