We must learn to confront disagreeable ideas

Yes, words can cause pain and distress but safe spaces and censorship will not build resilience

Photo by Shelagh Murphy on Unsplash

A decade ago, ‘safe spaces’ began appearing on American college campuses. Initially rough-and-ready places set aside for students from minority groups, they rapidly morphed into rooms bedecked with bean bags, cookies and colouring books for use by anyone in distress. When speakers such as feminist Christina Hoff Sommers or social scientist Charles Murray were booked to speak, the safe space became a way for students to retreat from confronting ideas they found distasteful while simultaneously registering their protest. The psychological harm they claimed to experience became weaponised in calls for censorship.

Fast forward 10-years and the ‘safe space’ has not just migrated across the Atlantic, it has long grown out of a single room. The cancelling of academic Alka Sehgal Cuthbert from the Rethinking Education conference last weekend, in order to ensure the ‘psychological safety’ of other participants, shows us that protection from mental distress is now a general expectation. Writing in 2014, director of the US-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Greg Lukianoff, wrote that students wanted not free speech, but freedom from speech. The same, it seems, is now true of education professionals.

I have shared platforms with Sehgal Cuthbert at various conferences and events stretching back over many years. Her contributions are always more intelligent and carefully considered than mine. So how have we reached a point where a scholarly, middle-aged woman is thought to pose such a risk to the mental well-being of her fellow-panellists that she is pulled from a public debate? 

Several ideas have grown in parallel. First, is the notion that words can harm. Back in the early 1970s, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu began employing the term ‘symbolic violence’ to refer to cultural practices that reinforced the power of a social elite. A 1993 book, Words That Wound, made clear the physical and psychological impact of being confronted with racist language, with one contributor going so far as to decry ‘spirit murder’.

Words can indeed trigger physical responses in readers or listeners as they terrify, delight or anger. But, as I once quipped while giving a lecture on my 2016 book Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity, only people who have never been in a fight can literally equate words with violence. The audible gasps revealed my audience’s disagreement.

Feeling threatened by words once meant being subjected to a personal, targetted attack. Now, as the cancelling of Sehgal Cuthbert illustrates, it means being in the vicinity of someone who holds different opinions. This shift echoes our growing sensitivity to mental health concerns. Whereas some degree of mental robustness was once considered to be the norm, this is no longer the case.

Each year, statistics suggest ever-greater numbers of young people are struggling with their mental health. The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service reports an astonishing 450 per cent increase in student mental health declarations between 2011 and 2021. A 2022 survey conducted by the mental health charity Student Minds claims that 57 per cent of respondents self-reported a mental health issue while 27 per cent said they had a diagnosed mental health condition.

It is commonly assumed that more students divulge mental health concerns because they no longer perceive there is a stigma in doing so. However, an alternative explanation is that mental health concerns have broadened to encompass emotional states that would not previously have been considered a medical problem. When people are assumed to be not resilient, but vulnerable and fragile, then ensuring psychological safety becomes an institution’s preeminent goal.    

In her new book Left Is Not Woke, the philosopher Susan Neiman points to the impact of this changed perception of personhood. From the mid-twentieth century, ‘the subject of history was no longer the hero but the victim,’ she writes. Furthermore, ‘what was recently a stigma has become a source of standing.’ Expressions of vulnerability, once shrouded in shame, are now worn with pride. Neiman links this shift to the rise of identity politics. Members of historically under-represented groups are granted a seat at the table but only if they brandish their victimhood and meekly accept others claiming offence on their behalf.

This brings us to the reason Sehgal Cuthbert was deemed too risky to speak. Alka is the director of Don’t Divide Us, a group that campaigns against both racism and the divisions sown by identity politics. It is, for example, critical of school anti-racist workshops that racialise children before imparting messages about white superiority and black oppression. 

The ‘colour blind’ approach promoted by Don’t Divide Us was once considered progressive. More recently, it was considered a legitimate alternative to critical race theory. Now, it is deemed a threat to campaigners who promote a different message. It took just seven complaints to have Sehgal Cuthbert stopped from speaking about indoctrination within education. Removing the only woman of colour from a panel reveals the shallowness of our obsession with diversity. All too often, a mix of genders and ethnicities masks political and intellectual conformity.

Words can indeed cause pain and distress but, in an updated form of the heckler’s veto, the demand for psychological safety has become a means of silencing debate. Privileging safety over free speech means we cower from disagreeable ideas rather than confronting them. Yet it is only through taking risks and engaging in dialogue that we can exercise our moral muscles, test our own arguments, challenge bad ideas and - just maybe - change our minds.

Originally published in The Times: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/4bce1302-5bc1-11ee-a0fe-c89e2badddf3?shareToken=110e2b7a731708d4869f115668b2df90