The two most abused words in modern society, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue in their illuminating new book The Coddling of the American Mind, are trauma and safety.
Not every physical or mental injury is traumatic, nor is every awful experience worthy of a post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis. The death of loved ones can be traumatic if they died needlessly and violently, they were young and you witnessed it, but there is nothing traumatic about a 90-year-old grandma dying in her sleep in the care home.
Yet trauma, the authors argue, is now used to describe every painful wound from a broken leg (she won't ever walk properly again and she'll have arthritis for the rest of her life!) to finding out a spouse has been having an affair (he can't sleep, he's lost all of his confidence and he doesn't feel like going to work!).
Trauma was a word once reserved for the worst kind of tragedies but now everyone wants their hurt recognized as trauma, regardless of the severity. As a result, Lukianoff and Haidt rightly point out, trauma has been both elevated and diminished. On one hand, everybody hurts and everyone else around them needs to accommodate that suffering. On the other hand, if everybody hurts, then no one does and legitimate trauma is easily ignored.
The same thing has happened to safety. Not only has "safetyism," as the writers call it, created a vast, unnecessary bureaucracy of paranoid government sentinels, it has poisoned the minds of both adults and children that they are constantly in imminent danger, despite the fact that most people living in most modern countries are the safest human beings who have ever lived. In places like Canada and the United States, the risk of dying or receiving permanent injuries as the result of infectious disease, crime or an accident in the workplace or in an automobile are ridiculously low compared to other less wealthy countries and compared to ourselves 50 years ago.
Yet peanut allergies are soaring among young people. As the results of a major study pointed out a few years ago, children are nearly six times more likely to acquire an allergy to peanuts if they weren't exposed to foods with peanuts in the ingredients during infancy as those kids who were. Other studies have shown that kids who grow up on working farms, where diverse forms of bacteria are everywhere and most kids quickly develop a robust immune system, are less likely to acquire a variety of medical conditions later in life, from asthma to intolerance to lactose and gluten.
In other words, the overwhelming focus on safety for kids has made them less safe by making them more prone to illness.
As its title indicates, The Coddling of the American Mind is far more concerned with emotional, psychological and social effects of too much trauma and too much safety, rather than the physical effects.
As a free speech and education advocate (Lukianoff) and an academic (Haidt), the authors are both frustrated and terrified by what is happening on college and university campuses as well as across broader society. Feelings have overcome facts in their view, so if someone feels their pain is trauma and their safety - physical or emotional - has been compromised, those feelings have to be accommodated or the powers that be, from university administrators to police officers to government officials, are accused of insensitivity and discrimination. Even questioning whether those feelings are based in reality, whether that pain really is trauma and safety really is an issue is seen as cruel and heartless.
The authors are particularly alarmed at how these views have tainted public discourse, where exploring serious, important issues like rape and racism are fraught with danger, because someone might be "retraumatized" by the discussion. Equating talking about rape with an actual violent sexual assault is a perfect example of the trivialization of trauma.
Furthermore, talking about these issues is seen as a safety threat to individuals, even though they are free to step away from any conversations that are too difficult to be part of. Like early exposure to peanut butter, exposing everyone - especially young adults - to challenging discussions about issues like rape and racism prepares them for a world where these injustices happen and gives them a starting place of knowledge to help prevent them.
"Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child," goes the wise old folk saying the authors quote.
By equating all pain as trauma and every potential risk to physical and emotional well-being as a safety issue, we invite more harm to our relationships with one another, to our children and to ourselves.
-- Editor-in-chief Neil Godbout
