Life has no trigger warnings... and even if it did, we’d still have to face it

WARNING: this column contains material that may upset some readers. Under-25s may find some passages particularly challenging.

If you happen to be a student at Aberdeen University, you should probably hide behind the sofa now.

A few paragraphs from here I refer to sexual violence. After that, there is a brief section on race issues. I cannot guarantee that all the animals in this column will make it out alive.

At one point I allude to my personal grief over the loss of my mother. this may cause some to reflect on a loved one they have lost.

this column is about life. If you would rather not dwell on a subject like that, I caution you to pass over it.

I graduated at Aberdeen University three decades ago wearing a mortar board and granny glasses which did my appearance no favours at all in the photographic record of the event.

But there is no discomfort about the learning I did there – only a lasting sense of fulfilment.

Back then, you did not obtain a degree in French and Philosophy while cocooned in a bubble padded out with cotton wool. Occasionally you were confronted with unpleasantness.

In moral philosophy, for example, there was a module on abortion.

It is a fact of life that vexing issues such as this fall within the purview of the moral philosopher, which is why, at 18, I grappled with an essay question which asked whether a woman who becomes pregnant through rape can morally seek a termination.

I am sorry about the explicit content of that last sentence. I did try to warn you.

In French, we read La Femme Rompue (the Woman Destroyed), in which Simone de Beauvoir charts the mental decline of a wife whose husband has left her – and La Leçon (the Lesson), an absurdist drama by Eugène Ionesco which culminates in rape.

Literature and philosophy teem with difficult subject matter, I came to understand, but then, so does the world they reflect. I figured universities were there to teach people about this world.

A generation later, at this august seat of learning founded in 1495, students are taking action to protect themselves from this teaching, particularly where it involves content they may find upsetting.

Undergraduates have supported a motion by Ivana Drdáková, the students’ association vice-president elect, to shield their sensibilities from unwanted references in their course work to subjects including racism, suicide, sexual, substance and animal abuse.

According to the motion, there were ‘multiple instances’ where university staff had failed to provide trigger warnings for this upsetting content.

Distressing

Says Miss Drdáková: ‘As a literature student, you inevitably come across literature that contains distressing scenes – for example, harm to animals. this is one of the things I do not like to read about.’

One is tempted to suggest that if Miss Drdáková does not want to be confronted with distressing scenes she has chosen the wrong degree course. Shakespeare, certainly, is out. Gore everywhere.

And do not go near thomas Hardy’s novels. Even the one with the happy ending has a less than rosy fate for a flock of sheep.

Perhaps Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the play where nothing happens – twice – would be more up this literature student’s street.

Yet even the most cursory analysis of what Beckett was getting at here – emptiness, purposelessness – may prompt yet more frantic trigger warnings.

It seems to me there is an unwritten contract we accept when we sign up to further education and it is that we are the ones in pursuit of learning and our degree courses are where that learning lies. take it or leave it.

It should be a simple enough contract to get our heads around because a similar, only obligatory, one exists during our school days.

there, aged 12 or 13, my classmates and I were confronted with the poem telephone Conversation by the black writer Wole Soyinka.

‘How dark?’ asks the landlady in the poem when the prospective tenant on the phone tells her he is African. ‘Are you light or very dark?’

there was, as I recall, no trigger warning for this lesson. Yet what a seminal lesson it was as an introduction to the casual racism of 1960s Britain, told from the point of view of a man of colour.

In a world where a white policeman is on trial for the second degree murder of a black suspect by kneeling on his neck for nine minutes, it feels important to me to have Soyinka’s poem in my memory banks. My school should be proud it was on the syllabus. the lesson was all the more valuable for its unsettling nature.

It is, of course, now de rigueur to have trigger warnings sprinkled through television news broadcasts, drama series and documentaries – few of which make any real sense either.

You do not have much of a murder mystery going without murder. there is an excellent chance the documentary on child sexual abuse will contain upsetting references to child sexual abuse. You really cannot have been paying attention if you suspect the ten o’clock news report on the humanitarian crisis in Yemen won’t contain images some viewers may find distressing.

Yet there are no trigger warnings – nor would I expect there to be – for drama scenes where a patient lies terminally ill in a hospital bed.

My appetite for such scenes is limited due to the fact they remind me of the last time I saw my mother.

It is nobody’s fault they appear without warning. Life itself springs surprises all the time. Why shouldn’t art?

the biggest problem with the thesis that these warnings must be liberally applied throughout university education is that it is a highway without exit into the palpably absurd.

Indeed, the absurdist playwrights I studied in Senior Honours would have loved it.

How does the history student gain insight into the past – into slavery, world wars, famine – if there is a content warning in every line?

Where does the medical student, the psychologist, the sociologist, the international relations undergraduate even begin to take on knowledge when it is laced with thoughts they may prefer not to think?

Uneducated

the next biggest problem with this demand for ‘protection’ is it comes across as an attempt by the uneducated to educate the educators.

Do the course work you signed up for. Learn something about the literature which would presume to shake you out of your mollycoddled torpor. Understand the times, the context, the writers’ intentions. that is what literature degrees are all about.

Who knows, some of the info contained in the books you wish to be shielded from may come in handy 20 or 30 years down the line when the ideals you hold sacrosanct give way to new ones espoused by the next generation of ultra-woke undergraduates.

By then you may well look back on those snowflake years with the same sense of embarrassment with which I view that mortar board and those granny glasses.

Life, it turns out, has no trigger warnings. And even if did, we’d still have to face it.

Now, a word to those cowering behind the sofa: you can come out now. It’s all over. Nothing for you to worry your pretty little heads about.