FATHER KNOWS BEST

By

JOHN SCHERBER

FATHER KNOWS BEST

         I attended a meeting the other day at which one of the participants was a woman who had taught at the college level in New York City for about twenty-five years. She surprised me by saying how happy she was to be finished with that phase of her life. I said that I thought teaching was a rewarding experience.

         She replied that it was now more about protecting students from things that might be negative experiences. There have to be trigger warnings on books so that students can avoid reading things they do not wish to know.   “So we are raising a soft-boiled generation,” I said, “one that needs protection all the time.”

         This idea reminded me of a study I read about a while ago that established that kids raised in households without dishwashers were hardier and more resistant to disease than those where dishes were machine washed at high temperatures. The implication was clear. Those children raised in a super-clean environment don’t accumulate the same level of disease resistance as those who are not.

         Now my term of soft-boiled generation might be more accurate if I changed it to the dishwasher generation. Are we really doing these kids any favors by putting the content of their education through a mental dishwasher? Will they be better equipped to be stronger citizens and more effective humans by keeping them from the kind of experiences that might strengthen their characters? Indeed, whose idea was this?

         It has to come from the kind of thinking that says, We know what’s best for you. That’s fine when the kid is five years old and has no judgment. But when we’re talking about college it’s nothing but blatant paternalism. Do we want to raise a generation of kids who have low resistance to lies because they were never exposed to difficult truths? There are times when I wonder if that is not exactly what we do want.

         An unthinking society is more easily led. Ideas, whether good or bad, can be inflammatory. Repressive governments always use censorship, and when I hear about books being deleted from a college curriculum because of language that is “inappropriate,” but which was appropriate for its time and mindset, then my censorship antenna goes up. Trigger warnings work much the same way. They say, don’t read this. It might be harmful.

         Do we really want to insist that writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century think and write like us? Is rewriting the past easier than understanding it?

         I will suggest that bad ideas are necessary, just as vaccinations, or living in a home without a dishwasher, can make us stronger. The value of good ideas is often best appreciated against the backdrop of bad ones. The passive acceptance of a good idea in the absence of any threat does nothing for our insight or conviction. Good ideas need competition to shine. That’s why we have free speech, so the good can stand out against the absurd.

         The argument has been offered that trigger warnings prevent pain. That may be true in some situations. But pain is a learning response. It’s what suggests we remove our fingers from the fire. It’s what prompts us to terminate a toxic relationship. It’s what urges us to end any harmful situation. It helps us learn to alter our unsuccessful behaviors and move on.

         In the trigger warning advocacy literature, the memories of rape victims are often raised. Is then an atmosphere where no reference to rape exists the appropriate response? Aren’t we better off with a therapist to help us deal with it? My sense is that injuries heal better in the sun and fresh air than when swept under the rug. But this particular issue has been used as a springboard to post a long list of warnings of far more situations, and it has become a plague for educators and students alike. There is never any shortage of people who would like to suppress the views of others in order to stroke their own prejudices.

         Here is a list of subjects I found online where it is considered “common courtesy” to advise people of the presence of these subjects in any text:

•   Swearing

•   Rape

•   Abuse (physical, mental, emotional, verbal, sexual)

•   Child abuse/pedophilia

•   Self-injurious behavior (self-harm, eating disorders, etc.)

•   Talk of drug use (legal, illegal or psychiatric)

•   Suicide

•   Descriptions/pictures of medical procedures (even if they don’t contain blood or gore)

•   Descriptions/pictures of violence or warfare (including instruments of violence, such as knives or guns)

•   Corpses, skulls or skeletons

•   Needles

•   Discussions of -isms, shaming, or hatred of any kind (racism, classism, hatred of cultures/ethnicities that differ from your own, sexism, hatred of sexualities or genders that differ from your own, anti-multiple, non-vanilla shaming, sex positive shaming, fat shaming/body image shaming, neuroatypical shaming)

•   Any time slurs are used (this includes words like “stupid” or “dumb”, which are still widely considered to be socially acceptable)

•   Trans* degendering, or anti-trans* views of bodies

•   Dismissal of lived oppressions, marginalization, illness or differences

•   Kidnapping (forceful deprivation of/disregard for personal autonomy)

•   Discussions of sex (even consensual)

•   Death or dying

•   Spiders

•   Insects

•   Snakes

•   Vomit

•   Pregnancy/childbirth

•   Blood

•   Serious injury

•   Trypophobia

•   Scarification

•   Nazi paraphernalia

•   Slimy things

Anything that might inspire intrusive thoughts in people with OCD.

         I’m surprised that the word brain is not also on this list of unmentionable words, because it is certainly nowhere in view here. So we are now to calculate what might cause intrusive thoughts in people with OCD and limit our own utterances accordingly. Childbirth, quite obviously, is deeply offensive to any well-born person. Consensual sex was appropriately banned long ago. And, may blood never run in our veins again. By the way, Trypophobia is a claimed pathological fear of objects with irregular patterns of holes––and we can’t be having any of that.

         Here is more censorship than you’d find in a twelfth century convent now masquerading as progressive thought.

         Well, all I can say is that you will surely never see any mention of spiders, snakes, vomit or slimy things on this page, either. You are safe here, count on it.

         Unless counting anything sends you into an obsessive-compulsive dither.

To visit the author’s website in search of more sanity, here’s a link:

www.sanmiguelallendebooks.com