The whole piece is dreck, a defense of bare-faced bullying of women and gays clothed in the pretense of the first amendment. The social value of speech has always been a factor in the first amendment analysis, and e.g. flyers insulting ugly women and gays don't have any.
The worst thing about the article isn't the defense of misogyny and homophobia. It's that it makes it that much more difficult to argue socially-conservative viewpoints that really matter without getting lumped in with guys like these and their vacuous assertions.
Just to be pedantic, the author of the article is British, all the students involved are British, and hence the First Amendment (to the US Constitution, as I assume you meant) is irrelevant.
Of course the UK has its own concept of freedom of speech, albeit quite different from the US one.
I think this is an important discussion to be had. The question of whether ideas like "trigger warnings" should be implemented in academia have good arguments on both sides. On a few of these issues I'm not sure where I stand yet and I'm very interested in hearing intelligent discourse from both sides over the next few years.
However, I don't think this is a particularly good article on the topic. It's riddled with character assassinations and complaints that fall low on the oft-cited-by-HN Graham hierarchy of argument[0]. Ironically this comment falls nearly as low because of what it is making reference to, but that's an existential issue for another day.
The author's writing paints "Stepford students" in a herdlike way, and many paragraphs open with imagery taking shots at their character. I generally love a bit of prose in an op-ed or news article, though I seem to disagree with a lot of HN readers there. But I think casual, drive-by insults are a bad idea when you're trying to point out something like group hypocrisy or make legitimate criticisms of a social movement.
My understanding based on reading the Geek Feminism Wiki [1] is that the author misrepresented trigger warnings as a signal that something might be offensive when rather they are actually meant to give people a warning that content may re-open deep psychological wounds (such as a PTSD flashback from abuse, urges to self-harm, etc).
"Trigger warning" and "safe space" are two terms that have sensible, specific definitions, but in practice are very frequently used in an informal, overly expansive way that renders them ridiculous.
Right, so it's a matter of degree. A "trigger warning" policy may be sensible in some form, but can be taken too far.
Oberlin College's infamous policy [1] (now tabled) shows this dynamic at its worst, warning faculty that "anything could be a trigger" and encouraging them to "remove triggering material when it does not contribute directly to the course learning goals." Such a policy pressures faculty into avoiding controversial subjects altogether, and gives students a lever to remove content they would rather not see taught.
Happily this policy has since been revised, showing that faculty can successfully fight to maintain their academic autonomy.
The intention may be good, but in practice trigger warnings probably do more harm than good to the very people they are meant to help. See the long discussion at the end of this article [1] with an expert on treating trauma survivors for details. An interesting quote from him:
The media should actually – quite the contrary…
Instead of encouraging a culture of avoidance,
they should be encouraging exposure.
Most trauma survivors avoid situations that remind
them of the experience. Avoidance means helplessness
and helplessness means depression. That’s not good.
Exposure to trauma reminders provides an opportunity
to gain control over them. This is the essence of the
treatment that we are using to help trauma survivors.
It involves encouraging the patient not to avoid
reminders of trauma, but in fact to make a point of
exposing themselves to reminders of trauma so that
they can develop a tolerance.
I liken it to a vaccination. You get a small dose of
the virus so that the body can develop immunity towards
it. Psychologically it’s the same phenomenon.
Here's another article that discusses five studies relevant to trigger warnings [2]. A couple interesting quotes:
Trigger warnings are designed to help survivors avoid
reminders of their trauma, thereby preventing emotional
discomfort. Yet avoidance reinforces PTSD.
and
Many women who have experienced sexual assault reject the
label victim in favor of survivor. But although the latter
term connotes empowering agency, having trauma become central
to one’s identity bodes poorly for one’s mental health.
Assuming that exposure is indeed the best way to treat PTSD, there is still the ethical matter of patient consent to consider. In the second linked article, the patient is exposed to the triggering content with full consent in a controlled clinical environment, but the recommendation in the first article is completely uncontrolled and could lead to adverse reactions away from a completely safe place. While I agree with Basoglu's assertion that there are too many possible triggers to warn everyone of everything, there are some common ones that we can warn about.
But the exposure must be controlled, otherwise the person suffering risks making the problem worse.
Consider the example of Bob, a hypothetical person who has a phobia of elevators.
People tell Bob to face his fears. So, Bob decides to do this. He visits a local mall that has a bank of elevators. As he approaches them his body starts releasing adrenaline. His palms get a bit sweaty. His heart starts pumping a bit faster. His breathing changes. His anxiety levels raise. Bob tells himself to just keep going. He reaches the elevators, and reaches out a shaky hand, and pushes the button. He has thoughts - "I'm going to get trapped in this elevator" (for example), but he pushes those thoughts aside. The elevator arrives, with the announcement "Ding!", the doors slide open, and Bob gets in. Bob's thought's are crowding his mind, but he thinks "This is stupid, my fears are irrational" - but that does nothing to stop his fear. He pushes a button for a floor a few levels higher. The doors slide close. The elevator starts with a small lurch. Bob's anxiety levels are now really high. He is near panic. The elevator reaches his selected floor, the doors open, and Bob rushes out. As he leaves the source of danger his body floods with endorphins, and the further away he gets from the elevator the better he feels. His breathing calms down; his thoughts subside; his heart rate drops back to normal.
Bob has not conquered his fear of elevators. Bob has made his fear worse.
What Bob should do -- and these might seem like minor changes -- is to add some time for him to consider his thoughts.
Bob should spend a few moments looking at the elevator. Bob is in control - he can get in or not, as he wishes. He has to think about what his emotion is ('Fear') and what the thought causing that emotion is ('I will be trapped in the elevator'). He should sit with that for a few moments. Bob is not supposed to think "my fears are irrational". People do after all occasionally get trapped in elevators. (And spiders can be dangerous, and dogs do bite people, and sometimes blood does carry diseases, etc etc.) He should consider the evidence for that fear - ('I read that report of someone who got trapped in an elevator for a few days'). He should also think about how his body feels, and recognise that his heart rate has risen, and his breathing is different. Then he needs to think about different evidence ("I don't know anyone who has been trapped in an elevator. I have never heard of these elevators not working." and see whether that has reduced his fear a bit. This is an iterative process, you're supposed to use it each time you face that situation and it gets easier to do over time. Once Bob gets into the elevator he is supposed to stay in it until he has controlled his breathing and reduced his fear a bit.
So, yes, it's important to not avoid all sources of trauma but it's important to do it properly.
Trigger warnings do serve a useful purpose when talking about suicide or self-injury, which both have elements of contagion.
EDIT: Your article starts with an example about OCD. I agree that trigger warnings don't help there, and what people actually need is much easier better quicker access to treatment. There is very little risk of someone with OCD doing the things they have obsessive thoughts of (women have thoughts of putting their babies in microwave ovens, for example, but they would never actually do this). The article's expert then only considers trigger warnings for trauma - (where I agree they serve little purpose) but does not consider trigger warnings for contagion of self-harm or suicidal ideation.
I don't think that example really fits. For Bob the elevator is not a reminder of his trauma--it IS the source of it.
What I believe that articles were getting at was not that Bob needs to be shoved into elevators, but rather Bob does not need to be warned away from situations where elevators might be mentioned. He doesn't need warnings before TV shows cautioning that there may be scenes with elevators, warnings that a control theory lecture will include elevator control examples, and so on.
I once had severe trauma after I started reading comments on polish equivalent of yahoo. I was struck by existential fear after confronted with sheer stupidity of people's opinions and their own reports if how they fscked up their life. That was shock at least on par with seeing pornography for the first time. I consider it to be formative experience.
We'd still have the debate, but if we know in advance that we're going to show or describe the horrors of war in graphic detail, we'd warn the veterans in the audience beforehand. Trigger warnings aren't censorship, they're common courtesy.
We impose limitations on Free Speech for libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, hate speech, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, non-disclosure agreements, right to privacy, right to be forgotten, public security, public order, public nuisance, and campaign finance reform. (This incomplete list scraped from Wikipedia). The means by which we decide these exceptions are by applying the principle of harm and the principle of offense, so named by John Stewart Mill. Specifically, we determine whether the speech actively causes, or is likely to cause, actual harm or whether it merely only has the capability to, but may not, cause harm.
On one side proponents will suggest that 'trigger warning' discussions are merely offensive to those who may possibly but will not necessarily be harmed - they are offensive but not harmful and this then is not enough to limit it as speech. Furthermore ample forewarning can be given to limit the exposure of someone sensitive to what is going to be spoken and a choice can be made in advance by someone who is sensitive to possible trigger warnings to participate.
On the other side, arguments can be made that (A.) exclusion from the debate based on the possible presence of trigger warnings legitimizes a paternalism because victims can not then show up to the debates (B.) the size of the class of potential victims and the scope of some discussions make it inevitable that harm will be done to someone or (C.) that the affects of open discussion on certain topics themselves have societal affects that cause harm as they institutionalize harmful norms (there are many examples from history).
There are topics and scenarios that exist on the boundary between the principle of harm and the principle of offense. Good arguments can fit these issues squarely into one or the other.
What is done and what is right are not identical sets. Most of those ways that we restrict free speech, for example, don't actually hurt anyone. The "fire in a crowded theater" is usually taken out of historical context, where it was being used for authoritarian purposes.
Most? It seems to me that there are a couple where it's arguable. I'm curious which ones you think don't cause harm to others and why it is you think they do not.
So, in case it isn't clear, I'm ardently for unconditional free speech--with the obvious observation that that is not easily practicable in our current society.
Obscenity and pornography don't necessarily hurt anyone. Sedition laws are, by definition, used only to support the current ruling class and government. Most of the trade secrets, NDAs, etc. are just to help entrenched interests--something many here have rallied about when signing contracts. Public order, public security, and public nuisance are additional laws mainly used to censor and justify the persecution of people who are in disagreement with the establish government.
Frankly, regulation of free speech has pretty much always favored the majority at the expense of the minority.
The first thing I will note is that you didn't specify 'most' of the things on the list. I think that's okay, but I do want to suggest that perhaps you aren't ardently for free speech as many of the items in the list appear to make some sense to you.
I'm of a similar mindset but don't hold such extreme views.
Allow me to try to provide some justification for the items you listed.
The types of pornography that are made illegal (here we are talking about America, you would get my agreement about recent laws passed in the UK) are snuff films - rape and child pornography or pornography that permanently disables or disfigures the subject - because they do necessarily hurt the subject. Once the pictures/videos are already taken, they continue to hurt the victims as their suffering is publicized and available to the fantasy of clients (and of course they won't see any proceeds), and this media will hurt future victims by institutionalizing a demand for new content. Limits on pornography (despite what religion institutions yell loudly about) are not about harm to customers but harm to subjects.
With exceptions for torture, humiliation, dismemberment and execution (including the same to animals) I won't defend obscenity restrictions as the arguments are quite different than those for restricted forms of pornography. These listed exceptions of course are great examples of harm coming from obscene content and again are illegal (though lacking in the case of animals) under obscenity laws under the harm principle.
Other forms of obscenity restrictions seem to me to fall directly in line with the offense principle and should not be restricted. Take for example the Supreme Court decision Miller v. California. The resulting 'Miller Test' for obscenity decisions:
1. Whether the average person would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to a lewd curiosity;
2. Whether the work depicts or describes, in an offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions, specifically defined by applicable state law; and
3. Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
Compare this test against Mill:
"That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right... The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."
Obscenity, when it is victimless, and it is almost always victimless, clearly fails the harm principle test. For the most part, this is the case in America. There are cases where obscenity laws prevent things such as expressions of homosexual affection, for example, and it is harder to find clear victimhood in these cases even when the law agrees to prohibit them. A note that this Supreme Court decision was made by a conservative majority court.
Regarding sedition I understand your point - that speech critical of the power elite ought to be protected in the strongest terms. I have a lot to say with regard to restrictions on sedition. I'll advocate for a devil for a blurb and then comment briefly in an attempt to sum up more than I can defend into a few sentences.
With very few exceptions (the velvet revolution?), successful seditious overthrow of a ruling class and/or government have in almost every single case caused great harm both to the ruling class and to those who are caught adrift in the following power vacuum. Furthermore the ruling class/governance structure have to be convinced...
Citizens United was primarily about allowing leveraged discussions of such topics in the 1-2 months before Federal primary and general elections. A ban on core political speech, and since the primary season is so long, and the national conventions are just a bit more than 2 months prior to general elections....
Which is exactly why the incumbent establishment was incandescently upset that this decision stuck down part of the bipartisan McCain (Republican)-Feingold (Democrat) law.
Key there is leveraged. That takes money and organization. Citizens United was about suppressing the distribution of a film during the 2008 Democratic primary season (as clarified during the oral arguments, this extended to books). The law went so far as to prevent sending non-partisan voter's guides such as the NRA's 60 days prior to general election; "low information voters" would not seem to be viewed as a great problem by our betters.
No one has a right not to be offended. And free speech isn't really free if it can't offend.
It sounds like the argument for trigger warnings is that some people think they might be harmed by speech. That doesn't sound like a very good reason to try to limit free speech.
> No one has a right not to be offended. And free speech isn't really free if it can't offend.
Yes this is the principle of offense.
> It sounds like the argument for trigger warnings is that some people think they might be harmed by speech.
Yes this is the principle of harm.
> That doesn't sound like a very good reason to try to limit free speech.
All of our freedoms are granted up until the point where our actions would cause harm to others. At this point our freedoms are infringing on the freedoms of others, and their expressions become restricted. In this regard, speech is and has been no different from any other right - although it sounds like you have an argument for why speech should be allowed even when it causes harm to others?
Discuss what is wrong with the arguments behind their behaviors, rather than harping on personality traits the author finds annoying. Many of the character traits the author mentions are not part of the messages of the political groups he is complaining about, but serve only to emphasize his opinion "Stepford students" as a whole are brain-dead and conformist.
There's definitely good criticisms of arguably (and in my opinion) bad behavior in this article, but it falls a little flat when the author can't restrain himself from tossing out petty insults whenever he's leading into a point.
But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up.
This base-shoring piece ironically panders to people who've already made up their mind and are uninterested in engaging in any kind of meaningful discussion. You can't possibly write something like that and expect to convince anyone that you're arguing in good faith.
Look, none of this is new. Universities have always been contentious places, students have always been belligerent and uninterested in hearing the views of their opponents. This is what it is to be young: to believe fully, with or without justification. A generation ago in the US, SDS would have barricaded themselves into the room with both these master debaters and held them hostage with a list of demands for the administration. The verbs have changed, but "We demand" has not.
This is a screed from a man who is upset that he is not being handed a platform to speak. Yes, guy. People don't like you. That doesn't make this a free speech issue. No one invited me to speak at Oxford either. Just go home without your rattle.
> students have always been belligerent and uninterested in hearing the views of their opponents
Agreed. But I don't know to what degree the school should accept the students' demands.
> This is a screed from a man who is upset that he is not being handed a platform to speak. [...] No one invited me to speak at Oxford either.
That's not what the author describes, though: they were invited to speak at Oxford, and students who didn't want that event to take place complained until it was cancelled.
> That doesn't make this a free speech issue.
It's not, I agree. But it's something, and not a good something.
I don't think it's fair to say that nothing has changed.
In previous generations, students absolutely would have protested. But administrations wouldn't have been so quick to give in to social outrage and to ban speakers. One of the unfortunate effects of social media is that allowing controversy of any sort has become much more dangerous. What might once have garnered a few feminist protestors outside a church (or evangelicals protesting outside a school) now elicits thousands of angry reactionaries on Twitter and Tumblr.
I don't like the tone of his writing, but he's got some excellent points.
I think that one of the greatest strengths of the university system is the idea that "offensive" ideas can be debated. An enormous amount of knowledge has been gotten from heresy, and I would argue that universities have been so central in the spread of knowledge precisely because they encourage (or at least tolerate) people who go against the grain.
This has disappeared, and I think that it leads to bad ideas winning.
One of the reasons why the US has such a strong protection toward speech, especially political and ideological speech, is that the Founding Fathers and their successors recognized the unpalatability of conflicting ideas and gave them the strongest possible protection. They recognized that such protection would give assholes the ability to say horrible, offensive things, and they believed that such a side effect was far better than the alternative - stifling free expression and allowing bad ideas to win because their proponents were better represented, better connected, or just flat-out more willing to suppress the other side's viewpoints.
The fact that these students are completely ignorant of this history is amusing because our modern academic tradition was based entirely off of this belief in a "marketplace of ideas."
Ben Franklin said, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I'd love to see what those exact same students would say if the prevailing attitude changed and a massive wave of right-wing ideology took over campus politics. I'm sure that they'd be crying about how their self-evident right to self-expression was being horribly violated. Poor things.
I'd love to see what those exact same students would say if the prevailing attitude changed and a massive wave of right-wing ideology took over campus politics. I'm sure that they'd be crying about how their self-evident right to self-expression was being horribly violated. Poor things.
This kind of attack is completely unnecessary. How is anyone supposed to respond to this comment when you've already constructed a straw man for your opponent and trivialized it?
It's not an attack, it's what's happening to the public discourse right now. There are areas of the internet that are right wing. Left wing people go to those areas to debate ideas, but when they see the comments sections aren't on their side, they claim harassment. This harassment may or may not come with requests for the moderators to make the comments a "safe space".
I'd love to see what those exact same students would say if the prevailing attitude changed and a massive wave of right-wing ideology took over campus politics. I'm sure that they'd be crying about how their self-evident right to self-expression was being horribly violated. Poor things.
I mean, this is simple enough to check, right?
Look at how historically right-wing or conservative universities (say, Baylor, Brigham Young, or Texas A&M) handle such things with their student groups.
I've made this point before, but I feel compelled to repeat it in response to this post. The late Christopher Hitchens, in one of his greatest orations[1], made some excellent points about free speech:
...it’s not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard. It is the right of everyone in the audience to listen, and to hear. And every time you silence someone you make yourself a prisoner of your own action, because you deny yourself the right to hear something. In other words: Your own right to hear and be exposed is as much involved in all these cases as is the right of the other to voice his or her view.
In other words, freedom of speech is really about freedom of hearing. Later, he asks who should be trusted with the job of censoring:
Who's going to decide? To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful or who is the harmful speaker, or to determine in advance what are the harmful consequences going to be, that we know enough about in advance to prevent? To whom would you give this job? To whom are you going to award the task of being the censor?
Did you hear any speaker in opposition to this motion (eloquent as... one of them was) to whom you would delegate the task of deciding for you, what you could read? To whom you'd give the job of deciding for you, relieve you of the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear? Do you know anyone- hands up- to whom you would give this job? Does anyone have a nominee? You mean there's no one in Canada good enough to decide what I can read? Or hear? I had no idea... but there’s a law that says there must be such a person. Or there's a subsection of some piddling law that says it. Well to hell with that law then. It's inviting you to be liars and hypocrites and to deny what you evidently already know already.
And finally, he notes that religious texts contain passages that would need to be censored, yet religious conservatives often call for censorship.
Look anywhere you like for the warrant for slavery, for the subjugation of women as chattel, for the burning and flogging of homosexuals, for ethnic cleansing, for antisemitism, for all this you look no further than a famous book that's on every pulpit in this city and in every synagogue and in every mosque. And then just see whether you can square the fact that the force that is the main source of hatred is also the main caller for censorship. And when you've realized this you'll therefore this evening be faced with a gigantic false antithesis. I hope that still won't stop you from giving the motion before you the resounding endorsement that it deserves. Thanks awfully. Night-night. Stay cool!
(If you haven't watched the whole speech, I recommend doing so. I've only transcribed a few choice passages, but the whole thing is great.)
And of course, there's the absurdity factor. Nobody thinks that censoring actually stops people from endorsing verboten opinions or talking about banned topics. Everything just gets driven underground. This gives the holders of censored beliefs an excuse to behave more extremely than they otherwise would. After all, they're being persecuted.
A fire-and-brimstone preacher on a street corner is a nuisance to me, and I won't want to hear him. But it's a public place, so I would just move on to avoid being annoyed by listening to him. Were he to knock on my front door I would tell him "no" and close the door again. Were he to be granted a lecture at the local university I would not bother to attend.
Yes, my mind is already closed and made up on the topics that this hypothetical preacher would like to re-open with me. Both of us think that we know better than the other. So what?
Then it sounds like we agree. Freedom of hearing refers to people being able to decide for themselves what they should hear.
I would behave like you in your examples. To go with your university case, the line is crossed if one tries to get the disliked speaker uninvited from the university. Or if one attends the lecture to disrupt it. This has happened many times with prominent speakers, and it's a shame that some people consider it acceptable behavior.
Yes, it would be wrong to try to prevent other people from hearing things that I disagree with. It is very tempting, as it is easier than trying to argue them out of it again afterwards. But wrong.
My problem with "the right to be comfortable" is that it gives creates lopsided debates. One side can be argued everywhere, whereas the other, the offensive one, can only be argued very carefully in the right places.
The solution, as I see it, is to disallow the inoffensive side too. For instance if there were a forum, that didn't allow attacks on whole classes of people, then it is best if they don't allow defenses either.
As far as I understood the article, a student organization made a big fuzz about the abortion debate, prompting the organizers to cancel it. The way I see it, no rights were denied in doing so, and both the students and the author are and were exercising their right to free speech.
Although I don't fully agree with the post you responded to, no one was not allowing someone to speak.
The culture of comfortableness is exactly what Vaclav Havel
described in "The Power of the Powerless"
Comfortableness is a misnomer. What it is conformity. Havel.correctly identifies this as "post-totalitarian". It is the same sick mindset of communism and the Salem witch trials and Inquisition. It is political control and it is used by malicious actors to manipulate and destroy.
Millions have suffered and been killed and imprisoned under such regimes, and Havel describes the casual brutality of it.
64 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadThe worst thing about the article isn't the defense of misogyny and homophobia. It's that it makes it that much more difficult to argue socially-conservative viewpoints that really matter without getting lumped in with guys like these and their vacuous assertions.
Of course the UK has its own concept of freedom of speech, albeit quite different from the US one.
However, I don't think this is a particularly good article on the topic. It's riddled with character assassinations and complaints that fall low on the oft-cited-by-HN Graham hierarchy of argument[0]. Ironically this comment falls nearly as low because of what it is making reference to, but that's an existential issue for another day.
The author's writing paints "Stepford students" in a herdlike way, and many paragraphs open with imagery taking shots at their character. I generally love a bit of prose in an op-ed or news article, though I seem to disagree with a lot of HN readers there. But I think casual, drive-by insults are a bad idea when you're trying to point out something like group hypocrisy or make legitimate criticisms of a social movement.
[0] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Graham%27...
[1] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Trigger_warning
Oberlin College's infamous policy [1] (now tabled) shows this dynamic at its worst, warning faculty that "anything could be a trigger" and encouraging them to "remove triggering material when it does not contribute directly to the course learning goals." Such a policy pressures faculty into avoiding controversial subjects altogether, and gives students a lever to remove content they would rather not see taught.
Happily this policy has since been revised, showing that faculty can successfully fight to maintain their academic autonomy.
1: http://web.archive.org/web/20131222174936/http:/new.oberlin....
[2] http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/hazards-...
Consider the example of Bob, a hypothetical person who has a phobia of elevators.
People tell Bob to face his fears. So, Bob decides to do this. He visits a local mall that has a bank of elevators. As he approaches them his body starts releasing adrenaline. His palms get a bit sweaty. His heart starts pumping a bit faster. His breathing changes. His anxiety levels raise. Bob tells himself to just keep going. He reaches the elevators, and reaches out a shaky hand, and pushes the button. He has thoughts - "I'm going to get trapped in this elevator" (for example), but he pushes those thoughts aside. The elevator arrives, with the announcement "Ding!", the doors slide open, and Bob gets in. Bob's thought's are crowding his mind, but he thinks "This is stupid, my fears are irrational" - but that does nothing to stop his fear. He pushes a button for a floor a few levels higher. The doors slide close. The elevator starts with a small lurch. Bob's anxiety levels are now really high. He is near panic. The elevator reaches his selected floor, the doors open, and Bob rushes out. As he leaves the source of danger his body floods with endorphins, and the further away he gets from the elevator the better he feels. His breathing calms down; his thoughts subside; his heart rate drops back to normal.
Bob has not conquered his fear of elevators. Bob has made his fear worse.
What Bob should do -- and these might seem like minor changes -- is to add some time for him to consider his thoughts.
Bob should spend a few moments looking at the elevator. Bob is in control - he can get in or not, as he wishes. He has to think about what his emotion is ('Fear') and what the thought causing that emotion is ('I will be trapped in the elevator'). He should sit with that for a few moments. Bob is not supposed to think "my fears are irrational". People do after all occasionally get trapped in elevators. (And spiders can be dangerous, and dogs do bite people, and sometimes blood does carry diseases, etc etc.) He should consider the evidence for that fear - ('I read that report of someone who got trapped in an elevator for a few days'). He should also think about how his body feels, and recognise that his heart rate has risen, and his breathing is different. Then he needs to think about different evidence ("I don't know anyone who has been trapped in an elevator. I have never heard of these elevators not working." and see whether that has reduced his fear a bit. This is an iterative process, you're supposed to use it each time you face that situation and it gets easier to do over time. Once Bob gets into the elevator he is supposed to stay in it until he has controlled his breathing and reduced his fear a bit.
So, yes, it's important to not avoid all sources of trauma but it's important to do it properly.
Trigger warnings do serve a useful purpose when talking about suicide or self-injury, which both have elements of contagion.
EDIT: Your article starts with an example about OCD. I agree that trigger warnings don't help there, and what people actually need is much easier better quicker access to treatment. There is very little risk of someone with OCD doing the things they have obsessive thoughts of (women have thoughts of putting their babies in microwave ovens, for example, but they would never actually do this). The article's expert then only considers trigger warnings for trauma - (where I agree they serve little purpose) but does not consider trigger warnings for contagion of self-harm or suicidal ideation.
What I believe that articles were getting at was not that Bob needs to be shoved into elevators, but rather Bob does not need to be warned away from situations where elevators might be mentioned. He doesn't need warnings before TV shows cautioning that there may be scenes with elevators, warnings that a control theory lecture will include elevator control examples, and so on.
I once had severe trauma after I started reading comments on polish equivalent of yahoo. I was struck by existential fear after confronted with sheer stupidity of people's opinions and their own reports if how they fscked up their life. That was shock at least on par with seeing pornography for the first time. I consider it to be formative experience.
If you've ever seen a rape survivor having a PTSD-induced breakdown, you consider it polite to avoid causing that when practical.
On one side proponents will suggest that 'trigger warning' discussions are merely offensive to those who may possibly but will not necessarily be harmed - they are offensive but not harmful and this then is not enough to limit it as speech. Furthermore ample forewarning can be given to limit the exposure of someone sensitive to what is going to be spoken and a choice can be made in advance by someone who is sensitive to possible trigger warnings to participate.
On the other side, arguments can be made that (A.) exclusion from the debate based on the possible presence of trigger warnings legitimizes a paternalism because victims can not then show up to the debates (B.) the size of the class of potential victims and the scope of some discussions make it inevitable that harm will be done to someone or (C.) that the affects of open discussion on certain topics themselves have societal affects that cause harm as they institutionalize harmful norms (there are many examples from history).
There are topics and scenarios that exist on the boundary between the principle of harm and the principle of offense. Good arguments can fit these issues squarely into one or the other.
Obscenity and pornography don't necessarily hurt anyone. Sedition laws are, by definition, used only to support the current ruling class and government. Most of the trade secrets, NDAs, etc. are just to help entrenched interests--something many here have rallied about when signing contracts. Public order, public security, and public nuisance are additional laws mainly used to censor and justify the persecution of people who are in disagreement with the establish government.
Frankly, regulation of free speech has pretty much always favored the majority at the expense of the minority.
I'm of a similar mindset but don't hold such extreme views.
Allow me to try to provide some justification for the items you listed.
The types of pornography that are made illegal (here we are talking about America, you would get my agreement about recent laws passed in the UK) are snuff films - rape and child pornography or pornography that permanently disables or disfigures the subject - because they do necessarily hurt the subject. Once the pictures/videos are already taken, they continue to hurt the victims as their suffering is publicized and available to the fantasy of clients (and of course they won't see any proceeds), and this media will hurt future victims by institutionalizing a demand for new content. Limits on pornography (despite what religion institutions yell loudly about) are not about harm to customers but harm to subjects.
With exceptions for torture, humiliation, dismemberment and execution (including the same to animals) I won't defend obscenity restrictions as the arguments are quite different than those for restricted forms of pornography. These listed exceptions of course are great examples of harm coming from obscene content and again are illegal (though lacking in the case of animals) under obscenity laws under the harm principle.
Other forms of obscenity restrictions seem to me to fall directly in line with the offense principle and should not be restricted. Take for example the Supreme Court decision Miller v. California. The resulting 'Miller Test' for obscenity decisions:
1. Whether the average person would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to a lewd curiosity;
2. Whether the work depicts or describes, in an offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions, specifically defined by applicable state law; and
3. Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
Compare this test against Mill:
"That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right... The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."
Obscenity, when it is victimless, and it is almost always victimless, clearly fails the harm principle test. For the most part, this is the case in America. There are cases where obscenity laws prevent things such as expressions of homosexual affection, for example, and it is harder to find clear victimhood in these cases even when the law agrees to prohibit them. A note that this Supreme Court decision was made by a conservative majority court.
Regarding sedition I understand your point - that speech critical of the power elite ought to be protected in the strongest terms. I have a lot to say with regard to restrictions on sedition. I'll advocate for a devil for a blurb and then comment briefly in an attempt to sum up more than I can defend into a few sentences.
With very few exceptions (the velvet revolution?), successful seditious overthrow of a ruling class and/or government have in almost every single case caused great harm both to the ruling class and to those who are caught adrift in the following power vacuum. Furthermore the ruling class/governance structure have to be convinced...
WTF? Can we discuss capacities of out dear leader and our allmighty twoparty at least?
Which is exactly why the incumbent establishment was incandescently upset that this decision stuck down part of the bipartisan McCain (Republican)-Feingold (Democrat) law.
Key there is leveraged. That takes money and organization. Citizens United was about suppressing the distribution of a film during the 2008 Democratic primary season (as clarified during the oral arguments, this extended to books). The law went so far as to prevent sending non-partisan voter's guides such as the NRA's 60 days prior to general election; "low information voters" would not seem to be viewed as a great problem by our betters.
Yes this is the principle of offense.
> It sounds like the argument for trigger warnings is that some people think they might be harmed by speech.
Yes this is the principle of harm.
> That doesn't sound like a very good reason to try to limit free speech.
All of our freedoms are granted up until the point where our actions would cause harm to others. At this point our freedoms are infringing on the freedoms of others, and their expressions become restricted. In this regard, speech is and has been no different from any other right - although it sounds like you have an argument for why speech should be allowed even when it causes harm to others?
(Wikipedia on the harm principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_principle)
How can you discuss/complain about problematic behavior without mentioning some examples of the behavior in question?
There's definitely good criticisms of arguably (and in my opinion) bad behavior in this article, but it falls a little flat when the author can't restrain himself from tossing out petty insults whenever he's leading into a point.
But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up.
This base-shoring piece ironically panders to people who've already made up their mind and are uninterested in engaging in any kind of meaningful discussion. You can't possibly write something like that and expect to convince anyone that you're arguing in good faith.
Look, none of this is new. Universities have always been contentious places, students have always been belligerent and uninterested in hearing the views of their opponents. This is what it is to be young: to believe fully, with or without justification. A generation ago in the US, SDS would have barricaded themselves into the room with both these master debaters and held them hostage with a list of demands for the administration. The verbs have changed, but "We demand" has not.
This is a screed from a man who is upset that he is not being handed a platform to speak. Yes, guy. People don't like you. That doesn't make this a free speech issue. No one invited me to speak at Oxford either. Just go home without your rattle.
Agreed. But I don't know to what degree the school should accept the students' demands.
> This is a screed from a man who is upset that he is not being handed a platform to speak. [...] No one invited me to speak at Oxford either.
That's not what the author describes, though: they were invited to speak at Oxford, and students who didn't want that event to take place complained until it was cancelled.
> That doesn't make this a free speech issue.
It's not, I agree. But it's something, and not a good something.
In previous generations, students absolutely would have protested. But administrations wouldn't have been so quick to give in to social outrage and to ban speakers. One of the unfortunate effects of social media is that allowing controversy of any sort has become much more dangerous. What might once have garnered a few feminist protestors outside a church (or evangelicals protesting outside a school) now elicits thousands of angry reactionaries on Twitter and Tumblr.
I think that one of the greatest strengths of the university system is the idea that "offensive" ideas can be debated. An enormous amount of knowledge has been gotten from heresy, and I would argue that universities have been so central in the spread of knowledge precisely because they encourage (or at least tolerate) people who go against the grain.
This has disappeared, and I think that it leads to bad ideas winning.
One of the reasons why the US has such a strong protection toward speech, especially political and ideological speech, is that the Founding Fathers and their successors recognized the unpalatability of conflicting ideas and gave them the strongest possible protection. They recognized that such protection would give assholes the ability to say horrible, offensive things, and they believed that such a side effect was far better than the alternative - stifling free expression and allowing bad ideas to win because their proponents were better represented, better connected, or just flat-out more willing to suppress the other side's viewpoints.
The fact that these students are completely ignorant of this history is amusing because our modern academic tradition was based entirely off of this belief in a "marketplace of ideas."
Ben Franklin said, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I'd love to see what those exact same students would say if the prevailing attitude changed and a massive wave of right-wing ideology took over campus politics. I'm sure that they'd be crying about how their self-evident right to self-expression was being horribly violated. Poor things.
This kind of attack is completely unnecessary. How is anyone supposed to respond to this comment when you've already constructed a straw man for your opponent and trivialized it?
I mean, this is simple enough to check, right?
Look at how historically right-wing or conservative universities (say, Baylor, Brigham Young, or Texas A&M) handle such things with their student groups.
...it’s not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard. It is the right of everyone in the audience to listen, and to hear. And every time you silence someone you make yourself a prisoner of your own action, because you deny yourself the right to hear something. In other words: Your own right to hear and be exposed is as much involved in all these cases as is the right of the other to voice his or her view.
In other words, freedom of speech is really about freedom of hearing. Later, he asks who should be trusted with the job of censoring:
Who's going to decide? To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful or who is the harmful speaker, or to determine in advance what are the harmful consequences going to be, that we know enough about in advance to prevent? To whom would you give this job? To whom are you going to award the task of being the censor?
Did you hear any speaker in opposition to this motion (eloquent as... one of them was) to whom you would delegate the task of deciding for you, what you could read? To whom you'd give the job of deciding for you, relieve you of the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear? Do you know anyone- hands up- to whom you would give this job? Does anyone have a nominee? You mean there's no one in Canada good enough to decide what I can read? Or hear? I had no idea... but there’s a law that says there must be such a person. Or there's a subsection of some piddling law that says it. Well to hell with that law then. It's inviting you to be liars and hypocrites and to deny what you evidently already know already.
And finally, he notes that religious texts contain passages that would need to be censored, yet religious conservatives often call for censorship.
Look anywhere you like for the warrant for slavery, for the subjugation of women as chattel, for the burning and flogging of homosexuals, for ethnic cleansing, for antisemitism, for all this you look no further than a famous book that's on every pulpit in this city and in every synagogue and in every mosque. And then just see whether you can square the fact that the force that is the main source of hatred is also the main caller for censorship. And when you've realized this you'll therefore this evening be faced with a gigantic false antithesis. I hope that still won't stop you from giving the motion before you the resounding endorsement that it deserves. Thanks awfully. Night-night. Stay cool!
(If you haven't watched the whole speech, I recommend doing so. I've only transcribed a few choice passages, but the whole thing is great.)
And of course, there's the absurdity factor. Nobody thinks that censoring actually stops people from endorsing verboten opinions or talking about banned topics. Everything just gets driven underground. This gives the holders of censored beliefs an excuse to behave more extremely than they otherwise would. After all, they're being persecuted.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIyBZNGH0TY#t=1240
A fire-and-brimstone preacher on a street corner is a nuisance to me, and I won't want to hear him. But it's a public place, so I would just move on to avoid being annoyed by listening to him. Were he to knock on my front door I would tell him "no" and close the door again. Were he to be granted a lecture at the local university I would not bother to attend.
Yes, my mind is already closed and made up on the topics that this hypothetical preacher would like to re-open with me. Both of us think that we know better than the other. So what?
I would behave like you in your examples. To go with your university case, the line is crossed if one tries to get the disliked speaker uninvited from the university. Or if one attends the lecture to disrupt it. This has happened many times with prominent speakers, and it's a shame that some people consider it acceptable behavior.
The solution, as I see it, is to disallow the inoffensive side too. For instance if there were a forum, that didn't allow attacks on whole classes of people, then it is best if they don't allow defenses either.
Although I don't fully agree with the post you responded to, no one was not allowing someone to speak.
Comfortableness is a misnomer. What it is conformity. Havel.correctly identifies this as "post-totalitarian". It is the same sick mindset of communism and the Salem witch trials and Inquisition. It is political control and it is used by malicious actors to manipulate and destroy.
Millions have suffered and been killed and imprisoned under such regimes, and Havel describes the casual brutality of it.
The endpoint of this is obvious. And learning about it is important. http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165havel.html