Freedom from Speech (Encounter Broadside Book 39)

by Greg Lukianoff

people all over the globe are coming to expect emotional and intellectual comfort as though it were a right. This is precisely what you would expect when you train a generation to believe that they have a right not to be offended. Eventually, they stop demanding freedom of speech and start demanding freedom from speech.

The social science of what happens when like-minded people talk only among themselves is quite striking: those who are broken up into groups with similar beliefs tend to become more extreme in their opinions and less able to understand the views of those who disagree with them.

placing a premium on intellectual comfort is at odds with the three great pillars of the modern world that Jonathan Rauch discussed in his 1993 masterpiece Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. These pillars are democracy (how we determine who gets to wield legitimate state power), capitalism (how we determine the allocation of wealth), and the intellectual system that Rauch dubbed liberal science (how we determine what is true).

Rather than teaching students to be skeptical of confirmation bias, we appear to be teaching them to have an expectation of confirmation: a sense of entitlement to an environment in which their beliefs are not contradicted (at least not too harshly).

she placed greater value on the emotional comfort of those with whom she identified than on the physical security of the women she assaulted.

An unfortunate truth of human nature is that if we are given a cudgel that may be wielded against people and views we oppose, some of us will gladly swing it. I can say with near 100 percent confidence that students and even other faculty members will use trigger rationales to silence voices on campus that they merely dislike.

Alleging that someone is insensitive to the emotional state of victims is a powerful and effective shortcut to taking the moral high ground in contemporary debate.

To those who value intellectual freedom, however, trigger warnings are yet another manifestation of the attitude that society must protect every individual from emotionally difficult speech.

When students take advantage of a psychological term developed to help those traumatized in the ghastly trenches of World War I justify being protected from The Great Gatsby, sleepwalker statues, and, as the Oberlin policy specified, Chinua Achebe, it becomes clear that there is virtually no limit to the demands that will be made if we universalize an expectation of intellectual comfort.

“since triggers are a contagious phenomenon, there will never be enough trigger warnings to keep up with them.”