Coddling Contemporary Minds?
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt might think so.
According to this article, Vintage US now warns readers that Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises contain “potentially upsetting content.” Note that these so-called trigger warnings are for adults, not children. (I wonder what Vintage would do with Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment or McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.)
Here’s an idea.
Human life contains potentially upsetting content. There’s no avoiding it. Why not, therefore, post one message, once and for all – say, on the front page of the New York Times – to the following effect:
Human life is hard. Ideas, situations, events, and persons are potentially upsetting. Learning to accept and overcome these undesirable facts is part of developing wisdom. Helpful ways to handle these facts reasonably include reading literature, studying history, reflecting on philosophy, and studying the natural sciences to learn about the physical world – red in tooth and claw.
Once the message is posted, we can give our novelists, intellectuals, teachers, etc., the freedom to research, write about, and discuss the underbelly of human affairs without worrying about the puritanical sensibilities of those who are too easily offended.