If the universities are to be be believed, history and literature are dark realms where evil lurks. Beware, the professors cry. The tree of knowledge may sprout from a seemingly fertile meadow, but under the surface lurks a dangerous pit of racism, sexism and bigotry, waiting to traumatise the unwary. Descriptions of the horrors of slavery could cause descendants of those slaves to relive the trauma of their ancestors. The recording of violence, race or sexuality in times long past could cause the readers great distress. Literature, it seems, poses a great threat to society. The book that defined my adolescence, The Catcher in the Rye, has come full circle. Having once been an icon of the struggle for free speech, it is now again falling foul of the righteous, ironically this time within the very institutions who previously were most vociferous in it’s defence. How short was that period when free speech triumphed? Liverpool University’s English Department recently chose to warn students studying Northern dialects that such language contains disturbing depictions of physical violence, alcohol consumption and gender.
Royal Holloway has now joined the fray, showing admirable concern for it’s students mental health by issuing a trigger warning for Oliver Twist. Students are being alerted to the themes of ‘domestic violence’, ‘child abuse’ and ‘racial prejudice’ woven into this tale of poverty and redemption set in Victorian London. It appears that Royal Holloway think that Charles Dickens, far from being concerned by the deprivations and inequalities of his time, actually wrote his novels with the express aim of upsetting 21st Century students. Readers are cruelly forced to enter Oliver’s world of exploitation, hunger and violence, and need to be warned that they could then suffer the aftermath of being exposed to such trauma. The fact that Oliver finds a happy ending does not matter, He was evidently made of far sterner stuff than today’s sensitive and fragile students. Perhaps the most dangerous part of the story is the evil capitalist idea that Oliver only found redemption when it was revealed he was actually from a higher social class than he thought. But maybe I am being too critical? Perhaps concern for student’s mental welfare has more to do with duty of care in a litigious age. Maybe the universities are terrified of being sued by someone who claims that reading Shakespeare at university turned them into a psychopath, or Huckleberry Finn turned them into a racist. Are students nowadays so fragile that expecting them to cope with any reality outside the safe bubble of rainbows, equity and pronouns is unreasonable? Perhaps the universities are worried of being sued for precipitating a massive public health crisis, caused by a surge of kids suffering from PTSD brought about by reading classic literature. In spite of students having survived thousands of years of being exposed to literature and history without suffering mental breakdowns, perhaps in the age of microaggressions and non-crime hate incidents it is far safer to not even take the risk?
Personally, I think there is much more to this disturbing recent phenomenon than the coddling of fragile young adult minds. Calling students snowflakes deflects attention from the fact that it is most commonly the faculties issuing these warnings, not the students themselves. Far from being born out of concern for the students, trigger warnings are in my opinion far more likely to be deliberately designed as a method of control. In my recent satirical novel Dadafarin, or The Pessimism, one of the characters describes woke ideology as akin to a computer virus. Vee sees Critical Race Theory and gender ideology not as just ideas, but as malware, cleverly crafted programs written specifically to overwrite parts of the brain’s software. To Vee, the infected person appears to have completely lost control of their own thoughts, and instead is now thinking someone else’s. They have have basically become a fundamentalist. Fundamentalists no longer actually think about things, but instead run what their senses tell them through an installed program that has defined outcomes. Religion has used a very similar process throughout recorded history. Unlike religious fundamentalists however, the woke fundamentalist is completely unaware that their thinking is now following rigid doctrinal lines rather than a process of evaluation and deduction; they reach their conclusions entirely under the illusion that it was their own thinking that lead to them. Effectively, they have become drones with pre-programmed responses. This social justice malware is cleverly disguised, as it has hijacked the brain’s empathy response (see my other article, The Politics of Empathy, for a more complete exploration of this idea).
Trigger warnings are just another form of malware, fully compatible with pre-installed social justice malware. But what possible advantage could be gained by making students scared of the subject matter they are studying? The answer, as always, is power and control. If you keep telling a young child that the bogey man will get him if he goes out alone at night, the child comes to automatically associate darkness with the bogey man. Similarly, if you tell a student that depictions of poverty or cruelty in Dickens can cause distress to the reader, they will be far more likely to get upset when reading them. They have been primed to respond in a predictable fashion, and closed-loop feedback appears to prove that the warning was warranted. The student now feels grateful that they were warned about the dreadful content of Oliver Twist: they think that the university/school has in fact acted very much like a responsible parent. Everyone is happy. However, the relationship of teacher/student has been irrevocably changed, to parent/child. The student has in fact been partially regressed to early childhood. Nor is this issue restricted to the universities; media providers are also increasingly keen to warn the consumer of ‘problematic’ content. Since the pandemic started, many people have now become used to being told what to do and what to think from the television.
By now it should be obvious that I do not for one moment believe that universities are in fact at all concerned that words may make their students uncomfortable. It seems far more likely to me that trigger warnings are designed to help build a platform from which to increase censorship, leading to the complete removal of ‘problematic’ works from the curriculum and, eventually, the entire public sphere. Dickens will be replaced by Angelou, Kant by Kendi. ‘Trigger warnings’ are actually nothing of the sort. They are a Trojan horse, a deliberate subterfuge to encourage students to be frightened of exposure to, let alone be challenged by, any reality or ideas falling outside the narrow doctrines of the social justice movement. The universities are in fact deliberately trying to infect the student populace with a form of paraphilic infantilism, where the university takes on the role of parent to the infant student. An infant rarely questions mummy’s wisdom. Mother knows best, or, as William Makepeace Thackeray said, “Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.”
Thackeray also said “Are not there little chapters in everybody’s life, that seems to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of history?”