Of Maurizio Blondet
Source: Maurizio Blondet
If you go to New York and someone tells you “You speak English very well”, how do you take it? For a compliment. Instead at Irvin University and the other nine universities in California and many other campuses, it's a "micro-aggression". Why, according to the students who banned the expression, suggests that “you are not a real American”. So you must absolutely avoid it, so as not to feel bad – who, the interlocutor? – no, the students themselves. The students made a list of expressions that sound discriminatory to them and, therefore, they make them feel bad. Talking about America like “melting pot” it's a micro-aggression against people who don't want to assimilate and blend into American culture. Saying that America is “the land of opportunity” is a micro-aggression to the people affected by racism, sexism or (god forbid) “homophobia” hinders success.
Last April, below Brandeis University, an association of American students with almond-shaped eyes posted a poster in the hall with a list of phrases that they considered microaggressions. It went from the sentence: “You are good at math” until: ”I am colorblind! I don't see racial differences!”. The trouble is that other students, also Americans of Asian origin, they felt the poster itself was a microaggression against them, and the president of the association had to write a letter of apology to those who had felt "hurt by the microaggression".
At Harvard Law School students – law! – they asked the professors not to use the word “violate” (not just sexually, but also in “breaking the law”) because it makes them feel bad: he wrote it on the New Yorker a law professor, Jeannie Suk (Asian-American, but don't point it out). Sociologist Laura Kipnis of Northwestern University , for writing an essay on "Unwelcome advances – the sexual paranoia prevalent on campuses”, was subjected to investigation by her students, who tried to get her fired.
Already in 2007, Student groups tried to get Keith John Sampson fired, a colleague (student-worker,he was also a doorman at Purdue University, Indiana) because he read the book publicly”Notre Dame vs the Klan : How the Fighting Irish sconfisse il Ku Klux Klan“. It's a book against he KKK, which recalls how the sect was fought in 1924 by the Irish Catholic inhabitants of Notre Dame: but the cover on which the hooded men appeared was enough, the accusers said, to make them feel bad. Sampson was convicted of "racial harassment" by the Affirmative Action office of the same university; he avoided being fired only because the press and the American Civil Liberties Union were interested in his case, and the university ended up dropping the accusation. But the union advised him not to read books with certain covers in public, “It's like bringing pornography to school”
https://nypost.com/2008/05/09/my-racial-harassment-nightmare/
(Just the cover)
They justify the censorship with medical reasons
This is how “I am a progressive professor is justified, and I'm terrified of my students progressives", which an anonymous teacher wrote explaining – under a pseudonym – how much caution he must teach, so as not to trigger reprisals from the students "hurt and offended" by any one of his sentences. Professors are advised to precede their lessons with “trigger warnings”, messages (verbal or even written) in which they warn that some of the things they say could be “triggering” , that is, triggering strong and negative emotions in certain students based on their previous traumatic experience".
Groups of students have reported texts such as L. as "triggering discomfort".and Metamorphoses of Ovid (sexual violence), The Mrs Dalloway's Virginia Woolf (for “suicidal inclinations”), Il Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald for being discriminatory and offensive to women.
At this point, a large portion of American and classical literature falls under censorship and should not be read aloud. Obviously, also the Genesis , “male and female God created them” becomes impossible to teach, because it is aggressive towards the multifaceted LGBT tribes.
These are some of the cases described by Gregg Lukianoff in his essay “ The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure” ( “Pampering the American mind- How good intentions and bad ideas are raising a generation for failure).
Lukianoff, who is a militant lawyer for the defense of freedom of expression (First Amendment), warns you of a worsening censorship situation on campuses. “Prima, it was the university administrations that instructed professors not to use words that might sound like discrimination (racial or sexual). But from 2013-14, out of the blue, it is the students who impose the new verbal codes, “trigger warning” policies, the lists of “microaggressions” – and worse, to demand the cancellation of public meetings, organized by universities, with lecturers they don't like, because they “make them feel bad”.
In fact, the main character of this new student censorship is his “medicalization”. Students demanding censorship of ideas,literary texts and people, they don't do it by motivating themselves to be against those ideas, philosophies and people. No, they say they are hurt by it, in a medical and psychological sense. Which aggravates their anxiety and depression, which harms their mental health.
In this way, they don't argue; they just forbid. “The ultimate goal”, says Lukianoff, “appears to be to transform university campuses into “safe spaces” (safe spaces) where these young adults are protected from words and ideas that make them uncomfortable. To the point of punishing anyone who disturbs this purpose, even accidentally: something I called “vengeful projectivity”. It creates a culture where one has to think twice before speaking, to avoid accusations of insensitivity,racism, aggression, annoyance or ppeggio”.
Imagine how much this “culture” helps academic freedom. Obviously, from a psychotherapeutic point of view, this extreme care to avoid what "disturbs" does not strengthen their character, nor does it make them healthier. Not at all.
“Between 2009 and the 2015, the demand for psychiatric emergency visits has increased five times faster than the number of registrations. A recent study reported that in 2017, among young adults in general, depression has increased significantly in the last three years, and that in the solo 2017 the percentage of young people who had serious suicidal ideation went from 6,8 percent of 2008 al 10,5%.
Censorship makes the lives of many students an Orwellian hell. Il 30 percent of them confessed to being afraid to express themselves in class because their expressions risked being considered offensive; il 29% he is afraid to express himself outside of class, in free conversations on campus, because others might find their ideas politically incorrect – and this leads to the punitive isolation of the individual by the group, his transformation into a pariah who is shunned, to whom words are not addressed, not invited to parties etc. More or less this also happens to professors. “That people are afraid to chat in the university canteen or in the dormitories is particularly alarming, because university is supposed to be the field where we learn from each other”.
It's a "cultural revolution", but unlike the one that exploded in '68 in the same universities of California with the cry of "do not forbid" and sexual freedom and taking drugs. This revolution freezes and oppresses in the name of conformism, assumed as a necessary medical condition. “The aspiration to the universal that drove those movements has been replaced by tribal thinking: everyone is within their group (ethnic or sexual preference) as in the tribe that makes him feel good. Towards everyone else, the attitude is: “You don't understand but my experience and feelings, cause you ain't like me nigga, homosexual, lesbian, vegan... so I won't even listen to you". The result is the new segregation between groups that become estranged and experience each other as hostile and incommunicable.
What can I say? First of all, it is a "class" phenomenon., where these daddy's boys wrap themselves in their protective shell from reality in a society where, Instead, poor peers have the best opportunity to enlist in the endless wars, face the harshest reality of blood and ambushes, terror and murders – and then end, veterans suffering from real post-traumatic syndromes, much more real than those accused by snowflakes, like homeless despised and abandoned, kicked out of uptown because they do their business on the sidewalk like in San Francisco. Or it is ironic that phrases that are harmless to most are perceived as "aggressions" by people who charge them with their own malicious intentions: they are precisely the privileged rich, when they tell you, “you speak English well”, those who mentally add “…for being a Mexican and an inferior”.
But it is more urgent to underline the paradox: this oppression that young people exercise on campuses on their peers and on professors, it is the paradoxical result of anti-authoritarian ideology: the one that denies the hierarchy between teacher and disciples, rejects all discipline and severity, and in fact invites children to self-educate, to establish their own order, outside the adult world. In a world without social pressure coming from religion as well as common morality, the result is this: that young people left to their own devices establish a cold dictatorship, a steely censorious totalitarianism.
When adults erase themselves
It doesn't just happen in America, nor uptown. Sunday night 14 a little boy of 13 five years old was killed with iron bars by five peers in Seine Saint-Denis, a suburb on the outskirts of Paris; other murders occurred in fights between neighborhood gangs, increasingly youthful. It is that "seriously degraded" situation that Gerard Collombe denounced, Macron's interior minister, before resigning. The ministry counted at least ninety gangs of ferocious minors, that neither the policemen nor the judges (who absolve them) they can contain, much less the teachers and imams in the Arab neighborhoods.
It is the result of something that the journalist-sociologist Luc Bronner, deficine “the cancel of adults” in the French “ghettos”.. In the families of those criminal kids, the father, when it exists, he is unemployed or an alcoholic, for children he is an unsuccessful failure and therefore has nothing to teach. From here"an overthrow of hierarchies” for which “counter-societies were established at the gates of the république, with their hierarchies, their laws, their social relationships, their own values. And a form of teenage dominationprobably unpublished in France as in Europe". As a remedy, the journalist believes it is necessary "restoration a generational order” – the hierarchy of adults responsible for their children, which is easier said than done in a society that has destroyed and mocked, therefore delegitimized, every authority.
After all, William Golding had already seen it all, in his novel "The Lord of the Fliesand” for which he won the Nobel. The story of upper-class British children who escaped an atomic massacre, who create their own society on a desert island: with its own totalitarian hierarchy, its oppressive dictator, divided into tribes, with tribal obsessions for a "Beast" that hides somewhere - and end up adopting a rotting pig's head as a totem - to honor "The Lord of the Flies", one of the Babylonian names of the Evil One . Because man is inclined to evil…
Assistant priests in juvenile prisons report young criminals who have no idea that they have done wrong, indeed no idea of good or evil. They are also young people who have self-educated themselves, in their own way, having no hierarchies to obey and learn from? On Sunday morning in Milan the center was occupied by a race : called by Radio Deejay (a pop music only radio) tens of thousands of Milanese ran. As I watched them pass , in a very dense file , all with their same color t-shirt, the currency,I asked myself: how come people when they feel free, and he can do whatever he wants, he wants to do what everyone else is doing?
People use the much vaunted freedom as an achievement, to “conform”. Conformity is people's normal way of being; and all it takes is an appeal from a pop radio that gives a task and a goal, and here they come by the thousands.
He wrote the diagnosis – I know, my ripeto – Ortega y Gasset: in a Europe where there are no longer "principles that oblige us to live in a certain way, our life remains exposed to pure temporariness. This is the horrible intimate situation in which the best youth in the world now find themselves. In feeling purely free, free from commitments, she feels empty. A life without commitments is more negative than death. Because living means having something specific to do - it is equivalent to carrying out a task - and to the extent that we avoid submitting our existence to a task, let's make our life worthless".
This is because, he wrote, Europe “no one is in charge anymore. Commanding means assigning a task to people, put them on the path to their destiny,on their hinge – prevent their dissipation”. It was the 1930. How far along we are in life without commitments, judge for yourself.
