Since when did the world exist to guarantee your feeling of safety?
When I was a child – which now begins to seem like it was further in the past than it actually was, so different has the world become in the interim – we used to respond to taunts this way: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”
It was a chant of some antiquity, and it had a purpose:
The rhyme is used as a defense against name-calling and verbal bullying, intended to increase resiliency, avoid physical retaliation and to remain calm and good-living.
Resiliency seems like a quaint notion as well. The idea was that the world could often be a tough place and that growing up involved a requirement to meet it with inner strength. That involved the ability to shake off relatively minor hurts and offenses, knowing that the world did not exist to meet your emotional needs. A related principle – unstated in the rhyme but nevertheless implied – is that there is a value in allowing people to speak their minds.
Those days are gone. Even in the workplace, which previously was not expected to be the warmest and fuzziest of environments, we often hear of young people (mainly women, but not exclusively women) clamoring for the elimination of any speech that makes them feel “unsafe.” And the definition of what constitutes such speech is left to the offended person, not some objective standard. These days many workplaces seem to have even jettisoned the very concept of an objective standard, in the best postmodern “critical thinking” manner, in which the subjective “narrative” has replaced nearly everything else.
Note the prevalence of scare quotes in the above paragraph. That’s because jargon – and what Theodore Dalrymple has described here as cant – has replaced meaningful speech.
What began in academia and in particular in postmodern philosophy has moved out into the world with a vengeance and a mission: to make the world safe for its young acolytes. Businesses and other entities are eager to fall in line, encouraged by Twitter mobs and Chinese money and fearful of accusations of racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia and whatever other names that they believe can hurt them.
I have blamed academia, philosophy, and feminism, but in some ways therapy is also to blame, although it’s a misunderstanding and misapplication of the notion that the client’s feelings must always be treated with respect. I don’t know how it goes now with therapists, or what they’re taught these days, but thirty years ago they were still taught that although they needed to show an understanding of and empathy for the client’s feelings, as therapists they also ultimately needed to guide the client according to some reality principle that did not depend on the client’s feelings – that is, to steer clients towards seeing that their perceptions of the world may not be reflective of reality, and that it might be best to find a more productive way of looking at things.
An incident in the early 90s when I was in grad school brought the current trends to my attention – the hegemony of feelings was already in full sway in the university. A professor was relieved of his teaching duties and told to attend sensitivity training classes for saying something utterly innocuous to which a few students had objected because it made them uncomfortable. There was a discussion of this issue in a class of mine, where I was one of just a few grad students in a sea of about a hundred undergrads.
I was also about twice as old as most of the people in the room, although that still made me very young by the standards I hold today. But it did make me a member of a different generation than my fellow students, and what seemed utterly reasonable and right to them seemed horrific to me, so horrific that I stood to speak before the group.
I gave a short but impassioned talk on how the final decision about what is offensive speech should not be the judgment of each listener. That way lay madness and an almost infinite variety of standards that infringed on speech itself. I said that the proper locus of judgment about this was not in the individual’s feelings, but in an objective standard about what constitutes an offensive remark that might justify some sort of official action.
I had expected some response to what I was saying, some discussion of the merits of the points I had raised. Instead, I was ignored. It was as though I hadn’t spoken, as though I was expressing some relic of thinking that was so passé it didn’t require engagement of any kind.
I knew that I had encountered something that was already dangerous. But back then I hadn’t the tools to understand its historical or philosophical or political underpinnings, or that it would in due time take over the outside world.
But that has come to pass. As Dalrymple writes towards the end of his piece (I suggest you read the whole thing):
The judge was enunciating what might be called the eggshell theory of the human psyche. If someone takes offense against something someone says, that is sufficient to be a justiciable harm. Gone is the “reasonable man” of traditional English jurisprudence, in assessing whether behavior is threatening or so insulting as to constitute mitigation for a loss of temper: one is threatened, bullied, insulted, offended if one says that one is, and that is enough to be actionable at law. Feelings become legislators.
That’s exactly what happened in the university I attended thirty years ago. And that’s also what alarmed me in the Larry Summers incident of 2005. In one of the earliest posts I ever wrote on this blog, I described what as happening this way:
Whatever happened to the Enlightenment? If Galileo were to return at this point, he might be in grave danger again–at least, if he were to suggest that the earth didn’t revolve around women.
That post of mine was entitled “Harvard in peril.” Now it’s the entire US that’s in peril, and the hour is late and getting later.
[NOTE: See also this post by David Foster on related trends, plus this Benjamin Boyce video on recent attempts to cancel Jordan Peterson’s newest book.]
