the times | Monday April 4 2022 25
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Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826The craze for trigger warnings is insulting
Nadhim Zahawi is right: toughening the mind and our emotions is not an optional skill but one we all need to develop
maybe remembers), even young
children are tougher than that. The
other absurdity is a ridiculously
literal interpretation of what might
distress people. Of course, loud bangs
can shock someone who has been
shelled, so gunshot warnings are
reasonable. But emotional distress
and memory are just as likely to be
caused by a tune, a smell, a facial
expression, a joke or a stranger’s
resemblance to someone who once
hurt you. Thus a jolly sitcom can
make you wince after a family row, or
a tap-dance finale renew your
bitterness about an injury.
More importantly, whether in fact
or fiction, there is often something
sustaining in contemplating and
pitying a parallel suffering. I once
spent an unforgettable evening at a
conference of The Compassionate
Friends, where everyone wore as a
badge the name of a child they lost
— through illness, accident, murder,
suicide. Grieving strangers bonded in
memory, empathy and tribute:
fellowship shimmered in the air. Art,
performance, literature and study of
others’ suffering can do this too, and
presuming we are flinching cowards
is insulting. The most useful warning
is that toughening your mind and
emotions is not an optional skill.
Without it you will never be able to
engage intelligently even with the
daily news, let alone the world’s art,
philosophy and beauty.lectures. Any mention of sexual
abuse, racism, self-harm, violence,
eating disorders, homophobia,
disability or bereavement is subject
to this anxiety. Archaeology students
at the University of Stirling may opt
out of seeing “gruesome” cadavers.
The University of Greenwich warns
that Shakespeare could be
“emotionally challenging”, as could
Orwell’s 1984 and War of the Worlds
by HG Wells. The presumption is
that you are entitled never to feel“uncomfortable”, which is not
possible in this dark world, nor even
desirable.
Obviously, some students have
experienced serious abuse, though I
suspect that they will be the most
robust. They’ve braced themselves
and endured this far. But many more
will be encouraged to nurture, as we
all do when young, a sense of
anxious yet privileged victimhood.
Encouraging distress is unhelpful.
The extreme trigger-warning craze
depends on two absurdities. One is
the presumption that most people
are mentally fragile, easily up-ended
and devoid of any steadying pride
and control. As Zahawi says (orin 1930s Alabama, it would not be
complete without “racially explicit
language, themes and content,
references to sexual abuse and
violence”. But we get warned, in case
we were expecting an ornithological
lecture. Actually Sorkin rather
brilliantly gives the white accuser a
sharp link to 21st-century American
racist paranoia: nearly every speech
contains, verbatim, something from
the website Breitbart. More shocking
than any fiction.
Once, life was simpler. Classifiers
slapped PG or X certificates on films,
and TV observed a 9pm “watershed”
(it’s still in the Ofcom code, though
nimble little fingers can now stream
anything anytime and get hideous
porn on their phones). But over-18s
once had to look out for themselves.
Today, content alerts have not only
increased but gone beyond being
basic consumer advice for parents.
They are conflated with the much
trickier concept of “trigger warnings”.
That phrase originated in serious
psychiatric literature about sufferers
from post-traumatic stress disorder.
This can create flashbacks, renewing
the original terror. It deserves expert
treatment. But cheapening the
psychiatric “trigger” word is neither
sane nor useful. Aside from the
entertainment industry, universities
attach trigger warnings to course
literature including in some cases
essential medical, legal and scientificA
word of sense from
Nadhim Zahawi, the
education secretary and
once a child refugee from
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
He says that children are not
oversensitive snowflakes and need
not be protected from encountering
hostile ideas or historical racial
insults. “We don’t need to put
warnings on things,” he said, and
teachers should enable pupils to filter
and “stress test” arguments. It is a
robust philosophy, and right now a
useful one. Our new culture of
anxious warning risks going beyond
kindness into imbecility.
We are all familiar with warnings
that we “may be distressed” by the
daily news, as indeed we ought to be.
Screen fictions warn of “sexual
content, violence from the start,
references to self-harm”. The retro
channel Talking Pictures TV must,
after an intervention from Ofcom,
tell us that a 1970s Rumpole of the
Bailey might offend “by the language
and attitudes expressed by some
characters”. In cinemas the screen
promises “strong language and
infrequent sex”. Popcorn-munching
jokers mutter: “The definition of
marriage!” We live in a
cautionocracy.
Live theatre is equally compelled
to presume a swooning fragility, even
in people who have heard of the
show, bought tickets, put their coats
on and found the right playhouse. At
David Hare’s marvellous Straight
Line Crazy, evoking 40 years of
Robert Moses building New York
expressways, we are warned of
“racial slurs, reference to the death of
a child”. Both are regular entries in
the beware-industry lexicon and
here a bit pointless: the death is only
glancingly referred to, all the slurs
happened in the 1920s, and while the“careful, children!” industry never
includes “explicit references to town
planning”, anyone dreading
bulldozers in their street will flinch
more painfully at seeing Ralph
Fiennes dissing public opinion.
A darker fusillade of trigger-
warnings accompanies Aaron
Sorkin’s reworking of To Kill a
Mockingbird. Because it relates the
wrongful trial of a black farm workerWe may be distressed
by the daily news, as
indeed we ought to be
Content alerts have
gone beyond being
basic consumer advice
Libby
Purves@lib_thinks