What do you think?

I just finished reading this article:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

I wonder where the line is between "being overly PC and censoring people" and "just being a decent person and not allowing bullies". I wondered what you guys think about this article?

(This article oversells CBT a little much but I has helped me a bit process my occasional anxiety and paranoia)

I personally think there is value in being exposed to different points of view, and the cure to bad speech is more speech.

 

Thanks for your response. I feel like you need to harden yourself a bit to the pain and cruetly of outside world, but you also need to try and make the world a nicer place too. I feel like censorship is usually bad for academic discourse and "I'm offended!" can't always be the last word.

(Also, thanks for noticing my icon! Bianca is my spoiled baby girl pig. She is screaming out the window of her hidey house because another guinea pig got too close and "mom should do something!!" I love her.)

 

I disagree with a lot of this article. I couldn't think of a quick and cohesive way to phrase it, so I'm just going to grab quotes from the article in question and respond to them.

I found and read this article, and I think the attitude here sums up a lot of my frustration with the 'anti-trigger-warnings'/'anti-PC' arguers.

First, she compares the incidence of 'needing to know rape law' in lawyers with 'needing to be okay with seeing blood' in surgeons - as far as I can tell, there seem to be many different kinds of lawyers, many of whom will never handle a case involving rape.

Secondly, her attitude towards students who may be traumatised or have triggers surrounding rape is very dismissive. She scoffs at the idea of warning people before showing films about 'criminal-sex-abuse investigations' and considers the idea of students being uncomfortable arguing for positions they disagree with in regards to rape as ridiculous. This isn't really conducive to solving the given problem that 'some people have triggers around material that makes it hard to deal with without warning', and I feel like a more compassionate approach that prioritises working with and listening to the students in order to create an environment within which people can learn most effectively would be a much better approach to take (especially, but not exclusively, if this is a class compulsory for a greater number of people than will actually find it actively relevant to their professional career).

Both of these pieces also strike me as disingenuous - the first seems to be complaining that student-teacher relationships are seen as having an unequal power dynamic which is concerning, especially when the teacher is in control of the student's marks, and the second is complaining about his fear of being complained about by liberal students (despite his only complaint being from a conservative student!) and his worries regarding the insecure nature of academic jobs (which is not actually the fault of the students).

[description of microaggressions and trigger warnings, bizarre story about microaggressions chosen so that the first impression on the readers is 'wow these people are stupid']

This is not actually true. It depends very much on the kind of anxiety being faced; only specific kinds of anxiety or phobias respond to exposure therapy. Furthermore, exposure therapy should be done by a professional, not by someone on a college campus who thinks that you should just get over your triggers already. That's not likely to work at all and will probably just exacerbate things.

This fails to explain why protecting people from preventable harm is a bad thing. It really does seem the other way round; if you can easily prevent harm to someone, at very little cost to yourself, then why wouldn't you?

Also, accepting that some people have triggers isn't really '[presuming] an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche', more just being realistic about psychology.

...If saying 'quit the thing, you're hurting people' is punishment, then sure, I am down with punishment. (In reference to the 'even accidentally'.) If someone's knowingly contravening campus codes and also the idea of being a decent person, then sure, do punish them, because they are deliberately being a dick.

Also, thinking twice before you speak isn't a bad idea; it gives you time to work out what you are trying to say, whether you should be saying it now or to these people, and other important social reflections. People who valourise being insensitive and aggressive because they think that being sensitive and approachable is somehow too PC really should probably not be teachers.

[Citation needed], because this doesn't follow at all. Also, a false dichotomy is being brought up between critical thinking and being accommodating to people's mental health/not being an asshole.

The comparison between an over-reliance on health & safety stuff and a crackdown on bullying seems kind of ingenuous - bullying is a really large problem in a lot of schools, and trying to deal with that is a good thing, not at all superfluous.

I'm not really sure why that's seen as a bad message, or contributing to a fragile psyche, or whatever; it seems a pretty good message for adults to give their kids, and one I wish more parents followed through on.

I feel like this should also note that that is because the distance between the ideologies of the parties has also grown massively - the Democrats have become somewhat more left over time, and the Republicans have shifted much much much more to the right. It's not just a case of people having more dislike for no reason; it's the ideologies becoming more and more incompatible, especially on matters that are very relevant to people's everyday lives, such as LGBT rights, abortion, welfare, etc.

I strongly disagree with this - morality is not necessarily about allegiance to teams and signalling that, and in fact a lot of the most robust moral systems are constructed by people thinking critically. (Hell, 'always think critically about things' may in fact be part of someone's morality.)

Also, painting morality in a negative light doesn't really serve any purpose, nor does it really make much sense. Even thinking critically about things requires some sort of moral or ethical base in order to draw a relevant conclusion with potential for action - for example, you can think critically about student-teacher relationships and decide that they have high potential for abuse, but that is not much use as a conclusion without a moral position of 'abuse is a bad thing' (or 'abuse is for other people to worry about' or anything else).

Again, the fact that job security in academia is approximately 0% without tenure is not the fault of the students. And petitioning and talking online about issues with professors/schools/whatever is not really a bad thing - 'stirring up online mobs' is very emotive and biased language.

and yet you are implying it by saying that you aren't implying it. (There's a word for that particular rhetorical device, but I forget it.)

A lot of that can be put down to increasing pressure within schools as the job market continues to suck and high competition for jobs exist. Furthermore, the change in attitude from 'get a degree if you want a job where a degree would be super relevant and important' to 'get a degree if you want a job ever' is forcing more and more people into academic situations which do not at all suit them. Additionally, the increasing cost of school and the subsequent economic stress on individuals and families will also take a large toll.

This is one type of philosophy, not an immutable truth.

That's... a bit much. It's one type of therapy, not the one true path to wisdom and enlightenment.

This isn't really much of a recommendation, beyond 'it works for some people'; it certainly doesn't uphold the author's idea that it is The Best Thing. And actually, one of the problems that CBT has is also reflected in this article - it can teach you to think that actual bad things that are actually happening are just your brain distorting events, which is reflected in the article's belief that actual triggers, harassment, bigotry, etc, are just your brain distorting events to believe that they are bad.

This is not necessarily true; often the chain goes like 'this is offensive, this is why, could you not do that?'. And the idea here that an emotional reaction to someone being a dick is equivalent to the irrational emotional reactions meant to be targeted in CBT is a problem in both psychology and articles like this.

Alternatively, 'what are we doing to our students if we teach them that their emotions are valid and that they can in fact dissent and be heard, after a childhood and teenhood in a society which often tells children and teens precisely the opposite?'

This isn't about encouraging people to have thin skins, it's about accommodating disabilities and not being an asshole.

Accounts of this happening do not mean that it's continually 'privileged' unless you back that up with evidence that many more complaints and frustrations have not been dismissed out of an institutional attitude that ignoring bigotry will make it not a problem, or just flat-out more bigotry the higher up the chain of command you go. (Which seems a much more prevalent problem.)

...Also, people trying to stop or punish bigotry is a laudable aim. Of course it's going to misfire sometimes, because everything does, but it's better to aim towards it than to go 'oh well trying to do this might go wrong occasionally so better not to try'.

...And yet people still do this, a lot, enough that people have to reiterate over and over things like 'if someone is being abused it's not a moral failing on their part' and similar extremely obvious things.

Also, this is kind of conflating things - that is, questioning in the sense of 'why are you upset? what did I do wrong?' is pretty much always okay, but questioning in the sense of 'I cannot see why you could possibly be upset because I called you a slur' is generally unacceptable, because it's invalidating rather than seeking to learn.

Not really? I mean, you will probably get into more arguments if you hold that it's not okay for people to be bigoted than if you're just like 'sure whatever be bigoted', but that's not a failing of the person trying to stand against bigotry, that's a failing of society in being bigoted. That's not really hypersensitivity.

[splitting post here because it's too long for the software]

 

This isn't necessarily a bad or irrational thing. For example, I can predict that when I have to go into town next week, I will be anxious and distressed by the amount of people around. This isn't a bad thing or a cognitive bias that should be removed; it's an observation of past events and a prediction of future events based on the patterns observed. It can also be incredibly useful - I can prepare by making sure I'm well fed and have a way to listen to music, and someone given a trigger warning for part of a course can prepare by engaging in whatever self-care they need to be okay.

This strikes me as a silly thing to complain about - shouldn't everything in a course contribute directly to the course goals?

Well, here's an example: I would like it if things warned for homophobia or transphobia so that I would know that it was coming and be ready to ignore it, rather than be surprised by it and jump up ready to defend myself or my friends, and then discover that that sort of reaction is not needed and try to calm down.

...Well, yeah, if you have books in which people kill themselves, especially if it depicts their thought process or depicts suicide as positive (which Mrs. Dalloway seems to do, from the Wikipedia article), it's not unreasonable to think 'oh hey, suicidal ideation is a bitch to deal with and some of my students are probably trying to deal with it, and sudden reminders that it's an option, or assertions that it's a good option, can make that harder. I should put a warning for that so that they can be prepared'. (Also, many of the Metamorphoses are indeed about sexual assault, so I'm not really sure of the complaint there?)

Again, this is not true. This does not work for all people.

Exposure therapy needs to be done by a professional, not a college professor.

...Also, exposure therapy takes time, even if it works. For example, if someone is trying to go through exposure therapy to get rid of arachnophobia, and they are at the stage of 'being able, just about, to look at a photo of a spider without freaking out', and you then insist that today's class involves handling a spider, and don't ask to be excused, because exposure will help you!, then the person in question is indeed going to freak out and will probably lose progress in their attempts to be less afraid.

And again, exposure therapy doesn't work for everyone, and deliberately trying to trigger people when you can easily avoid it just makes you an asshole.

Earlier in the article, he mocks the idea that a campus should be a safe space, so I'm not really sure that you can reconcile the two.

This, again, does not follow: 'we should not allow trigger warnings in colleges, because then students will get used to things in college, which will be easier than in 'real life' because real life does not allow trigger warnings'. If you are also disallowing trigger warnings and opt-outs, then your environment is no different from the world beyond college in that sense, and thus is no easier to habituate in.

I don't think this really follows.

Or create a short (probably anonymous) survey asking people to note down if they need trigger warnings for anything. Or getting Disability Services to do so. Or just warning for things that are commonly triggering.

My responses to the concerns about disinviting people and so forth are pretty much covered by this post (which is responding to a different article, but one which raises most of the same points and examples re: disinvitation, etc).

...Not really? Requests for trigger warnings involve realising that a thing would probably be problematic, based on past experience, and asking for an accommodation to ameliorate that. That's kind of like saying that 'asking for extra time on exams is catastrophising'.

Not really? Like, again, there will always be places where things misfire, but trying to get rid of entrenched bigotry is still a good aim.

And no, smart people don't overreact, because overreacting, or perceived overreaction, gets your name dragged through the news and used in thinkpieces for years.

Okay, yes, this is true up to a point, but this attitude needs to be combined with the recognition that other people can be assholes and that asking them to stop doing that is perfectly reasonable.

Also, I'm gonna tag @Aondeug here, if she feels like chipping in, because this keeps talking about Buddhism like it's the best thing ever, and may be misrepresenting it, etc. So she's more qualified to talk about that aspect, if she wants.

...No? Balancing freedom of speech with making people feel welcome does kind of involve codes of speech, such as 'don't call people slurs'. Talking about it is great, but accepting that if you want to make people feel welcome you can't just say whatever you feel like is necessary.

This does make me wonder whether you could invoke the ADA for this. But either way, it's still an incredibly dick move.

...Most people from any sort of minority or marginalised group know about living in a world full of potential offenses. What seems to be being advocated here is teaching them to shut up about it and not challenge people on that. (Which goes against the author's idea that challenging people in the classroom is necessary - I'm sorry, is it only students who should be challenged and never professors? That's not very academically sound.)

Sure, do teach people CBT. That would be great! But also, don't use CBT language to shut down a debate where it's not relevant or not appropriate.

This is a common problem in CBT. You can blame people unnecessarily, sure, and learning not to do that is great. But also the idea that blaming people full stop is a cognitive distortion is incorrect and can be fairly harmful, because sometimes a thing is someone else's fault, and sometimes it's necessary to know that in order to take the correct action.

This is very value-neutral - it can be bad, or it can be a good way to manage anxiety (when you have a response for all the 'what-if' questions, it's often a lot easier to then not be anxious).

Again, a common problem. This is valid in some cases but fails to take into account that feelings often have a reason, and that, for example, you could feel depressed because your marriage wasn't working out. (it's often also used to invalidate feelings full stop)

this is the end of this long thing whoo

 

First off I want to state something very important. CBT is NOT modern Buddhism. At all. By removing the rebirth cycle, karma, and the truth that the end of the Path is an absolute cure for suffering you do not have Buddhism. That last bit is important in particular because all forms of Buddhism are defined by the Four Noble Truths.

1. There is suffering, conflict, and dissatisfaction.
2. Suffering has a cause. That cause is desire, attachment, and ignorance.
3. There is a cure to suffering.
4. The cure is this Noble Eightfold Path.

By telling people that we can only treat and reduce mental sufferings we are creating a gate in front of the Dhamma. The Dhamma is revolutionary and exceptionally radical. It proposes not that you can lessen pain, but that you can entirely root pain out forever. CBT does not present this idea from my experience, nor does therapy in general leading to my dissatisfaction with a deal of it. CBT is merely a tool to help at best, Dhamma it is not. Please see this article on the topic of Buddhist Romanticism by the Venerable Thanissaro Bhikkhu.

Next thing we will cover is the idea that trigger warnings are bad and that we should not have to tell people about things like rape in fiction. Now one of the big ideas in Buddhism is that pain is suffered by all sentient living beings. These include humans, ants, ghosts, people in Hell, gods, and more. All of us suffer pain and pain is unpleasant and it is why we seek the Path. To end pain. Now there is something called metta in Buddhism, Loving Kindness. Metta is not love as it is typically defined in Western schools of thought. It is dispassionate and does not at all deal with affection or enjoyment or fondness. It is a sort of unconditional love and concern for another living being. All of them in fact. This means that one can hate someone yet love them at the same time. You don't like them but you love them when you have metta.

Now we may ask ourselves why do I bring this up? Because it is our duty as Buddhists to help reduce and prevent suffering as much as we can. Not a nice thing, not a bonus. Our duty. When we become Buddhists we must do a few things. The first is to take the Three Refuges, to swear that we will go to the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha for aid. The next is that we take the Five Precepts: to abstain from killing or physically harming other living beings, to abstain from harmful or deceitful speech, to abstain from taking that which is not yours, to abstain from the taking of intoxicating substances, and to abstain from sexual misconduct (this varies but it always includes prohibitions on rape and adultery). You cannot be Buddhist without taking these and as a Buddhist you work to do your best to uphold these.

To which one may say "Well, by not telling someone that there is rape in a book I am not raping them personally or harming them personally. I did nothing. I am blameless." Except the very lack of action is also an act, and it is something that you may accrue karma for. So let us say that you know that a friend is triggered by rape due to having been assaulted. You've a movie you really want to show them but you know that rape is in the film. You do not tell this friend this when showing them and as a result your friend has a panic attack and suffers. By refusing to tell them about this you have committed an act of wrong speech. By not speaking you hurt someone. You are to be held to blame for this.

Buddhism is not merely about your own comfort. It is about everyone and everything's comfort. They mean just as much as you do and there are reasons that many suttas do not focus upon reminding you to care about yourself. Many people are egotistical in a Buddhist sense of the word.

Next thing is the claim about what Buddhism preaches. Yes, we do in fact hold that desire can be mastered as can thought. We do in fact hold that you cannot force reality to conform to your desires and that all attempts to do so are ultimately doomed to failure. However Buddhism also preaches that we need to do what we can to help people. To do our fucking best to reduce sufferings. Is tagging things entirely successful? No. It cannot be. Can trigger warnings be used to bully people and harm them? Yes. They can be. But so can the Dhamma be used to bully and harm.

God there is shit regarding distortions too. Yes distortions or vipalassa are a big problem within Buddhism and what it presents as reality. However distortions as Western psychology and Buddhist Romanticism understand it are not distortions from our point of view. If you're not operating under our cosmology and logic you are not using our "ancient wisdom". You are using something that is, at best, inspired by it. Tell me, if I were to remove God from the Holy Trinity would it still be the Holy Trinity? No. It would not. It may be a theology inspired by it, but it is not the Holy Trinity. Western distortions are not vipalassa by and large.

Also Buddhism holds to the idea of morality very, very strongly. An objective morality. There is Right and there is Wrong. That which is Right is Skillful and that which is Wrong is Unskillful. We have a series of 14 immorals and 25 morals. There is other lists of this shit too and we can also get into the complicated nature of karma and how it works. Basically the universe it has within it instilled a form of morality and a standard by which we are all held. It is like gravity. Objective. Final. Deal with it.

It's not morality that binds and blinds, it is desire, attachment, and ignorance. To say that morality binds and blinds is to be ignorant as to what true morality from a Buddhist perspective is. That is also to be attached to a delusion that our Western schools of thought are supporting. Perhaps it may even be indicative of a desire to be rational and above others. The point is though it's not right and it leads to suffering.