In last week's episode, we talked
about the pros and cons of trigger warnings
in college classrooms.
Let's see what you had to say.
First things first, a small bit of not comment-related news.
Idea Channel finally has a t-shirt,
if you can-- this t-shirt, if you can see.
Thank you, Morgan.
Um, if you-- I mean, like, a T-shirt
design that you could buy.
You can buy Idea Channel t-shirts, not this t-shirt.
Your own.
Oh.
It was designed by my friend, Andrea,
who is an awesome and talented Illustrator.
We'll the links to her work and the dftba.com
store, where you can purchase this in the doobly-doo.
We have a couple other things on the way right now.
This is the one thing that we have.
Again, not just this single one, this single design.
I gotta get off this boat.
If you would like your very own Idea Channel t-shirt,
you can find a link to the dftba.com
store in the doobly-doo.
Get them while supplies last.
Pretty sure we can print basically
an infinite number of these.
So get them because you like us and enjoy the t-shirt.
This has been me asking you to buy our shirt.
[LAUGHTER]
Hey, so OK.
First bit of actual comment-related news.
Thank you to everyone who had such a great and a reasoned
and reasonable and respectful conversation on both
the subreddit and on YouTube for this video last week.
There was a fair amount of tension, I think.
And they're, you know, the things-- things get heated
and people get upset and say things that aren't the nicest.
But I think that the level of conversation
we reached surrounding this topic
was altogether actually really, really good, especially
on the subreddit.
The conversation that happened around this video
on the subreddit was so, so, so good.
So I just want to say-- not that you, like, need my approval
or anything.
But, man, I just want to say thank you.
And it was great to witness and to be involved in.
So I just want to put that right up front after asking
you to buy our t-shirt.
[SIGHS]
Rathdrgnknight raised a really great point
that a lot of other people sort of touched on, which
is this worry that it seems like a good number of the people who
are requesting trigger warnings or who are upset when they are
not present are not, in fact, people
who suffer from anxiety or PTSD or depression, et cetera.
And I think that there are a couple different ways
to look at this.
The first is that I don't think you necessarily need
to be someone who suffers from anxiety
or PTSD in order to advocate for those people who do.
I don't think that you need to be a sufferer of any illness
or disease or sickness in order to advocate for people
who do experience that thing.
And that-- you know, it's nice when
there is a support network around people
who suffer in the way that some people might.
But second, I think there's also a necessary amount of nuance
that is lacking in certain parts of this conversation.
And the nature of that nuance is a strong understanding
of what kinds of things tend to cause problems
for people who have anxiety or PTSD as opposed to a-- you
know, like that fictional construct of millennials
that I talked about in the episode of someone who's just
offended at everything, because that person,
you know-- I think that person really is a caricature.
And I think that having a conversation
about the kinds of things that we should reasonably
expect people might be upset with will clear
the air a lot of this kind of PC bogeymen of, like, oh, you
just-- you can't say anything, because I think,
when you talk with people who actually suffer
from these things, they're not going
to say to you that you-- that, like, you just-- you
can't talk.
It's just-- it's just being cognizant
of the very particular situations and subjects
where trouble is caused.
And I think that those things are fair and easy to avoid.
Matthew Hartman, boss1000, and a couple other people
pointed out that they might actually not
have any problem with the idea of trigger warnings,
as long as they are called "content
warnings," that the actual title of "trigger warning"
is itself something that has taken on lots
and lots of extra meaning.
And there was a really great conversation
about this in the subreddit as well,
which I would encourage you to check out.
I could really go either way on this.
But I think it's an interesting response to the whole thing.
M. Avery makes a really, really great comment of this idea
that I wish that I had gotten to in the episode, which
is a difference, an important distinction
between moral and psychological discomfort,
that we can expect college to put people in situations where
they experience all kinds of moral discomfort;
that we're looking at things in the world,
and they are affecting the way that we
think the world works, that we think the world should be.
But that that is not necessarily exactly
the same as psychological discomfort,
which is a thing that can and should
be avoided for the sake of interacting
with and interrogating moral discomfort.
CB Droege, a literature professor,
also wrote an amazing comment that I would not only encourage
but almost insist that you read.
This is especially great because it touches on something
that we only had time to discuss very, very briefly
in the episode, which is how colleges are responding
to this situation and that their response is sort of influencing
the conversation in a way that tends to be
unhelpful for almost everybody.
And CB Droege goes into great detail
on this, talks about how it's not necessarily the problem--
a problem with the students, but it is a problem with colleges
as institutions and how they treat both the student
body and their instructor.
So yeah, great comment.
Thank you for writing it.
Highly recommend it.
William May has a really interesting point of view
as fart as trigger warnings are concerned.
Sort of likens them to spoiler alerts,
that if you are letting your students
know ahead of time that there's difficult stuff in, say,
the books that they're reading, then
you are in some way ruining their natural response
to that stuff.
And that natural response is necessary for interacting
with novels, with literature in the way that college
students would.
And I don't necessarily know that I agree with this.
I can totally see this point of view.
But I think that what it does is it turns the way that you
interact with media or culture in college into entertainment,
which I don't think it is and I don't
think it's supposed to be.
That we want our entertainment to be unspoiled so that, when
it happens, we have that natural response.
But what you do in college is not entertainment.
It's, you know, critical inquiry.
It is sort of intellectual consideration.
And so from that perspective, I would
say that it is almost better not just to provide trigger
warnings but to talk with the class upfront about everything
that happens in a work so that they can see
as closely as possible how all of the sort of contingent parts
that create the complex of the work that they're looking
add up and function throughout the course of the story
and that trigger warnings as a spoiler sort of
indicates that we're here to be entertained,
not here to look at something as closely as possible.
I don't know.
That's-- that's my perspective, I guess.
I just-- I can't help but think about ninth grade
in my English class, where the teacher before we
would watch a movie, she would write out on the whiteboard
every single thing that would happen in the movie.
She would write down all the plot points.
She would write about the way-- we would talk about the way
that the cinematography was going to change,
the way that the editing would change.
And I just-- I remember thinking,
as a kid, that she was ruining movie day,
because I just wanted to watch a movie,
like a ninth grader does.
You just want to watch the movie.
You want to not think.
You want it to not be class.
And what she was doing is she was turning
watching the movie into work.
And that-- I mean, it worked.
It absolutely worked, because there was no way
for me to sit there and not interact with the thing
that I was watching, given the framework
that she had built the day before,
and that I was forced to look at all of these different parts
moving and changing and having a relationship to one another,
as opposed to just having them sort of glossed over
in front of my eyes.
And for a couple movies that we watched, she did absolutely--
she was like, and just so you know, like, there's-- you know,
there's going to be some naked people.
And you're just going to have to deal with that.
And I expect all of you to be, you know,
to be adults about it.
So, you know, not-- she didn't call it a trigger warning.
But it was essentially a content warning.
And I just-- I think it was so effective.
I just thought it was very effective.
I don't know.
Tarvis_ on a subreddit asks a really good question about safe
spaces, which is a thing that we didn't talk about in this video
at all and actually something that I don't have a lot
of expertise in.
I have almost no experience with them
and actually didn't know a whole lot about them
before the middle of last week.
And from what I understand, it seems
like the problem that is perceived with safe spaces
is roughly the same as the problem that
is perceived with trigger warnings--
that it's people attempting to avoid interacting with ideas
that they find offensive or difficult
or counter to their held beliefs.
At its base level, I don't necessarily
see a problem with this, that if someone needs a place
to go to work through their own beliefs
or talk to other people who also share
their beliefs without having to just constantly defend them
from counterarguments, sure.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like we all need
that in some form or another pretty frequently.
The fear, of course, seems to be much like the fear with trigger
warnings-- that people use safe spaces to completely
and totally avoid any kind of opinion or idea
or content or information that acts counter to their beliefs.
And again, like trigger warnings,
I would be surprised if the use of a safe space
equates completely and totally and 100% isomorphically
with the, like, total avoidance of all things
that you disagree with.
It doesn't seem that way.
But again, like I said, I don't know much about safe spaces.
So I would be curious to know from you
what you have to say about this whole question
as it relates to the things that we talked about
in last week's video.
Neeneko writes a really great comment
about how the apples of the trigger warning discussion
is really this idea that there are a certain class
or group of people who are allowed to be offended
by things, because it has sort of been determined
by the majority that the things that they find offensive
are normal or OK to be offended by and that,
when there is another group of people--
generally a smaller group of people-- who are offended
by different things and particularly if they
are offended by things that that first large group do or say,
that it turns into a conversation about what's
OK or right to be offended by.
And I thind that that this is a really, really insightful
comment.
Lots of really good ideas packed into a small amount of text
and is something that I am going to be thinking about a lot.
So thank you for this comment and for sort
of placing this in my brain.
This is, I think, a very interesting and big idea.
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