Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

To me free speech as a concept is basically a legal one. It mainly bears on whether a person can be treated as a criminal for saying something. I am not quite an absolutist on this question, but very close. I would say that the state must have overwhelming interests at stake to justify criminalizing speech. Civil liability is a different question and I'm willing to treat it by looser, but still restrictive, standards.

But just because some kinds of expression ought not be criminalized, it doesn't mean they are socially acceptable in any way. I'm fine and dandy with calling people out for anything they say that's harmful or offensive, even organizing boycotts or protests over offensive speech. It is when the law gets into it that I grow exceedingly cautious.

Add to that that I think a lot of the early promoters of free speech were literally talking about printing presses, pamphlets and public speaking. Now we have the telephone, the television, cinema, the internet, all of which alter communication massively each in their own way and together. Dunno if that should make a difference or be registered by free speech arguments. Maybe, maybe not, but it seems like something that gets missed a lot.

The internet analogizes pretty well to printing presses and publication, with the owner of the server as the publisher. I can upload my posts to ilx or my photos to flickr, just as I can write a letter to the editor and use the newspaper to disseminate my letter, but that use is conditional on the editors of the newspaper wanting to publish it. Similarly, paid space on a server is subject to the conditions of sale, as imposed by the owner and accepted by the buyer, as with ads in a newspaper.

ppl who don't think liberals do this apparently haven't met every white ex-hippy/deadhead/pink floyd megafan boomer dude i've met
this:

There's also a sense online that some people who are mainly interested in free speech - may have a reasoned, valuable commitment to it - sometimes 'swoop' into discussions merely to assert that free speech is more important than anything else and then swoop out again.

they do it, I just didn't originally get why he only zeroed in on liberals.

I once saw a Wikipedia argument on someone's talk page where he had content removed as it was original research (which he didn't deny), and he replied saying that he would file a lawsuit if it wasn't reinstated, as Wikipedia had violated his free speech, and he had won a similar case like this before.

can't find it anymore but wish I could, it was really funny.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116842/trigger-warnings-have-spread-blogs-college-classes-thats-bad

What began as a way of moderating Internet forums for the vulnerable and mentally ill now threatens to define public discussion both online and off. The trigger warning signals not only the growing precautionary approach to words and ideas in the university, but a wider cultural hypersensitivity to harm and a paranoia about giving offense. And yet, for all the debate about the warnings on campuses and on the Internet, few are grappling with the ramifications for society as a whole.

hard not to read this article as a combo WE AINT HURTIN NO ONE CMON and SHUTINS STAY HOME, but the framing does kind of suggest that the spread of trigger warnings mistakenly accepts the liberal scheme for the public management of wrongs/risks: class it as a harm, institute safeguards.

i don't know much about liberal theory. are there recognized classes of things that are proscribed because they might do harm, but it can't be known in advance whether they would in fact do so (thus the logic of a trigger warning, to issue a precaution to permit those who expect harm to exclude themselves)? (if pertaining to speech, would that just traditionally fall under 'decorum' and 'decency'?)

Weird thing to worry about in an age when there are fewer barriers to people viewing all different kinds of content than ever before. Everything is accessible at every moment; things like trigger warnings are just there to help people navigate life without having negative emotional responses forced on them. It has nothing to do with "free speech."

The trigger-warning-requiring "trauma" strikes me as a little bit like the gluten allergy -- a very real but not extremely common phenomenon that gets co-opted by attention seekers.

treezy the reason i put this in this thread (besides tnr lol) is that the framework seems to be the liberal framework, in which speech is traditionally one of the acts least thought to fall within the scope of the harm principle. since the rationale for trigger-warning seems to involve avoiding the inadvertent causing of harms (or maybe that's not the right description, which would matter?), it seems like it's worth asking what a more widespread use of trigger warnings implies about our conceptions/perceptions of ourselves and our speech. say, as harmful to ourselves, beyond our ability to control or to bear it, because of what has been done to us or what has happened to us. and of speech, the words of others, as a danger to our mundane capacity to play a part in the sphere of speech, to relate to others in public.

like, the more is classed under traumas of that sort, the conception becomes an appeal to liberalism's hatred of cruelty, because the triggerable person would be regarded as bearing persistently or permanently tender wounds which any sensitive responsible person would forbear to touch. but i'm not sure a practice of free and open discussion is compatible with that degree of wariness about speech as potentially cruel.

counterpoint

“People brutalise everything. They get up noisily, go about noisily all day, and go to bed noisily. And they constantly talk far too noisily. They are so taken up with themselves that they don’t notice the distress they constantly cause to others, to those who are sick. Everything they do, everything they say causes distress to people like us. And in this way they force anyone who is sick more and more into the background until he’s no longer noticed. And the sick person withdraws into his background. But every life, every existence, belongs to one person and one person only, and no one else has the right to force this life and this existence to one side, to force it out of the way, to force it out of existence. We’ll go by ourselves, as we have the right to do. That’s part of the natural course.”
— Thomas Bernhard — from Concrete

as harmful to ourselves, beyond our ability to control or to bear it,

I may not be following all the parts of your argument, but my response to this bit is, why does it have to be "unbearable" to be unacceptable? Can't people determine for themselves what level of pain or discomfort or aggravation they're prepared to accept at that moment? Trigger warnings are just to let those people know that they may, for their own mental and/or emotional health, want to exercise their right to that limit.

xp I think that last post gets at my point more.

you realize a trigger warning doesn't actually prevent anything from being said.

the more widespread use of trigger warnings implies that more people know what triggers and trigger warnings are and want to create welcoming environments for people who need them. it allows people to mentally prepare themselves if they need to, or bail altogether if they need to. i don't even have 'triggers' and i appreciate them for my own sake. if i were in a hypothetical class right now and i saw a PPT with the header "Trigger Warning: Suicide" i would bail. i'm not sure how any discussion benefits from me freaking out in the middle of a classroom. 15 million american adults share my disorder.

xp

Imo to reject the idea of triggers and trigger warnings as unnecessary or RUN AMOK or w/e is basically to say, "Regardless of who you or I am or what our relationship is, I claim the right to add to your pain today. Fuck you. Deal with it. Not my problem." And then you expect friendship or scholarship or obedience or agreement or anything from that person afterward?

i know it doesn't prevent the things from being said, but it effects a greater regimentation of speech that seems to parallel the contractualization of all human relations under late liberalism, which seems like maybe not the soundest tactic xp

I'm just not seeing a problem with that.

Maybe I don't know what "late liberalism" means? But I think framing it as an issue of "contractualization" and moreover of that being a BAD thing is loading the dice.

cool with putting the well-being of people with disabilities over the greater regimentation of speech that seems to parallel the contractualization of all human relations under late liberalism

well, i think the picture of self-culture in a liberal like mill is predicated on a certain degree of personal risk-taking in the pursuit of growth, and on a certain health of spirit (the kind he suffered a lack of during his depressive episode)

if you take bernhard's metaphor w/o worrying too much about the fit, and say ok, society is now such that so many more of us are just sick (in some sense, wounded, whatever), and no one has the right to force us to suffer any more than we already do, where in anticipation of the sort of harms under consideration here, we require ourselves to engage in this kind of more extensive regimentation of our public interaction, it seems like something that is not going to improve our health any—at best, maybe maintain our sickly condition without it worsening.

something very nietzsche's last man about that picture. xp

Dude. If one of my loved ones died alone and was eaten by their cats and now I'm traumatized when anyone talks about feeding their cats, that is not something one could reasonably predict might have that effect. But when we're referring to rape, assault, grief, disability, trauma, a whole lot of things that we all agree have a lasting harmful effect on people's well being, to protest having to observe some sensitivity about that is really, really lame. And defensive. Aaaaaaand...do those people not have anything worse than that in their lives to be offended about? Like, if having to limit your speech so as NOT TO HURT PEOPLE is the most you've ever been infringed on, you might want to get to, I dunno, go outside once in a while.

Also you might want to reconsider the fedora as a personal style choice.

well, i think the picture of self-culture in a liberal like mill is predicated on a certain degree of personal risk-taking in the pursuit of growth, and on a certain health of spirit (the kind he suffered a lack of during his depressive episode)

if you take bernhard's metaphor w/o worrying too much about the fit, and say ok, society is now such that so many more of us are just sick (in some sense, wounded, whatever), and no one has the right to force us to suffer any more than we already do, where in anticipation of the sort of harms under consideration here, we require ourselves to engage in this kind of more extensive regimentation of our public interaction, it seems like something that is not going to improve our health any—at best, maybe maintain our sickly condition without it worsening.

something very nietzsche's last man about that picture. xp

― j., Monday, March 10, 2014 12:30 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

how loudly do you allow yourself to fart in public

ok, this thread has taken a turn toward the ad hominem. let's clear out for the night and get some sleep. this thread will still be here in the morning.

it was a serious question

i want to

1. understand the liberal point of view from which there might be reasonable resistance to the increasingly broad practice of issuing trigger warnings outside of special, self-chosen contexts

2. ask whether fully taking over the liberal way of managing this issue (viz. add more safeguards, more opt-outs) is the best way of achieving the underlying goals. i am not sure, but i gather that many people to whom trigger warnings seem beneficial are also interested in changes to society that would make trigger warnings unnecessary. but adding another procedure to our interactions may be a more attractive way to 'solve' the problems without changing anything that causes them.

that's all. if you can't talk about that without getting abusive then i think you should ask yourself whether you are capable of having discussions about things at all.

it was literally a serious question i'm not kidding

what kinds of spaces need trigger warnings? presumably we don't need to slap one on the front page of the NYT bc you can reasonable expect that a newspaper will cover sometimes traumatic events and will only take care to give a trigger warning for particularly graphic images (like when they showed the death photos of saddam's sons). similarly other public spaces like tv/movies + radio already take precautions to only show certain content at certain times, to rate themselves, and even censor certain kinds of profanity (or even depravity - like jeffrey dahmer getting bleeped in 'Dark Horse'). so really we're just talking about internet spaces, and particularly places like blogs that might cover a range of content and only occasionally something trauma-related. if that's really the entire context of the 'trigger warning' convention it's really a very small bunch of ppl working out group ethics and not really anything srsly compromising free speech ethics imho.

mordy, the spaces contemplated in that article include classrooms, syllabi, etc.

Oberlin College has published an official document on triggers, advising faculty members to "be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression," to remove triggering material when it doesn't "directly" contribute to learning goals and "strongly consider" developing a policy to make "triggering material" optional. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, it states, is a novel that may "trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more." Warnings have been proposed even for books long considered suitable material for high-schoolers: Last month, a Rutgers University sophomore suggested that an alert for F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby say, "TW: suicide, domestic abuse and graphic violence."

Well yeah, this seems pretty silly. I had a chat w/ a lit. teacher at one of the local Orthodox Jewish orthodox in Philly about the kinds of books he was allowed to assign and any insinuation of sex, violence, etc was problematic + really restricted his ability to compose a syllabus. It's hard to imagine you could have a functional Lit department w/out teaching this kind of literature. Violence + trauma themselves are major motifs of contemporary humanities.

that's all. if you can't talk about that without getting abusive then i think you should ask yourself whether you are capable of having discussions about things at all.

― j., Monday, March 10, 2014 12:55 AM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and ok this wasn't like my point with the fart thing but do you not see maybe a teensy shred of irony here

how loudly do you allow yourself to fart in public

I do not ever purposely lend impetus to my farts when I am in a public place. I do not go to great lengths to suppress them, either. I let nature take its course with minimal interference, but under the right circumstances I will make a bit of effort to mitigate them.

This is a different situation from publically venting an opinion which may greatly offend and requires only a trivial act of will to suppress. Farts are not willed into being and even the most poisonous farts should generally be forgiven as being beyond human control.

There absolutely should be a debate about the use of trigger warnings in a college setting, especially re: literature. I can see a strong case for warning students about books which contain graphic scenes of rape or child abuse but it's unhealthy to not discuss where lines should be drawn.

To take Oberlin's TWs on Things Fall Apart as one example, it's meant to be an upsetting book. Any anti-racist novel you can think of might trigger a reader who has experienced racism but that's the point. I worry that to trail it with a long list of warnings will have the effect of putting some readers off.

I'll tell you, one book that coulda done with a trigger warning is Jude the Obscure; because sweet merciful christ, I did not see that shit coming at ALL

When Trigger Warnings become spoilers

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, it states, is a novel that may "trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more."

But surely anyone teaching Achebe would say in advance what it addresses rather than assigning it blind? I don't know, maybe these lists are useful for some teachers.

Trigger warnings are kind of the privileged person's substitute for thinking ahead of time that treating a difficult subject like...a hypothetical, like an abstraction, may be harmful to someone for whom it's not hypothetical. If people resist being encouraged to show this consideration, if they react badly and defensively when you bring it up, if they reduce a student's grade (or threaten to) if that student exercises their right to protect themselves...

Like, if you think this kind of thing is unnecessarily legalistic or w/e, fine, but...actual, literal laws about lots of things are necessary because people don't just naturally do what's good for each other (or their goods are contradictory or etc).

if they reduce a student's grade (or threaten to) if that student exercises their right to protect themselves

Is that's what's happening? Clearly that would be wrong.

That was part of the resolution being passed in the college case that motivated this shitty article. I also heard from someone that when the student in question approached the prof afterward, he or she was uncooperative about resolving the issue, which led to this official resolution. I've asked the person who said that for a source, not sure where they got that info.

Thanks. Following the links about that Santa Barbara case, it seems like a clear-cut case of where trigger warnings should have been used, especially as it was a film rather than a book.

“Two weeks ago, I sat in class watching a film screening and felt forced to watch two scenes in which the instance of sexual assault was insinuated and one in which an instance of rape was graphically depicted … there was no warning before this film screening … and it was incredibly difficult to sit through.”

If you didn't use the phrase TW but asked anyone if a teacher should warn students before screening a graphic rape scene I don't think there'd be much controversy. Although the article isn't about a single case it's bad form to start with that example.

To what extent should these protections extend? Do we determine what traumas should exempt you from engaging w/ particular material or should the student have the leeway to pick what he or she feels comfortable learning? For example, should someone who lost a family member to terrorism be allowed to opt out of any September 11th related literature? Should a veteran of the Iraq war be allowed to opt out of reading Civil War literature in an early American lit class? What about if you haven't experienced trauma directly but the material just makes you feel very uncomfortable? Should we let Christian fundamentalists opt out of learning about evolution in a biology course? Who is going to determine the validity of the objection?

I can't help but feel like colleges should let all applicants know that course material may upset students, and that part of education may include being confronted w/ information that can make you feel sad or hurt. If a student has a particular concern about their circumstances (like maybe they're a refugee from a war torn country) shouldn't the onus be on them to ascertain beforehand that a course won't be too debilitating to their psychology?

I'll tell you, one book that coulda done with a trigger warning is Jude the Obscure; because sweet merciful christ, I did not see that shit coming at ALL

the experience of reading this book without knowing what Hardy's going to do is one of the greatest, most horrible experiences you can have as a reader imo

in personal communication and online where you don't have the benefit of a course description/cover copy. etc, trigger warnings seem like a nice courtesy! in school they seem ridiculous to me, in my quest for knowledge I'm going to run across shit that fucks me up, the end, goes w/the territory. imo there's an easy right way to address this pedagogically i.e. the teacher says "so, we go over some pretty intense stuff in this class and if you have issues around that stuff, be advised, our themes here are" &c. alternately, when I was in college a very righteous professor taught a course on excess in art and every year the first thing he did on the first day of the semester was screen Pasolini's Salo

Yeah basically 'free speech' is a sham anyways, and using that to justify being a jerk is no better than saying "I was drunk". Let's have some personal responsibility. You are not 8. Maybe think about people other than yourself from time to time.

exactly (xp to mordy).

framed in the way DL/orbit mentioned it suggests that teachers are reacting punitively to the exercise of rights. but i would like to see what happened in the oberlin instance. i would expect it's far more likely that a student said, i won't do this thing, the content is triggering, and a teacher said, it's your grade, do the work or don't.

there is already a procedure in place for students who e.g. suffer ptsd: it is to seek a medical exemption and confer with instructors to make suitable arrangements for doing the coursework.

my understanding of the beginnings of 'trigger warning' discourse is that it had much more specifically to do with extreme or graphic content apt to provoke episodes from vulnerable readers. i.e. suffering past specific incidence of trauma in such a way that they fit the use of medical exemptions like the ones used already.

the references to triggers in the oberlin resolution seem so much broader as to have lost contact with the specific function of trigger warnings intended for e.g. ptsd sufferers.

http://new.oberlin.edu/office/equity-concerns/sexual-offense-resource-guide/prevention-support-education/support-resources-for-faculty.dot

Understand triggers, avoid unnecessary triggers, and provide trigger warnings.

A trigger is something that recalls a traumatic event to an individual. Reactions to triggers can take many different forms; individuals may feel any range of emotion during and after a trigger. Experiencing a trigger will almost always disrupt a student’s learning and may make some students feel unsafe in your classroom.

Triggers are not only relevant to sexual misconduct, but also to anything that might cause trauma. Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression. Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand.

this is obscurantist. a sort of immunological concept of recollection, and of whatever causes recollection, of trauma, is linked to a nonspecific range of negative emotion that is disruptive to learning—but it's clear enough how that relates to sexual violence and the trauma incurred from it.

but the last paragraph goes a lot further to import a vast range of assumptions into the already seemingly fluid concept of 'triggers'. what are the links between those sentences meant to be? whatever they are, it seems as if the intention is to legitimize a use of the concept of trigger that is broader than, let's call it, a medicalized use (i would include psychiatric usages there too). and that's a big part of my uncertainty about this, as a strategy (since it is clearly part of a shift in social justice strategy as well as in the preferred techniques for self-care being taken up and defended by people whose personal projects may or may not be that invested in social justice work). if nearly anything, whether concerned or indifferent, related to our violent cultural legacy is being re-conceived according to an immunological conception of people's emotional health in connection with any and all of their encounters with that culture, but the clinical basis for treating some cases of emotional disorder separately (because their etiology is due to incidence of some specific trauma) is minimized to such an extent that anything anyone says is triggering for them is triggering, how could that not have consequences that are worth asking about?

i don't really appreciate the 'if you resist, you are bad' implication. i think it's obviously possible to show concern for personal well-being and for systemic ills while disagreeing with this specific innovation in the practice of doing so.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/178725/feminists-talk-trigger-warnings-round

Did anyone bring up the Wellesley sculpture incident yet? That was the first thing that made me take a second look at the concept of trigger warnings and think, whoa. Interested in hearing in orbit's thoughts on that issue .

boomingest post j.

i missed this the first time around! i agree that it's a thing, "creepy liberalism," if that's what we're calling it

i don't know this writer:

But every life, every existence, belongs to one person and one person only, and no one else has the right to force this life and this existence to one side, to force it out of the way, to force it out of existence. We’ll go by ourselves, as we have the right to do. That’s part of the natural course.”
— Thomas Bernhard — from Concrete

my education is drifting back to me in dim waves atp but it seems a little... noteworthy to have an extended conversation about suffering and its place in public life in a totally non-christian way. is it fair to call trigger warnings regimented compassion?

The Oberlin website is what made me uneasy about this whole thing - when I read "Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism" I thought good luck studying literature then. I think TWs should be used as sparingly as possible. In the Santa Barbara case a rape survivor would have every reason to be pissed off with having a filmed rape scene sprung on her without warning, although I'd rather that was addressed with the teacher in question, who failed to exercise basic consideration for his/her students, rather than tackled with blanket application of TWs.

This piece that Valenti linked to is a good take on it and the idea of the "student-customer".

http://tressiemc.com/2014/03/05/the-trigger-warned-syllabus/