Thomas Jefferson once said:
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. - Notes on the State of Virginia
Freedom of Religion was an uncomplicated matter. For Jefferson, tolerance of other worldviews would be wide ranging unless it damaged him financially or harmed him physically.
The times have changed. In today’s world the psychologized self reigns supreme such that if what you do or say hurts another person’s feelings then you have harmed them. This amounts to a form of oppression. The offender must therefore be silenced. No pockets need be picked. Nor legs broken.
Words and Ideas are enough to cause harm. Identities are thereby marginalized. And legitimacy denied.
Tolerance is passé. Affirmation or silence is required.
Obviously, in such a fragile world, freedom of religion and freedom of speech will be under threat.
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt were featured in a previous post.
Their very fine book, The Coddling of the American Mind offers insight into today’s fragile student psyche. And how we got to this point in our culture.
They wrote a series of articles in The Atlantic which they eventually turned into that book.
Here are some quotes:
In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health. Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma. Source: The Atlantic
According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided.
Lukianoff & Haidt
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As a Christian I certainly advocate avoiding offensive speech, if at all possible, without denying my worldview.
As a grandparent I bemoan the overall lack of resilience and grit in today’s younger generation.
What are we doing to our students if we encourage them to develop extra-thin skin just before they leave the cocoon of adult protection?
Lukianoff & Haidt
We’ve coddled too far. The weakest person in the room now dictates the discussion. And remains woefully unprepared for life in this world.
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