Each of us has arrived here via an unlikely and circuitous path. All of us are exquisitely tuned by cultural as well as genetic endowments. We have benefited from the sacrifices and crimes of our ancestors. This is what some people mean when they talk about "privilege" and how some of us should check it.
They mean we should be aware of the essential subjectivity of our lives, that our perceptions are colored by things that were whispered in our childish ears, by the residual beliefs, prejudices and superstitions of buried generations. Yet while there are those with whom we've been trained to identify more closely, the more you are exposed to other people, the more you come to realize that all people are essentially alike. To be moral is to simply recognize the shared dilemma of humankind--to empathize with the Other.
This happens naturally when people begin to get out and circulate in the world, encountering people who superficially seem quite different from themselves. For some of us, our first real exposure to people much different from the people we grew up around is when we go to college (if we are privileged enough to go).
When I went to college, I had a lot of help. The state gave me a break on books and tuition; my parents welcomed me back any weekend I wanted to make the four-hour drive. I could do laundry in their house; I could sit at their table. I had an off-campus job that paid me better than jobs held by a lot of my classmates. I only lived in a dorm for a little while before I found a roommate and we got our own place a mile or so off-campus. I had a car.
(Not necessarily a good thing, because I was not the sort of mature young person who could be counted on not to drive to New Orleans in the middle of the night with my no-count friends.)
Outside of the gymnasium and fieldhouse, I didn't avail myself of a lot of opportunities that were presented me. I skimmed across the surface of a depthless reservoir, never bothering to submerge myself in its warm, teeming richness. In many ways, I cheated myself of a fuller university experience. I didn't make much of an impression on most of my professors; it was usually my goal not to be noticed.
And unlike some of the students at the University of Missouri in Columbia, I never did anything particularly brave or noble as a student. I never risked much. I never campaigned for social justice, though there certainly were a lot of things wrong with the world in those days. Instead I did lots of idiot stuff I didn't want my parents to find out about. That they never did may be the proudest accomplishment of my academic career. I made my grades and got my degree and moved into the world of work.
But somehow I've come to understand the easiest way to get along in the world is to respect an individual's particular experience and accept the limits of our own understanding. Because we have so much in common with other humans, perhaps our default attitude toward them ought to be pleasant. Maybe we should be as gentle as possible in our day-to-day dealings with strangers. It doesn't hurt to smile, to try to put people at ease, to assure them we mean them no harm.
We need to understand a lot of people who loudly protest "political correctness" are just trying to license their own boorishess. We ought to care about the feelings of other people, we ought not try to intimidate them or to make them feel uncomfortable because they do not conform to some group norm. We ought to be sensitive to an individual's particular experience.
And so, in a way, things like "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces" sound like reasonable ideas. If you have experienced a particular trauma, maybe you'd appreciate a heads-up to allow you to prepare yourself for a potentially upsetting passage in a book or film. Properly used, a trigger warning should work like the content warning before a movie or television show.
Similarly, maybe having a designated space where people who feel somehow marginalized and insecure can meet with like-minded souls to explore issues specific to their identity without fear of judgment, ridicule or criticism isn't such a terrible idea.
Of course, these ideas can be carried to ludicrous extremes. Because just as some people advertise their "political incorrectness" as a cover for doing and saying horrible things, other people will use well-intentioned concepts about making the world less harsh for the vulnerable and suffering as a means to suppress any speech or action that doesn't align with whatever party line they've adopted. That both Left and Right are capable of exercising totalitarian muscle is a historically verifiable fact with less to do with politics than the human capacity for cruelty.
Because people are the worst. For all our high-minded philosophy, we're just--as Tom Waits is supposed to have said--"monkeys with guns and money." We love our viral outrage. We love watching our kind ripped apart in the Internet hate machine.
It serves little purpose to equate the shrillness of certain members of the Mizzou faculty with, say, Joseph Stalin. We shouldn't assume they were acting out of anything like principle when they attempted to bully a couple of remarkably cool-headed journalism students trying to report in a public space last week: they were almost certainly caught up in an emotional surge. I bet the adrenaline and endorphins released in the wake of righteous anger felt really good.
Melissa Click--the communications professor who appeared to try to incite mob violence against a student journalist in a now viral video--is getting death threats. Sure she is. It took me about 15 seconds to find her email address online. It's fun to shame the bad person. Maybe not as much fun to push someone around or knock heads together or break out store windows, but pretty fun nevertheless. (Just read any online comments section.)
Truth is, I don't know if Click is any worse than anyone else. It's pretty easy to get carried away when your goal is social justice. The assumption of virtuous motive confers a privilege of its own.
One we'd all do well to check.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 11/15/2015