"Safe places" are all the rage, as young people struggle to find a refuge from disturbing ideas on campus and enforce orthodoxy on the whole student body and faculty. Robert
Tracinski argues that this strategy is a good way to lose the war of ideas:
The most powerful historical precedent for this is the totalitarian creed of the Soviet Union—a dogma imposed, not just by campus censors or a Twitter mob, but by gulags and secret police. Yet one of the lessons of the Soviet collapse is that the ideological uniformity of a dictatorship seems totally solid and impenetrable—right up to the moment it cracks apart. The imposition of dogma succeeds in getting everyone to mouth the right slogans, even as fewer and fewer of them understand or believe the ideology behind it.
I don't believe for a second it has anything at all to do with "feeling safe" or "avoiding triggers". It is all about censoring people they don't agree with. It just so happens that they've been taught that "feeling unsafe" is a trigger (if you'll excuse the pun) for college administrators who have a responsibility to make sure the campus is a "safe educational environment". By claiming that certain opinions and positions make them feel "unsafe", they're forcing the college administration to shut down whatever it is they don't like. It's all about control, and nothing to do with protecting their actual feelings. Oh, sure, they'll censor anything that DOES hurt their feelings too, but mostly it's about silencing those who don't agree with them.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the longer they force the culture to ignore the elephants in the room, the more likely the shouting is to drown out the thinking when the elephants in the room are eventually addressed, especially if the EitR's are consistently ignored and ignored until they can no longer be.
ReplyDelete@MikeD - that is certainly possible, and I don't doubt that there are speech opponents who are not personally troubled, but like to pretend so. But there are indeed those who are oversensitive, yet convinced that this is the fault of the world's injustice, not something they must overcome in order to get along in a harsh world. I have met them. They don't belong in adult discussions, yet there they are, pissing in the punchbowl.
ReplyDeleteI wish some college administrator would lead this to it's inevitable conclusion and the next time someone complains of a trigger, proceed with shutting down the entire campus as it's triggers all the way down, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteTriggers the moment you emerge from the womb! Or perhaps from the instant of conception. Best to avoid the whole thing, to be safe.
ReplyDelete