Why we need trigger warnings

But are trigger warnings and safe spaces really examples of a new form of political correctness? Chait menacingly describes the new P.C. as “the language police.” Critics pose the argument that, through threats of lawsuits and overzealous parental interference, the timidity of the self-infantilized will cast a shadow on academic culture as a whole. Yet surely people who need trigger warnings and safe spaces are less scary than they are scared. If students are “self-infantilized,” how can they also threaten the free speech of the broader campus? And if universities are so quick to surrender to these ostensible threats of retribution, so unwilling to make arguments against veritable babies, then there could hardly be a robust free speech culture on campus to begin with. There is a disjunction in these accounts: The new P.C. proponents are self-evidently ludicrous, and they also wield an outsized power over academic life. (These accounts also fail to show how, exactly, such outlandish ideas so quickly gain a foothold in major institutions full of the most educated members of society.) Perhaps it’s possible to see trigger warnings and safe spaces as less a cause than a symptom of a stifled intellectual culture on university campuses.

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But the biggest problem with the jeremiads against the new P.C. is that they treat the so-called politically correct as radical freaks who are outside of mainstream American society—opposing the common sense free-speech position held by wholesome liberals and conservatives. Yet far from outlier ideas, trigger warnings and safe spaces grow out of impulses that are broadly shared. For many decades, the United States has been the home to a thriving vernacular therapeutic culture, where ordinary citizens borrow concepts from psychology and use them as tools of self-improvement, often, in the process, forming distinct political and social identities. In a society where Oprah Winfrey is a guru to millions and self-help books are perennial best-sellers, the adoption of folk therapy is hardly the mark of eccentricity. Moreover, trigger warnings and safe spaces echo the larger jitteriness that has marked American culture for many decades, gaining special salience after September 11, 2001. To understand trigger warnings and safe spaces, we would do well to forget the category of political correctness altogether, and look back at the origins of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

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