House of Eratosthenes

Video footage of Yale students losing the plot over a faculty head and his wife, who said everyone should calm down about Halloween, has caused much head-shaking in liberal circles. And it isn’t hard to see why. The head’s crime was that his wife sent an email suggesting academics and students should chill out about ‘culturally insensitive’ Halloween costumes. It’s okay, the email said, to be a ‘little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive’ on this one day. For his wife issuing this mildest of rebukes to over-sensitive over-18s, the head was accosted by a mob of students insisting the email made them feel unsafe. When he told the crowd that he thinks university is about providing education, not a ‘safe home’, they screamed at him to ‘step down!’. ‘Who the fuck hired you?!’, the most unhinged of the students cries.

It’s unnerving, odd, a terrifying snapshot of the new intolerance. We could see the culture of ‘You can’t say that!’ in all its swirling, borderline violent ugliness. It wasn’t a whispered or implied ‘You can’t say that!’, of the kind we see all the time in 21st-century public life, in response to people who criticise gay marriage, say, or doubt climate change. No, this was an explicitly stated ‘You can’t fucking say that, and if you do we’ll demand that you be sacked!’ That it was stated at Yale, and in response to a bloody email about Halloween, has added to the hand-wringing among liberals, who want to know what’s gone wrong with the new generation.

Okay, fine. It is indeed interesting, and worrying, that students are so sensitive and censorious today. But I have a question for the hand-wringers, the media people, academics and liberal thinkers who are so disturbed by what they’re calling the ‘Yale snowflakes’: what did you think would happen? When you watched, or even presided over, the creation over the past 40 years of a vast system of laws and speech codes to punish insulting or damaging words, and the construction of a vast machine of therapeutic intervention into everyday life, what did you think the end result would be? A generation that was liberal and tough? Come off it. It’s those trends, those longstanding trends of censorship and therapy, that created today’s creepy campus intolerance; it’s you who made these monsters.

I think it’s even worse than that, though. The prior generation is not acting just as an enabler of this sort of behavior; it has been a forerunner. The ramifications of this are heavy, in that they would mean this whole lunacy is inter-generational, it didn’t just start this year because it’s never really stopped.

I’ve also noticed something about it: It’s theater. Correcting whatever caused the offense is not nearly as important as manifesting that the offense took place. Also, the drama that ensues has a lot of value nobody ever seems to discuss, as a diversionary tactic; the expression of offense alters the outcome.

The perpetually offended, therefore, have a loathing against whatever conclusion would most likely have been produced, had the discussion not been interrupted. It’s not just an isolated defensive outburst against “offense,” it’s a whole way of life. Down in Missouri, that Melissa Click woman who called for “muscle” to block that reporter from covering a protest — I’m still having trouble with the concept of a protest that isn’t supposed to be seen — just did it again, citing “death threats” as the reason for canceling her class as she deals with the ensuing troubles. Death threats, yes it’s always death threats…

Pussy Losing the argument? Stir the pot a bit. Death threats, not feeling good, sprained ankle, being offended. These are people who start arguments, and figure they ought to be the ones to finish them. If ever it doesn’t go that way, they reach for a sort of “ejection seat lever” and there’s your real cause of offense. That’s why we’re seeing so much of this. It isn’t an ever-evolving society reaching new heights of sophistication and learning that certain things should be taboo, and it isn’t even (completely) a thing with thinning skin, upon those who are getting offended. It’s a tactic. A tactic used by those who just want to skip ahead to the fun part, where they win the argument, without slogging through that boring thing that involves some actual arguing.

Viewing it through that lens, we see this embiggens the ramifications involved somewhat. Quite a bit, actually. These are not isolated incidents at Yale and Mizzou. Like Rush Limbaugh said, “It’s only getting started here, folks.” Even that isn’t completely right, “it” isn’t just getting started.

These are people, being groomed to run the world of tomorrow, to make all of the Big Decisions That Really Matter within our society of the near future — being taught how to start arguments and not to, in any civil way, finish them. Now think of that. That’s really not much different than teaching a whole generation of passenger airplane pilots how to take off, but not how to land. Tomorrow’s executives, professors, politicians and other authority figures are being taught how to hit the emergency-eject button when they figure out they’re losing the argument, so they can get their way even when they find out in mid-course that they’re wrong. Taught that, by the precious snowflakes of yesteryear, who were taught precisely the same thing, and have been getting offended constantly since then — and have taken over academe.

The point is, nothing significant just happened, except that we’ve been forced to give a greater share of our attention to something that’s been happening already, for a long time. When we bring it to a stop, that’s when life starts getting better for everybody.

Well, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that they want to “start an argument and not finish it”. They want to start an argument and immediately be declared the winner the second they open their mouths. It’s not that they want to learn how to take off but not how to land. It’s that they want to sit in the pilot’s seat, start the engines, and then declare that they have arrived at their destination without ever having actually moved. Then they want all the passengers to get off the plane and believe that they are at their destination, and act as if they were at their destination.
- saneperson | 11/13/2015 @ 10:46
Who made these monsters?
Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Anything ELSE?
- CaptDMO | 11/13/2015 @ 12:30
“Correcting whatever caused the offense is not nearly as important as manifesting that the offense took place.”
SEE: The Taming of the Shrew.
- CaptDMO | 11/13/2015 @ 12:32
There are lots of big sophisticated intellectual answers to that question, but there’s also an overlooked prosaic one: Whoever invented the classroom feedback survey.

College professors are all “graded” by their students at the end of every semester. And since one of the keys to getting tenure is “teaching performance,” profs have every incentive to make sure their teaching evals are glowing…. which, in practice, means giving As on every assignment and not bothering the poor little dears with things like challenging ideas.

Take a look at a site like RateMyProfessors.com for the kind of thing I mean. The “reviews” are ludicrous, and the rating system at that particular site even includes a “hotness” rating…. you know, because if you must sit through some boring-ass class in order to get your A, you might as well gaze upon whatever passes for eye candy in the ivory tower while you do it.

Given that, is it any wonder that they think screeching about their pwecious widdle feewings is learning?
- Severian | 11/13/2015 @ 17:30
Severian’s example regarding RateMyProferssors is pretty illustrative. It makes me wonder how many of today’s “snowflakes” would be willing to speak out on what they believe, if they didn’t have the anonymity of the internet nor the numbers of the latest group of “protesters” to hide behind.

If the professors got together and started a RateMyStudents site, which could be accessed by potential employers, I bet protests of “character assassination” would be rampant. Then, of course, the “Liberals” would all call even more loudly for forgiveness of student debt, since it wouldn’t be “their fault” that nobody would give them a job with a six-figure salary
- IcelandSpar | 11/15/2015 @ 07:39
[…] House of Eratosthenes features Generation Butthurt. And congrats on 11 years of blogging! […]
- Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup » Pirate's Cove | 11/15/2015 @ 07:40

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“Who Made These Monsters?”Thursday, November 12th, 2015

“Who Made These Monsters?”
Thursday, November 12th, 2015