Trigger warnings are nothing but tribal slogans

I write as a historian. This article makes no sense at all. It cannot even sustain a coherent point of view. I challenge the author to deconstruct "By contrast, what trigger warnings so parochially teach us is that writers like Shakespeare and Chaucer lack sufficient insight into their own societies – and therefore need the help of more enlightened modern minds." 1, what he mean by "parochially"? 2, "more enlightened modern minds"? "modern"? "enlightened"? 3. Chaucer wrote fiction. Shakespeare dramas. Neither pretended to be social or cultural historians. Please THE, please

Dear graff.40 : I agree with you on all points. That passage was intended as irony, though I confess that tightly worded opinion pieces run the risk of turning all statements into literal ones. Apologies for any confusion, and thanks for signalling this.

Unlike graff.40 I found Eric's excellent article not only entirely comprehensible but utterly convincing. The kind of 'deconstruction' recommended by graff.40 adds nothing to the debate about the value of the kind of trigger warnings under discussion. 'It cannot even sustain a coherent point of view'. No need to apologise at all, Eric.

Now, I'm a computer scientist and read Chaucer for pleasure not academic study, but what I value is the challenge of meeting Chaucer and his characters in the milieu that THEY inhabited, not drag them into mine and like Q in "StarTrek: The Next Generation" put them on trial for sins they didn't know that some think they commited. As always I wonder what we do that future generations will clutch their pearls over, exclaiming, "How could they possibly have done/thought THAT, it's so obviously wrong!" Both Chaucer and us lot are creatures of our own times, doing our best to be moral and ethical beings in the time we inhabit, not pandering to the shrill of a different age. And as for Christianity? If we take from that faith the injunction to be kind, to love other people as we do ourselves, we won't go far wrong, whenever we live.

The trouble with an article like this is that it picks out the most egregious examples of something and uses them to pass moral and Sociological judgement. Of course warning students that Chaucer contains depictions of Christianity is bizarre. That doesn't mean that all trigger warnings are nothing more than tribal signifiers. I'm a geneticist. Some of the works we deal with are about conditions that students might find literally triggering of they have personal or family experience, Such as anorexia or schizophrenia. It's not necessary for a student to study all these works to understand the area, but they need to study some. I earn students so they can duck out of, say, discussion of schizophrenia is difficult for them, but they are happy to study breast cancer. I don't think that is any sort of signaling.