I tend not to talk much about political issues on social
media. Partly this is because the format doesn’t lend itself too well to
nuance, unless one is willing to spend hours of one’s time in epicycles of
debate with opinionated strangers, and partly it’s because I’m scared that, if
I post something, I might change my mind. I tend to consider every issue from
numerous sides, and largely shy away from the kind of tub-thumping that
characterises much internet discussion. Or maybe I’m just a coward whose arse
is full of splinters from sitting on too many fences. See what I just did
there? I’m too much of a coward to even admit to being a coward.
Anyway, with all this in mind we come to the issue of ‘safe
spaces’. For those of you who don’t know, ‘safe space’ denotes a place, often
on a university campus, where certain modes of ‘phobic’ speech are not allowed.
The notion of safe spaces has the right-wing commentariat in paroxysms of
incredulity. How, the thinking goes, can an ostensible bastion of free thought
such as a university succumb to such a shackling? Isn’t a university (the
thinking continues) the very place where students should be exposed to ideas with which they may not agree? And with
that, today’s students are written off by many as weak, fragile ‘snowflakes’.
Whilst I understand this line of thinking, it misses two
crucial points. It is these two points that I want briefly to discuss in this
blog post. The first point is this: I
believe there is a sense in which the demarcation of a safe space is an act of
bravery and of revolution, rather than a demonstration of fragility. As a
straight male and all that, I understand that I am insulated from a lot of the
language and thinking that negatively affects others, and that, in creating a
safe space, marginalised groups are reshaping their environment. It misses the
mark to say that it is a big, bad world out there and today’s students are ill
equipped to deal with it. As the poet Roger McGough writes, “shush, old man,
your day is done/Whilst mine has only just begun”. In other words, the students
of today are the leaders of tomorrow, which sounds platitudinous until you
realise that it is the old git spluttering ‘snowflake!’ over his copy of the Daily Mail whose “day is done”. And surely
it is a more proactive, leader-like thing to say “we’re not going to take it
anymore” than it is simply to capitulate to outdated attitudes and modes of
speech. It’s not so much that these students are unwilling to ‘face up’ to the
reality of the ‘big bad world’; it is more that they have already done too much ‘facing up’ and are now saying “no more”.
So I get it. I’m not going to bang on about snowflakes
and SJWs and the rest of it. What I will do, however, is this: from a place of
understanding and (I hope) empathy, I will offer a tentative case against safe spaces. This will form the
second of the two points which the above caricatured case against safe space
misses.
Now is the time to get your violins out as I get
personal. For as long as I can remember, indeed perhaps for as long as I have
been alive, I have had mental health difficulties. In particular, I suffer from
OCD (and the concomitant anxiety and depression which this condition
engenders). One of the most common courses of action for OCD is ERP, which
stands for Exposure and Response Prevention. According to OCD UK, this involves “being exposed
in a very structured way, with the support of your therapist, to what makes you
feel anxious, and not carrying out compulsive rituals after exposure.”
To take a very clichéd example: suppose your OCD centres on tidiness and order.
You obsessively go around the house making sure your ornaments are ‘just so’.
ERP might involve purposefully tipping over an ornament, and then leaving the
house for a period of time instead of going through the whole tidying ritual
again. The idea behind ERP is to gradually desensitise your brain so that, over
time, the anxiety associated with the exposure decreases. A crucial aspect to
this course of treatment is purposeful exposure to the very thing that makes
one anxious.
It does not
take a great mental leap to see how this principle might be applied to the idea
of safe spaces. Suppose that my university has just invited a speaker who
espouses the view that poets are useless people. I get ‘triggered’ by this. According
to psychiatrist David Veale, I have three choices: (1) the obsessive choice,
(2) the non-obsessive choice, and (3) the anti-obsessive choice. The obsessive
choice, i.e. the thing that my OCD wants me to do, is to ‘no platform’ the speaker,
to banish him entirely from my sphere of experience and perhaps beat him over the
head with the complete works of Phillip Larkin. The non-obsessive choice would
be to glumly just let him get on with his talk but to refrain from attending it
myself – a step in the right direction, sure, but somewhat passive. The third
option, the anti-obsessive choice, is the very opposite of what my OCD
wants me to do, and as such is the very thing that ERP would recommend doing.
In this case, the anti-obsessive choice would be to go along to the talk, to
expose myself in a purposeful way to the thing that makes me anxious. If I do
this enough times my brain gets desensitised and I am no longer ‘triggered’.
Does this
imply that I should not argue, debate, criticise and get riled up? No it doesn’t;
I am absolutely free to do these things. But it does imply that I should purposefully
expose myself to views that I might viscerally disagree with. Should I then go
out of my way to invite racists, sexists and bigots of all kinds to speak at my
university? I’m not sure. This entire discussion raises complicated issues, but
I would say this: it is better to have such people give ‘talks’ at
universities, where they can be exposed to debate and ridicule, than it is to
have them stirring up credulous acolytes elsewhere. With ERP, the exposure
takes place under the supervision of a trained therapist – in a ‘safe space’,
as it were. With this in mind, it may be that the role of safe spaces within
universities should be that of managed exposure, rather than the banishing
unpalatable viewpoints.
