There’s another way of looking at the annals of slaughter and rape that thread through the history of civilization—this civilization or any other. It is this: A record of civilization that lacks such accounts is a lie. “There is no document of civilization,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Universities are not fallout shelters. (Once again, Kant: Dare to know!) Brutalities cry for attention. Attention to the appalling causes disturbance. Deal with it. You’re at school to be disturbed. Universities are very much in the business of trying to get you to rethink why you believe what you believe and whether you have grounds for believing it. At a time when almost twice as many freshmen think it is either “very important” or “essential” to be “very well off financially” as to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life,” it is more than ever incumbent upon the university to lift its eyes from capital campaigns and get on about getting students to consider the world.
That said, truly the traumatized, especially victims of sexual violence whose traumas can be reactivated by what they read, see, and hear, are entitled to some kind of alert. What exactly should be said to such people, by whom, and when, is beyond my ken. But why the high tide of panic? Is it truly the case that, in the spirit of what Robin Morgan once wrote about pornography, “Ovid is the theory, rape is the practice”? The reaction is so wildly disproportionate to any actual harms, it’s overdue to ask what’s going on.
And on this score, it’s hard to resist the thought that overwrought charges against the trigger-happy curriculum are outgrowths of fragility, or perceptions of fragility, or of fears of fragility running amok. When students are held, or hold themselves, to be just minutes away from psychic disaster, is it because they know “real” fragility is sweeping across the land? Or has there arisen a new generational norm of fragility, against which fortifications are needed? Whatever the case, angst about fragility cuts across political lines and crosses campus borders. Shall we therefore stop talking about rape, lynching, death camps? Shall we stop reading the annals of civilization, which are, among other things, annals of slaughter? I was talking the other day to a Columbia sophomore, Tony Qian, who put the point pithily: “If you’re going to live outside Plato’s cave, you’ve got to be brave.” What ever happened to, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make ye free”? Not comfortable—free.
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That said, truly the traumatized, especially victims of sexual violence whose traumas can be reactivated by what they read, see, and hear, are entitled to some kind of alert. What exactly should be said to such people, by whom, and when, is beyond my ken. But why the high tide of panic? Is it truly the case that, in the spirit of what Robin Morgan once wrote about pornography, “Ovid is the theory, rape is the practice”? The reaction is so wildly disproportionate to any actual harms, it’s overdue to ask what’s going on.
And on this score, it’s hard to resist the thought that overwrought charges against the trigger-happy curriculum are outgrowths of fragility, or perceptions of fragility, or of fears of fragility running amok. When students are held, or hold themselves, to be just minutes away from psychic disaster, is it because they know “real” fragility is sweeping across the land? Or has there arisen a new generational norm of fragility, against which fortifications are needed? Whatever the case, angst about fragility cuts across political lines and crosses campus borders. Shall we therefore stop talking about rape, lynching, death camps? Shall we stop reading the annals of civilization, which are, among other things, annals of slaughter? I was talking the other day to a Columbia sophomore, Tony Qian, who put the point pithily: “If you’re going to live outside Plato’s cave, you’ve got to be brave.” What ever happened to, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make ye free”? Not comfortable—free.
- More Here
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