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Chris Coffman's avatar

Great, comprehensive, survey about an essential subject!

I saw this syndrome unfolding when my now-32 year old son was taught in his undergraduate cognitive neuroscience class that because the same part of the brain lights up when a person is physically hit or verbally insulted, “science proves that speech is violence”.

We’re dealing with a cultural mood that has found numerous ways to insidiously infiltrate our civilizational consensus. I hope articles like this--evidence-based and data-driven--can help turn the tide, but if not there are bad times ahead.

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Ella Dorn's avatar

Random, but for an amazing set of data to support this - check out the Opinion archive for The Tab, an all-UK student newspaper. You can directly see student opinions - and not those of just any students, but of wannabe journalists - change over the past 11-12 years. In 2011 the slant was still very much towards free speech, in 2020 there's an article admonishing Rihanna for appropriating the Qur'an. Everything politics-related is quite moralistic and scold-y in tone now, and echoes the mainstream Guardian/Twitter viewpoint. The writing also gets better and more interesting when you scroll back to 2010!

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