The sword of safetyism

Safetyism is not about protecting vulnerable people. It is about conflict.

Written by Rob Kurzban

This past September, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) cancelled a panel that was initially accepted for presentation at their annual conference. Why? According to a letter posted to the AAA web site, the panel—which was a discussion of biological sex as an analytic category—compromised "the safety and dignity of our members,” and the ideas they were to discuss would "cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large."

Also in September, a controversy erupted surrounding a TED talk by Coleman Hughes, who gave a presentation defending the idea that people should be treated the same regardless of race. Hughes published an article at the Free Press about how TED had suppressed publicity for his talk. The head of the organization, Chris Anderson, took to Twitter to explain what had happened: staff at TED felt their “identity” was “being attacked.”

More recently, after the University of California Regents condemned the attacks by Hamas terrorists, a group of faculty members, the University of California Ethnic Studies Family Council, wrote a letter addressed to the Board in response, claiming that the charges of “terrorism” and “unprovoked” aggression “contributed to a climate that has made Palestinian students and community members unsafe.”

These incidents are drops in a vast sea of examples in which the language of safety, attack, and harm are used to describe the threat posed by ideas—or even just words—often calmly delivered to audiences seated in a comfortable setting. Words can, of course, be used to incite violence, but analytic categories are not coming for you in your sleep.

To capture this trend of the obsession with safety, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and legal expert Greg Lukianoff used the term “safetyism” in their book "The Coddling of the American Mind." Safetyism refers to the idea that the need for safety—from everything from actual physical threats to ideas to even particular words—is more important than other concerns, including free speech and open debate. The AAA’s action perfectly illustrates this, placing the putative concern about harm above the value of scholarly discussion.

Haidt and others have discussed examples of safetyism gone awry at length—I highly recommend this book and the more recent book by Lukianoff, coauthored by Rikki Schlott—so I won’t contribute another essay to that ample genre. This post, instead, looks at counterexamples. When are academic institutions emphatically not responding to claims that a student is unsafe?

These counterexamples are important because they illustrate that safetyism might not be what it appears to be. Even the word, safety, implies that safetyism is a defensive norm: to protect others. However, safetyism might not be actual concern about the safety of students or “the community at large.” Elsewhere, I have argued that moralistic attacks nearly always have a pretext. To claim that someone has done something that makes others unsafe might be a call for defense. But it might be better understood as a kind of offense, a pretext to launch moral attacks. Safetyism, in other words, might be a rhetorical and psychological weapon.

Dangerism

At the University of Pennsylvania, Paula Scanlan swam for the University during the time that Lia Thomas, previously a member of the men’s swimming team, competed on the women’s team. In an interview, Scanlan described the locker room with Thomas as “incredibly uncomfortable.”  Instead of rushing to protect her—here was a student using the language of discomfort—as one would expect given the emphasis on safetyism, according to Scanlan, “the university wanted us to be quiet and they did it in a very effective way. They continued to tell us that our opinions were wrong and if we had an issue about it, we were the problem...”

More vividly, recent terrorist attacks have revealed a much more serious and visible trend among universities. On November 1^st, a video was posted of a speech given by Noa Fay, a student at Columbia University, who reported that fellow Jews received death threats and other forms of harassment from their fellow students. She indicated that the perpetrators suffered no consequences and that Jews “do not feel physically safe on Campus.” Abigail Shrier summed this and related incidents up in the headline of an excellent article about the indifference to Jewish students’ concerns about their safety amid pro-Palestinian rallies: “Universities to Jewish Students: You’re On Your Own.” We are used to colleges responding with alacrity when a student claims that a word, a gesture, or a symbol have made them “uncomfortable” or concerned about “harm.” However, as Shrier puts it:

… American universities shrug while Jewish students on American campuses face students cheering for their murder. As one Jewish young woman cried to a professor, during yesterday’s University of Washington pro-Hamas rally, “How are you allowing this. They want us dead. Please.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. The issue here should be focused on legitimate threats of actual harm. I reject the claim that words and ideas are properly considered “violence.” My position on free speech is along the lines of that endorsed by people like KC Johnson and organizations such as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. So while I would absolutely defend the rights of pro-Palestinian students to demonstrate peacefully, hitting people with sticks and banging on glass doors is not protected speech. Reasonable people can disagree both about how to exactly set the standards for free speech—the First Amendment and subsequent judicial opinions on the topic are good places to start—and how a particular case fits with those standards. Generally, I support erring on the side of more rather than less speech, consistent with FIRE’s principles and those of the first amendment.

All students are safe but some are safer than others

If Shrier is correct, why are American universities suddenly shrugging away concerns about safety? Two ideas point to the answer, which is that safetyism wasn’t really about defense in the first place.  

First, the session at the AAA, the concerns of Paula Scanlon, and the fears of Jewish students are, at their core, conflicts. It can be easy to lose sight of this fact because in discussions of safetyism, often only one side of the story—the person claiming they are at risk—is considered. Now, of course, some varieties of safetyism don’t involve conflict, such as making playgrounds safter by having more forgiving surfaces. Frequently, however, a claim about harm or safety sets one person or group in conflict with the person or group allegedly posing the threat.

The second piece that illustrates what is going on is to look at the results of conflicts in which people claim that they are in jeopardy. Let’s take a few examples.

Some years ago, James Damore wrote a memo in which he questioned the diversity practices of the company he was then working for, Google. The memo made claims about biological differences that were, it was claimed, “harmful” … and led to Damore’s firing from the company.

In 2020, the nation was entranced by the Central Park birdwatching incident in which Amy Cooper said that she called the police because she felt threatened by Christian Cooper, who had asked her to put her dog on a leash. This is not the place to litigate the facts of the matter, but the result of that conflict was that Amy Cooper lost her job and, really, the reality that had been her life. Christian Cooper’s subsequent birdwatching book became a bestseller.

In 2018, graduate students approached Dartmouth professor David Bucci with accusations of sexual harassment by other people in the Department he chaired. While Bucci himself was not accused, he was named in a subsequent lawsuit because of the alleged slow response to prevent further abuse. Within a year of the filing of the lawsuit, Bucci committed suicide.

These examples are, of course, chosen to illustrate the point. They show, however, that claims regarding safety are conflicts, often accusations with life-altering results for the parties involved. This fact illuminates why some claims about safety are treated differently from others.

Action pretexts

This analysis turns on the fact that there are two different ways that people choose sides when conflicts emerge. One way is to choose a side focusing on the identity of those involved. So, for instance, most of us would nearly always side with a family member, no matter the circumstances. (Exceptions are illustrative: The Unabomber’s brother turned him in. In extreme cases, even the strength of family loyalty is not sufficient to choose sides based on identity.) A second way to choose sides is to focus on the actions, what the people involved did, doing so impartially, setting aside the identities of the people in the conflict.

Importantly, however, almost invariably, when someone is choosing based on identity, they claim that they are choosing based on actions. The examples I have used before are Jews in Nazi Germany and Blacks in the American South. In these cases, people side against the members of the disfavored groups because of their group membership, but when attacks are made, they are almost always justified with a reason. In the case of the Jews, the reason was that they were harming the German economy. These reasons are, really, action pretexts. They are alleged actions taken by a member of the disfavored group that is used to justify an attack. They are, to be sure, often fictitious.

Over time and across cultures, the permissible action pretexts change. In Berlin in the 1930s, the pretext was economic harm. In the 1950s American south, it might have been an alleged sexual relationship between a black man and a white woman. In Salem Massachusetts in the 17^th Century, it was witchcraft. Recently, the sorts of actions that are the basis of large numbers of accusations are put in the language of harm, and include racism, transphobia, and sexual harassment.

This is the heart of my suggestion that safetyism is offense rather than defense: Pretexts change but human nature stays the same. When people learn the allowable pretexts for accusations against others—I am feeling uncomfortable, for example—they use these pretexts to the extent they think third parties will back them. In this way, members of more powerful groups can attack and exploit others, especially those in subordinate groups.

The hierarchy of privilege

With this in mind, it is easier to make sense of safetyism and why Jews have not been protected by it.

Progressive ideology, which has taken hold of academic and other institutions, views people as either oppressors or oppressed. When Scanlon came into conflict with a person who identifies as trans, Scanlan was the lower, oppressor status individual. For this reason, the community sided against her. A similar dynamic is at work in conflicts in which people are of different races, as in the case of the Coopers.

Which brings us to the subject of Jews. As Bari Weiss and, even before recent events, James Lindsay pointed out, anti-Semitism is “a reliable consequence of the ideology of Critical Social Justice when put into practice.” I recommend both pieces by Weiss and Lindsay, which smartly address the issue. Armin Rosen’s piece in Tablet and David Bernstein’s excellent piece in Reason on this topic are also excellent. Bernstein hits the nail on the head, in my view, writing: “Because they [Jews] are oppressors, they have no right to self-defense, no right not to have their children slaughtered, their women raped, and so on, if it's done by the oppressed, in particular if done in the name of anti-colonial resistance.”

Though some might be surprised given the oppression that Jews have endured over the millennia, under the progressive rubric, Jews and, especially, Israeli Jews, are white colonizers, the very bottom of the identitarian hierarchy.

In short, safetyism is not really about defense. It is an action pretext, a tool that is available for members of favored (“oppressed”) groups—on campus these are racial and ethnic minorities, those who identify as trans, and so on—but only for those people. This is how action pretexts work. Action pretexts are the reasons used by members of more powerful groups to bring third parties to the conflict to their side. And, to be clear, by “powerful” here I don’t mean who previously had power. I’m referring to the power that people have, often as members of groups, in virtue of the fact that others take their side in conflicts.

This dynamic explains why safetyism “works” for thee but not for me. Once you view claims that one is unsafe or uncomfortable as an action pretext to accumulate support during conflicts, then it is possible to predict when it will be effective and when it will not be. Is the complaint coming from a favored group and is the conflict with someone in a disfavored group? My prediction is that most of the time, you’ll be able to determine who won—and who lost—based on who is making the claim about safety rather than what they allegedly did. The winner and loser of past conflicts on college campuses and at other progressive-dominated organizations can be predicted, if this view is correct, by simply knowing the identities of those involved in the conflicts, without needing any information about the putative facts behind the dispute.

That’s the bad news. Safetyism has been omnipresent on college campuses and other institutions, allowing countless moral attacks on victims of groups not protected by their identity.

The good news is that the present moment, it seems likely that this dynamic is about to change. The reason is that what was formerly just a pretext has taken on new significance. By and large, prestigious American institutions of higher learning are among the safest places ever to have existed on the planet. My guess is that administrators did not really think that students needed trigger warnings before they were told that there were two sexes or that using “main bedroom” instead of “master bedroom” would save listeners from trauma. My sense is that much of safetyism was theater that played an important role in the overall cultural milieu of campus life, affording the sorts of moralistic attacks the students enjoyed.

The stakes, however, have been raised. While there has, of course, been violence and coercion on campuses, recent weeks—this piece was written in October and November of 2023—have seen violence erupt on campuses from New York to Boston to New Orleans and elsewhere. Violence and safety are no longer, as it were, academic matters.

My guess is that administrators and leaders didn’t mind if protection was dispensed unequally when the stakes were low. And they didn’t mind the destruction of a life here and there of a member of group that wasn’t very popular anyway, given the current cultural context.

That has changed. Now that students are genuinely in fear of their physical safety because of the spread of an ideology that truly wishes them harm, my prediction is that administrators, who on the whole genuinely care about preventing violence to students on their watch, will start to adopt a more action-focused rather than identity-focused approach. Related, my (optimistic) prediction is that these institutions are going to adopt more impartial approaches to both speech and safety. Recall that impartiality is a cornerstone of action-focused regimes. When real physical harm is at stake, institutions will start to afford protections to members of all groups, not just the favored ones. Further, I suspect that as physical violence looms larger on campuses, the attention to hurt feelings and discomfort with ideas and words will recede. The present moment is adding perspective that has been missing both at the local level and at the global one.

Safetyism might have been a mix of a little defense and a lot of offense, but now that the stakes are higher, my guess is that this mix will swing in the direction of more genuine protection for students. The trend for donors to withhold support in light of the now glaringly obvious double standard will also help.

On the other hand, it’s very difficult to overestimate the administrative rot in America’s institutions of higher learning, so it might be best to keep one’s hopes relatively modest.

Rob Kurzban has a PhD in Psychology from University of California Santa Barbara and Masters of Public Administration from the Fels Institute of Government. He also writes for Living Fossils. You can find more of his essays there.

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