It’s a good point and one that comes rolled up with a lot of other ideas including authoritarianism, insurance, commodification, control, and catastrophizing.
It’s all comes together as part of a desire to reject complexity for a simple definition that allows people to maintain an easy sense of righteousness.
Yes, the word "unsafe" is used as a weapon these days. I don't encounter it with my friends and comrades, but every time I hear it somewhere else, I get a sort of "watch out" feeling. I guess the word unsafe makes me feel unsafe : ) . I know of college students who have used it to describe a classroom environment after a classmate expressed anti-abortion views, and wanted the professor to do something about it. I think all entering college students should have a required course on free speech and what it means.
My friend and I were talking about smoothness the other day. People want a smoothness to their lives, which is understandable. We don't want the inconveniences of getting in our car or on a bus to go to a store to buy groceries and then get back on the bus or in our car to go to the post office and the bank. We don't want to run errands or really do anything that takes time away from whatever we want to do (though I'd say staring at our computer screens or phones takes up far more of our day than errands did). We also don't want to be challenged on our beliefs. We don't want to have our boundaries be pushed or pulled. We want to feel safe and comfortable.
We want life to slide easily along. We want a frictionless existence where everything is available to us without effort, where we can simply turn off things we don't want to engage with. Tech companies have facilitated this in a lot of ways.
And I think it's honestly been incredibly harmful to us as a social and political animal. Even something as banal as running errands requires you to interact with people who may be radically different than you. You may walk into a heated argument or an awkward confrontation. You may even have to deal with small injustices, both personal and political. This helps keep us tethered to society, by forcing us to exist bodily in it day after day, hour after hour.
No one enjoys waiting in line, but often this can lead to conversation with strangers. Maybe, even, it will lead to political engagement.
The first time my wife went shopping with my mother, she told me that my mother just talks to everyone at the store, whether they're a fellow shopper or employee. Which is about the last thing I ever want to do. I'd rather never talk to any single person in a store and I'd definitely prefer for strangers not to talk to me. But I think the discomfort of these interactions is a good thing. I think we lose something in always feeling safe and comfortable.
Like, I never ask someone at a clothing store for help. And I definitely don't ask their opinion about the clothes I try on or pick out. There's something slightly humiliating in liking something in front of someone else, because they may think you look foolish or lame or just plain bad. But I think these small forms of humiliation are good for us. It's good to feel uncomfortable, at least in small doses.
What do you think of the relationship between safetyism and gender?
Along with a sensitivity to coarse language, safetyism is a trait that correlates with women, and as women in US have shifted their political affiliations from right to left over the decades, those sensitivities have moved with them?
Could it be that is all political correctness, (and now wokeness), has ever been? The encroachment of a more, stereotypically feminine attitude regarding risk and harm, replacing the more stoic and rowdy male preference?
"And it proves again what I’ve been saying for 15 years: I’m just a leftist who never changed."
This was me until some time in 2020: there is a Platonic ideal of the left, and I alone participate in it. Unlike all the really existing people who run the really existing organizations of the left. They are not real leftists.
Platonism is definitely a coherent worldview, but it has drawbacks.
I don't think it's just "psychological safety." It's also physical safety. Look to the schools that were shut down for far longer than they needed to be to minimize covid risk -- at the cost of children's education, cultivation and opportunity.
As a kid growing up in the 90s and 2000s, I can remember year by year the organizations I loved -- the community pool, my summer camp -- becoming more safe and less fun. Some of these changes were probably sensible. Many of them served to reduce trace amounts of risk further. How many children, after all, are you willing to allow die a year so that a playground can be qualitatively more 'fun'? Once you have the data, the easiest answer is zero, but the effect of those risk-mitigating decisions cumulatively has become more than the individual decisions. The immediate cause was generally legal liability, but that is the result of a middle class increasingly unaccepting of risk.
"...her views and caustic expression of them, such as her refusal to honor the pronouns of trans people."
Do you still feel this way about the subject? Because from where I'm standing, demanding that everyone should say things they don't believe to be true, for the sake of another person's psychological safety, is peak safetyism. (Spare me the argument that it's about "respect.")
Is there a "trans" exception to your safetyism stance?
All sorts of things can be made *problematic* once liberal discourse norms are thrown out.
All it takes is astroturfing support for The Current Thing, the cost of which usually amounts to no more than the rounding error, and then you have justice and the arc of history on your side.
I don’t think it’s safetyism as much as the belief that racism is about using the wrong words. That if you get someone who has very negative views of Black people to stop using the N world that makes them not racist. That’s not how the world works.
I like the term safetyism a lot, and I agree that it represents a major shift in liberal politics over the last few decades.
Maybe this is pedantic or wrong of me, but I figured I would at least mention it. I think the “man who tells it like it is” comedian persona has had right wing associations and connotations since at least the 1990s. I’m thinking of people like Denis Leary for example. I think it probably dates back to the first, early-90s iteration of the culture war, and the first appearances of the term “political correctness.” So if I remember the early 2000s correctly, and I may not because I was in middle school, someone like Carlin was obviously not conservative (I loved his anti religion rants), but his style appealed to more conservative or libertarian men because even by that point the association of liberals with political correctness and sensitivity had already been established pretty strongly. So I think 25 years ago, Carlin’s shtick was probably in a vague way associated with the right and its dislike of political correctness. At least that’s my memory of the time. Just a minor point from me
I think it goes even further than that. What we have is narcissism masquerading as virtue.
Didn’t resilience used to be a thing?
It’s a good point and one that comes rolled up with a lot of other ideas including authoritarianism, insurance, commodification, control, and catastrophizing.
It’s all comes together as part of a desire to reject complexity for a simple definition that allows people to maintain an easy sense of righteousness.
Yes, the word "unsafe" is used as a weapon these days. I don't encounter it with my friends and comrades, but every time I hear it somewhere else, I get a sort of "watch out" feeling. I guess the word unsafe makes me feel unsafe : ) . I know of college students who have used it to describe a classroom environment after a classmate expressed anti-abortion views, and wanted the professor to do something about it. I think all entering college students should have a required course on free speech and what it means.
My friend and I were talking about smoothness the other day. People want a smoothness to their lives, which is understandable. We don't want the inconveniences of getting in our car or on a bus to go to a store to buy groceries and then get back on the bus or in our car to go to the post office and the bank. We don't want to run errands or really do anything that takes time away from whatever we want to do (though I'd say staring at our computer screens or phones takes up far more of our day than errands did). We also don't want to be challenged on our beliefs. We don't want to have our boundaries be pushed or pulled. We want to feel safe and comfortable.
We want life to slide easily along. We want a frictionless existence where everything is available to us without effort, where we can simply turn off things we don't want to engage with. Tech companies have facilitated this in a lot of ways.
And I think it's honestly been incredibly harmful to us as a social and political animal. Even something as banal as running errands requires you to interact with people who may be radically different than you. You may walk into a heated argument or an awkward confrontation. You may even have to deal with small injustices, both personal and political. This helps keep us tethered to society, by forcing us to exist bodily in it day after day, hour after hour.
No one enjoys waiting in line, but often this can lead to conversation with strangers. Maybe, even, it will lead to political engagement.
The first time my wife went shopping with my mother, she told me that my mother just talks to everyone at the store, whether they're a fellow shopper or employee. Which is about the last thing I ever want to do. I'd rather never talk to any single person in a store and I'd definitely prefer for strangers not to talk to me. But I think the discomfort of these interactions is a good thing. I think we lose something in always feeling safe and comfortable.
Like, I never ask someone at a clothing store for help. And I definitely don't ask their opinion about the clothes I try on or pick out. There's something slightly humiliating in liking something in front of someone else, because they may think you look foolish or lame or just plain bad. But I think these small forms of humiliation are good for us. It's good to feel uncomfortable, at least in small doses.
Good stuff.
What do you think of the relationship between safetyism and gender?
Along with a sensitivity to coarse language, safetyism is a trait that correlates with women, and as women in US have shifted their political affiliations from right to left over the decades, those sensitivities have moved with them?
Could it be that is all political correctness, (and now wokeness), has ever been? The encroachment of a more, stereotypically feminine attitude regarding risk and harm, replacing the more stoic and rowdy male preference?
"And it proves again what I’ve been saying for 15 years: I’m just a leftist who never changed."
This was me until some time in 2020: there is a Platonic ideal of the left, and I alone participate in it. Unlike all the really existing people who run the really existing organizations of the left. They are not real leftists.
Platonism is definitely a coherent worldview, but it has drawbacks.
Nice DF Wallace reference!
I don't think it's just "psychological safety." It's also physical safety. Look to the schools that were shut down for far longer than they needed to be to minimize covid risk -- at the cost of children's education, cultivation and opportunity.
As a kid growing up in the 90s and 2000s, I can remember year by year the organizations I loved -- the community pool, my summer camp -- becoming more safe and less fun. Some of these changes were probably sensible. Many of them served to reduce trace amounts of risk further. How many children, after all, are you willing to allow die a year so that a playground can be qualitatively more 'fun'? Once you have the data, the easiest answer is zero, but the effect of those risk-mitigating decisions cumulatively has become more than the individual decisions. The immediate cause was generally legal liability, but that is the result of a middle class increasingly unaccepting of risk.
You said this of Meghan Murphy:
"...her views and caustic expression of them, such as her refusal to honor the pronouns of trans people."
Do you still feel this way about the subject? Because from where I'm standing, demanding that everyone should say things they don't believe to be true, for the sake of another person's psychological safety, is peak safetyism. (Spare me the argument that it's about "respect.")
Is there a "trans" exception to your safetyism stance?
Big win for neo-liberalism, ultimately.
All sorts of things can be made *problematic* once liberal discourse norms are thrown out.
All it takes is astroturfing support for The Current Thing, the cost of which usually amounts to no more than the rounding error, and then you have justice and the arc of history on your side.
too many people love safeyism and wokeism on the left like how the right wing buisness class love their tax cuts
I don’t think it’s safetyism as much as the belief that racism is about using the wrong words. That if you get someone who has very negative views of Black people to stop using the N world that makes them not racist. That’s not how the world works.
What happened was that the PMC got the whip hand.
That meant that the status quo now had to be defended and no longer challenged.
I like the term safetyism a lot, and I agree that it represents a major shift in liberal politics over the last few decades.
Maybe this is pedantic or wrong of me, but I figured I would at least mention it. I think the “man who tells it like it is” comedian persona has had right wing associations and connotations since at least the 1990s. I’m thinking of people like Denis Leary for example. I think it probably dates back to the first, early-90s iteration of the culture war, and the first appearances of the term “political correctness.” So if I remember the early 2000s correctly, and I may not because I was in middle school, someone like Carlin was obviously not conservative (I loved his anti religion rants), but his style appealed to more conservative or libertarian men because even by that point the association of liberals with political correctness and sensitivity had already been established pretty strongly. So I think 25 years ago, Carlin’s shtick was probably in a vague way associated with the right and its dislike of political correctness. At least that’s my memory of the time. Just a minor point from me