I recently had the misfortune to hear ‘AntiSocial’, a discussion program on BBC Radio 4 about the use of ‘Trigger’ warnings, an import from the US, warning people about content which they might find upsetting. These are now used before most archive programs on TV, even Dad’s Army, and in universities to protect students from possible shocks provided by the likes of Thomas Hardy and Charlotte Bronte. Also, to close down texts which are found to be too upsetting, or racist. Supporting these warnings in the program was Elise Page (They/Them) a graduate of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, now working on a PhD at UEA, which she says, ‘Examines 9/11 as an embodied event and reads the Twin Towers through affect theory in an ecocritical frame.’ She, ‘Synthesises affect theory and ecocriticism to create a specific theory of the Ecology of NY. Their academic interests include decolonising the academy, climate humanities, affect theory, trauma theory, and architecture.’
She is taking a year off from all that to work as ‘post-graduate officer at UEA,’ such are the pressing concerns of Woke. She says on line, ‘It really was an honour to be elected by my fellow postgraduates. I am passionate about fostering a compassionate, liberatory culture on campus. Before this role, I was doing some work on decolonising the university. This can mean diversifying course content, or making learning and teaching methods more accessible to everyone. But it needs to be steered by students from a diverse range of backgrounds – I’m here to support you and make sure your voices are heard.’
Despite all that academic prestige I thought her use of English in the program was disappointing, ‘Hi, like, you know, kind of, sort of,’ she seemed unable to my ears, to express herself clearly, it was not possible to really know what she thought as her ‘compassion,’ seemed to make it hard for her to fully disagree with anyone. Perhaps that was just as well as she was supporting the use of ‘trigger warnings,’ even though three recent studies using a thousand cases in the US and Canada have found that they are useless and in fact increase anxiety among students.
I put my surprise at how poor she sounded on Twitter and received a response from a woman who referring to Elise as, ‘Them,’ said she’d found Them’s performance, ‘fantastic’. I replied that even if I had approved of her, I wouldn’t have called her, ‘fantastic,’ which is just empty hyperbole. That was followed by a horrible, if I may also exaggerate although I won’t lapse into the now popular term, ‘horrific,’ ‘pile-on’ where a large number of people on twitter get together to mob someone with their hatred and contempt. I was attacked as a loathsome right-winger who had broken one of our current social mores; you are not allowed to criticise someone’s language especially not if they are younger, now almost a protected category, or from a different ethnicity. ‘Kindness’ or rather US style blandness is now the rule and we are now an all whooping, hand clapping, ‘kindly’ non-critical people, get used to it, ‘Boomer!’
Perhaps because I was brought up in the exacting age before this constant approval, I find this a big change. I was reminded of this in a recent episode of The Archers, surprisingly as for years the series has been a left-wing diatribe with whole busloads of Ambridge pensioners going off to celebrate ‘Pride’. But a bucolic character was complaining that a teacher had once told him he was exceptionally good at something and now he found he wasn’t good at it at all. He was quickly reassured by a friend that the teacher must have been right. I meet those teachers regularly. We are now in an age where pupils now renamed students, patients and passengers are chiefly ‘customers,’ and after forking out a lot of hard-earned cash in taxes and fees, expect good results even if they are impossible to provide.
On a recent still-life course, we were presented with a round, stubby stainless-steel tea-pot and other assorted items to draw. I was astonished later to see that all the mostly elderly ladies present, these groups are mainly women which may have something to do with the blandness/kindness, had given their pots very long spouts. Come back Dr Freud, or at least someone who might have noticed it, apart from me. Our ‘teacher’ didn’t say a thing, apart from the now usual, ‘Fantastic, marvellous, well done, Betty, Joyce, Marjorie.’ At another group in the National Gallery where we were going to draw from Rembrandt’s paintings it was the same. The young woman teacher or I should say, ‘facilitator’ came late, looked dishevelled and stood about smiling, before telling us all our drawings were just wonderful and ‘amazing’. There was a man present on that occasion and we whispered to each other that we found the teacher disappointing.
I assume that she was being paid, but for what? Why not just put some kind of little robot into class rooms to spout the magic word, ‘Fantastic,’ at appropriate intervals. No one will demur, everyone will be really happy and feel they have got their money’s worth; and it will save the state an enormous amount on salaries.
Jane Kelly’s quotation is unfortunately very far from being the only example of the feculent argle-bargle that floats continuously on the swirling “academic” cesspool of postmodern albophobia.
For another typically logorrheic example of Private Eye’s Pseuds’ Corner x George Orwell’s Doubleplusgoodthink, see the latest Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society (formerly “Man”), for a review of “Epidemic Illusions” by WHO ex-adviser Eugene Williams, who maintains that “global public health” functions as “an apparatus” of the “matrix of racial, political, economic, social, epistemological, linguistic, and gendered hierarchical orders imposed by European colonialism”.
In a “plurivocal style incorporating rhetorical irony, flash fiction, ethnographic description, poetic allegory, and emic insights from his transdisciplinary training”, the writer “deftly parses multiple scales of epistemological privilege”, “discursively unravels” how Global North bureaucracies “achieve monopolies” with agendas that “sanction racialized, conservative accounts of disease outbreak and fetishize structural naive causal inferences”. Unsurprisingly he proceeds through “re-descriptions” instead of “linear arguments” and critiques (here reaching ironically logical conclusion) the notion of objective and “universal truth”. Ebola sufferers are portrayed as victims of western bourgeois scientists and doctors who serve as “mechanisms” of “coloniality”, accomplices in “hermeneutic injustice” and “symbolic violence”, “clinical nihilism”, and denial of “redistributive justice”.
You could spend £22 on this 193-page tract or instead donate an equivalent sum to the “white saviours” rescuing African children from (say) trachoma or galactosemia.
The attack on “white science” (in this case, the “bourgeois-empiricist methods in the Global North [Japan included]”) is part of the attack on “white people”, documented by writers as politically different as Douglas Murray, James Lindsay, Jared Taylor and Arthur Kemp. It resembles in upside-down form the pre-war attack on “Jewish physics” and we know where that led.
You should see and feel the wholesome wokeness at my ‘First Steps in making your own IED’ Further Education class! Our fiery eyed Leader (Him/him) waves a scimitar around in the air with one hand whilst hurling a blackboard rubber with the greates felicity at at the inattentive with the other.
Criticism of these traditional aids and his traditional teaching methodologies is of course not permitted, but we have all been impressed by the explosive results he has achieved.
“Them” is for plurals. A much more appropriate word to encompass all compinations and the feelings of many, in the singular at least, would be “s” for she, “h” for he and “it,” naturally enough, for it. To make a plural it would only be necessary to add an “s” as a suffix.
Given the sadistic filth and freakish horror that passes for terrestrial television entertainment watched by children, I think the student “protections” and censorship of literary works by white authors have another purpose.