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Anti Federalist
05-12-2016, 07:36 PM
A good read from The Atlantic.



How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/concept-creep/477939/

A mother leaves her son in the car while popping into a store at a strip mall. She is charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. A high school senior complains to her Facebook friends about a teacher and is suspended for “cyberbullying.” Students at Wellesley start a petition calling for the removal of a statue of a man in his underwear, claiming that the art piece caused them emotional trauma. So many residents of Santa Monica, California, claim to need emotional support animals that the local farmer’s market warns against service dog fraud.

How did American culture arrive at these moments? A new research paper by Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, offers as useful a framework for understanding what’s going on as any I’ve seen. In “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,” Haslam argues that concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before,”expanded meanings that reflect “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm.”

He calls these expansions of meaning “concept creep.”

Although critics may hold concept creep responsible for damaging cultural trends, he writes, “such as supposed cultures of fear, therapy, and victimhood, the shifts I present have some positive implications.” Still, he adds, “they also have potentially damaging ramifications for society and psychology that cannot be ignored.”

Two stories illustrate how concept creep can be a force for good or ill.

Story 1: During the 1950s, third graders would climb into their parents’ cars and ride around without seatbelts. When stopping short, fathers and mothers would use their right arms in hopes of keeping their little ones from hitting their heads on the dashboard. These kids lived in houses slathered with lead paint and spent hours in family rooms thick with cigarette smoke. Today, there are laws against letting children ride around without seat belts, lead paint is banned, and there is such a powerful stigma against exposing children to second-hand smoke that far fewer kids suffer from poor health outcomes related to such exposure. Society’s concept of what constituted an unacceptable risk, harm, or trauma expanded for the better.

Story 2: During the 1950s, third graders could walk to school, play alone at the park, or bike 10 minutes to a friend’s house without anyone worrying or objecting, so long as they came home for supper or before the street lights came on. Today, though kidnapping is just as rare, a parent who allows that same behavior is at risk of arrest or even losing custody of their children to their state’s child protective services bureaucracy. Society’s concept of what constituted an unacceptable risk, harm, or trauma expanded for ill. In Hanna Rosin’s words, it “stripped childhood of independence, risk taking, and discovery—without making it safer.”

Expanding notions of harm have transformed many parts of society for good and ill.

Concept Creep and Abuse

How did a working-class mom get arrested, lose her fast food job, and temporarily lose custody of her 9-year-old for letting the child play alone at a nearby park?

The concept of abuse expanded too far.

Classically, psychological investigations recognized two forms of child abuse, physical and sexual, Haslam writes. In more recent decades, however, the concept of abuse has witnessed “horizontal creep” as new forms of abuse were recognized or studied. For example, “emotional abuse” was added as a new subtype of abuse. Neglect, traditionally a separate category, came to be seen as a type of abuse, too.

Meanwhile, the concept of abuse underwent “vertical creep.” That is, the behavior seen as qualifying for a given kind of abuse became steadily less extreme. Some now regard any spanking as physical abuse. Within psychology, “the boundary of neglect is indistinct,” Haslam writes. “As a consequence, the concept of neglect can become over-inclusive, identifying behavior as negligent that is substantially milder or more subtle than other forms of abuse. This is not to deny that some forms of neglect are profoundly damaging, merely to argue that the concept’s boundaries are sufficiently vague and elastic to encompass forms that are not severe.”

Students of philosophy will recall Aristotle’s belief that virtue is a mean state between extremes—for every virtue, there are corresponding vices of both deficiency and excess. That conceit could inform how a society conceives of abuse. Seeing nothing wrong with a parent who verbally berates, mocks, and frightens a 7-year-old, or fails to take her to the doctor, the dentist, or the schoolhouse, merely because there is no physical or sexual abuse, suggests a vice of deficiency.

On the other hand, consider a parent who screams at their 13-year-old in a moment of anger, “You’re behaving so selfishly that I’m ashamed to be your mother!” To construe that isolated incident in an otherwise loving home as emotional abuse would be a vice of excess, and if it led to the child’s removal by child protective services, or an overzealous psychologist convincing the child that they are a victim of abuse, it could harm all involved as surely as could a vice of deficiency.

What Counts As Bullying

How does an honor student engaged in the oldest student pastime, complaining to peers about a teacher, wind up suspended with a “cyberbullying” mark on her record?

“The concept of bullying has spread from its original meaning to encompass a wider range of phenomena,” Haslam writes. “It has expanded horizontally into online behavior, into adult workplaces, and into forms of social exclusion that do not directly target the victim with hurtful actions, as distinct from hurtful omissions.” (For example,being excluded from a group of friends is dubbed bullying.)

Bullying has expanded vertically, too.

“Behavior that is less extreme than prototypical bullying now falls within its bounds,” Haslam observes, adding, “in some circumstances bullying behavior need not be repeated or intentional, and it need not occur in the context of a power imbalance as traditionally conceived.” This “concept creep” might square with our intuitions if, say, a “bullying” college student posted, on one occasion, a “revenge porn” video of a powerful pop star a few years his elder who he dated in high school.

Yet the same “concept creep” produced this excess, as reported by the New York Times:

Katherine Evans said she was frustrated with her English teacher for ignoring her pleas for help with assignments and a brusque reproach when she missed class to attend a school blood drive. So Ms. Evans, who was then a high school senior and honor student, logged onto the networking site Facebook and wrote a rant against the teacher. “To those select students who have had the displeasure of having Ms. Sarah Phelps, or simply knowing her and her insane antics: Here is the place to express your feelings of hatred,” she wrote. Her posting drew a handful of responses, some of which were in support of the teacher and critical of Ms. Evans. “Whatever your reasons for hating her are, they’re probably very immature,” a former student of Ms. Phelps wrote in her defense.

A few days later, Ms. Evans removed the post from her Facebook page and went about the business of preparing for graduation and studying journalism in the fall. But two months after her online venting, Ms. Evans was called into the principal’s office and was told she was being suspended for “cyberbullying,” a blemish on her record that she said she feared could keep her from getting into graduate schools or landing her dream job.

One rant, reasonably mild, one time, by a teen against an adult in a position of authority. By this low standard, I’ve been “cyberbullied” over Twitter and email most days.

Expanded Notions of Trauma

Trauma originally referred to a physical injury to the body. In bygone wars, many who experienced what World War I soldiers called “shell shock,” and what is now called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, were denied sympathy, care and treatment for their condition.

Thanks to “concept creep,” today’s veterans are treated better. Meanwhile, the concept of trauma generally, and PTSD particularly, is expanding to include lesser harms.

Haslam writes:

In recent years, trauma theorists and practitioners have proposed including childbirth, sexual harassment, infidelity, and emotional losses such as abandonment by a spouse or loss or a sudden move or loss of home within that range. These extensions are sometimes justified empirically by research showing that these events can precipitate PTSD symptoms (e.g., Carlson, Smith, & Dalenberg, 2013). Nevertheless, they represent a lowering of the threshold of severity for traumatic events.

A recent definition of trauma produced by the U.S. Government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration exemplifies this lowering:

Individual trauma results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.

This definition abandons most of the restrictive elements of DSM’s Criterion A.

A traumatic event need not be a discrete event, need not involve serious threats to life or limb, need not be outside normal experience, need not be likely to create marked distress in almost everyone, and need not even produce marked distress in the traumatized person, who must merely experience it as “harmful.” Under this definition the concept of trauma is rendered much broader and more subjective than it was even three decades ago.

Indeed, by the government’s definition, a Wellesley student who saw that statue of a man in his underwear, perceived the event as “emotionally threatening” and experienced “lasting adverse effects” on her “spiritual well-being” is a trauma victim. Since the same designation also encompasses victims of torture and brutal sexual assaults, and people who experience adverse effects as extreme as suicide, an inevitable effect of this “concept creep” is to leave us without language to distinguish classic trauma, even though isolating such cases might be useful or necessary.

Mental Disorder And Its Treatment

Creep in the concept of “mental disorder” has been much debated in elementary education. Are boys displaying normal restlessness in school classrooms being diagnosed with attention-deficit disorders and medicated so that they’re more sedate for teachers?

“Ordinary vicissitudes of childhood now find shelter under the umbrella concept of mental disorder,” Haslam writes, and with regard to the whole range of mental disorders, “recent editions of DSM sometimes loosen the criteria for determining where normality ends and mental disorder begins. This quantitative easing allows milder, less disabling psychological phenomena to qualify as disordered. Sometimes this relaxation of criteria takes the form of recognizing less severe ‘spectrum’ conditions, as with cyclothymia, a less impairing variant of bipolar disorder, and Asperger’s syndrome, a less impairing variant of autistic disorder, which has recently been reincorporated in the latter diagnosis, thereby vertically expanding it.”

Once again, alongside potential benefits of “concept creep” are significant pitfalls. Haslam worries, “By misrepresenting normal sadness, worry, and fear as mental disorders, the mental health professions overmedicate, exaggerate the population prevalence of disorder, and deflect resources away from more severe conditions.”

These trends within psychology have influenced the larger culture, and in doing so have raised another concern about “concept creep.” There are suffering people in the world for whom emotional-support animals really do prove vital companions. But the new ethic of never questioning anyone’s subjective assessment of their own psychological needs, in combination with a surfeit of people willing to game any system that allows (say) a beloved pet to accompany them, is unsustainable.

This was best illustrated by Patricia Marx, who wrote in the New Yorker about her successful attempt to get “an emotional support turtle” into a fancy Upper East Side art museum.

She succeeded in part because she had a letter:

To Whom It May Concern:

RE: Patricia Marx

Ms. Marx has been evaluated for and diagnosed with a mental health disorder as defined in the DSM-5. Her psychological condition affects daily life activities, ability to cope, and maintenance of psychological stability.

It also can influence her physical status.

Ms. Marx has a turtle that provides significant emotional support, and ameliorates the severity of symptoms that affect her daily ability to fulfill her responsibilities and goals. Without the companionship, support, and care-taking activities of her turtle, her mental health and daily living activities are compromised. In my opinion, it is a necessary component of treatment to foster improved psychological adjustment, support functional living activities, her well being, productivity in work and home responsibilities, and amelioration of the severity of psychological issues she experiences in some specific situations to have an Emotional Support Animal (ESA).

She has registered her pet with the Emotional Support Animal Registration of America. This letter further supports her pet as an ESA, which entitles her to the rights and benefits legitimized by the Fair Housing Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. It allows exceptions to housing, and transportation services that otherwise would limit her from being able to be accompanied by her emotional support animal.

The backlash to America’s “ever-increasing sensitivity to harm” is about a lot of diffuse, sometimes contradictory things, but it is partly about an aversion to being scammed.

Changing Views of Prejudice

Prejudice is perhaps the most controversial subject that Haslam tackles, tracing its evolution in the field of social psychology. Classically, “the prejudiced person holds hostile attitudes toward members of an outgroup.” Is that definition sufficient?

He writes:

Early social psychological researchers began with an understanding of prejudice as blatant bigotry, examining endorsement of hostile and derogatory statements about African Americans, Jews, and others. However, as rates of endorsement of these statements began to wane later in the 20th century, the understanding of prejudice was broadened.

McConaghy (1986) drew a distinction between “old-fashioned” racism, exemplified by endorsement of explicit bigotry, and a subtler and more prevalent “modern” racism. Modern racists, like so-called “symbolic” racists (Sears, Henry, & Kosterman, 2000), do not endorse direct hostility to traditional targets of prejudice but instead denied the continuing existence of racism and expressed opposition to affirmative action policies. It was possible to score high on a questionnaire measure of modern racism, and later sexism, without agreeing with any derogatory evaluations of the target group. Nevertheless, such scores were taken to indicate prejudice because they were conceptualized as revealing tacit negative evaluations and were associated with other indicators of prejudice, such as discriminatory behavior.

Within academia, “concept creep” expanded what counted as prejudice “from direct, expressed antipathy...to inferred antipathy,” and then the concept was expanded in two more ways. “The concept of aversive prejudice (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2004) applies to liberally minded people who deny personal prejudice but hold aversions, sometimes unconscious, to other-race people,” Haslam writes. “These aversions are not based on hostile antipathy but on fear, unease, or discomfort.” And the idea of implicit bias—that subconscious attitudes and beliefs could shape actions—entrenched the notion that prejudice included negative racial sentiments held by people even if they were unaware of harboring them.

In yet another evolution, prejudice was no longer restricted to negative group evaluations. “The concept of benevolent sexism (Glick & Fiske, 1996) extended prejudice to include group evaluations that were at least superficially warm and positive,” Haslam writes. “Benevolent sexists idealize women as pure creatures who are too delicate and morally superior to inhabit the hurly-burly public world of men.”

And the concept of prejudice as understood in the academy would not be complete without mentioning the rise of the controversial microaggressions framework:

...some research implies that prejudice exists at least in part in the eyes of the target. Research on microaggressions (Sue et al., 2007), for example, takes the target’s perceptions of prejudice as clear evidence of its existence: If a target perceives a slight as evidence of prejudice, then it is taken as such, even if the slight is ambiguous and its author denies it.

Of course, many prejudiced acts are unambiguous, target perceptions may tend to be accurate, and denials of prejudice are frequently not credible.

Nevertheless, to count perceived discrimination and ambiguous microaggressions as unqualified instances of prejudice is to subjectivize the concept. In addition to this subjectivity, the concept of microaggression extends the concept of prejudice by encompassing acts of omission and phenomena that reflect anxiety rather than hostility.

Proposed examples include the faltering speech, trembling voice, and mispronunciation of words by anxious White therapists discussing racial issues with minority clients, and “the sheer exclusion of decorations or literature that represents various racial groups” in environments that they inhabit.

The scholarship behind each step traced above has generated too much debate to summarize let alone engage here. But it seems reasonable to presume that, as in every other realm, “concept creep” around prejudice includes both salutary improvements in understanding and expansions that could be perilously excessive.

What strikes me, considering controversies I write about within this framework, is that the “vertical creep” of prejudice isn’t necessarily the core reason people are at loggerheads.

Large majorities in America believe that there should be a powerful stigma against prejudice, as classically defined. If you’re overtly hostile to members of a racial or ethnic group, I don’t want you in my home or working for my company or living next door. Like most people I know, there is no group for whom I feel more aversion than racists and few political causes that I feel as strongly about as opposing prejudice.

Nor do I object to the academics who study lesser kinds of prejudice.

It’s useful to understand and study the fact that there are people “who deny personal prejudice but hold aversions … not based on hostile antipathy but on fear, unease, or discomfort.” I think that phenomenon is damaging and worthy of remedy.

I’m grateful for the scholars who are studying implicit bias, too.

But it seems like there ought to be clearly distinguishable words and concepts for klansmen and demagogues who deliberately stoke racial anxieties, on the one hand, and college students who take a test that suggests that they have mild, negative associations about a racial group, without harboring any animosity toward people in that group, acting badly toward any members of that group, or advocating for anything but full equality on the other. Those college students may be labeled “prejudiced” or “racist,” but few people will be inclined to exclude them from their homes or their workplaces.

When social-justice progressives on college campuses call for peers to be punished, socially or administratively, for “microaggressions,” like saying the word “fútbol” instead of soccer, or donning a tiny sombrero at a tequila party, or chalking Trump 2016 on a sidewalk, I wonder if part of what’s going on is that the punishment-seekers are saying, “That’s prejudiced” or “That’s racist,” and meaning, “That’s racist, the category that we all agree should be maximally stigmatized.” Whereas their critics reply, “No, that isn’t racist,” or “You’re wrong,” meaning not that the behavior at issue is or isn’t coherently objectionable in a way worth interrogating, but that, “Right or wrong, that behavior clearly doesn’t fall into the category of things that should, almost all of us have agreed, be maximally stigmatized.”

In this telling, “concept creep” exacerbates failures to communicate.

When a concept is stretched to include “milder, subtler, or less extreme phenomena than those to which they referred at an earlier time,” any earlier judgment or consensus about how best to respond to that concept no longer applies.

Why Are So Many Concepts Creeping In the Same Direction?

Concept creep is inevitable and vital if society is to make good use of new information. But why has the direction of concept creep, across so many different concepts, trended toward greater sensitivity to harm as opposed to lesser sensitivity?

Haslam endorses two theories.

One concerns the field of psychology and its incentives. “It could be argued that just as successful species increase their territory, invading and adapting to new habitats, successful concepts and disciplines also expand their range into new semantic niches,” he theorizes. “Concepts that successfully attract the attention of researchers and practitioners are more likely to be applied in new ways and new contexts than those that do not.” The other theory posits an ideological explanation. “Psychology has played a role in the liberal agenda of sensitivity to harm and responsiveness to the harmed,” he writes “and its increased focus on negative phenomena—harms such as abuse, addiction, bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma—has been symptomatic of the success of that social agenda.”

A third theory occurs to me.

Consider criminality, bullying, and racism. As fights against crime or bullying or racism intensify, crooks, bullies and racists try to hide their misdeeds; enforcers react—if a thief starts “innocently forgetting to pay,” a crackdown on the tactic is needed; if a bully starts kicking his victim under the table rather than punching him in the face, a definition of bullying as “open aggression” is shown to be flawed and insufficient; if racists no longer use racial slurs in public, but persist in using dog whistles, the latter are stigmatized. But efforts to encompass covert bad behavior tend to target increasingly minor acts, and more alarmingly, to rely on opaque or subjective assessments that capture some non-crooks, non-racists, and non-bullies. More innocents are thus searched or arrested or dubbed racists or bullies.

Invariably, this triggers a backlash and an ensuing debate that is muddled in a particular way. When critics of the criminal-justice system or progressive anti-racism suggest that society is now punishing some people wrongly or too severely, defenders of the status quo accuse them of acting as apologists for criminals or racists. The core of disagreement actually concerns whether concept creep has gone too far.

Jonathan Haidt, who believes it has gone too far, offers a fourth theory. “If an increasingly left-leaning academy is staffed by people who are increasingly hostile to conservatives, then we can expect that their concepts will shift, via motivated scholarship, in ways that will help them and their allies (e.g., university administrators) to prosecute and condemn conservatives,” he writes. “We can expect academic concepts to ‘creep’ in ways that increase the number of victims and the damages those victims suffer, and in ways that make it ever harder for anyone to defend themselves against ugly moral charges. Such politically motivated scholarship may sometimes originate in humanities departments rather than in psychology, but it draws heavily on psychological concepts and research, and it feeds back into the six streams of creeping psychological research that Haslam reviewed.”

For liberals who are skeptical of that explanation, he adds:

Suppose that the FBI was traditionally a right-leaning organization, like most law enforcement organizations. Suppose conservatives outnumbered liberals by about three to one from its founding in 1908 through the 1990s.

But suppose that during the administration of George W. Bush the agency began to lean much further to the right. After the 9/11 attacks, the agency’s culture became extremely hostile to liberals and Democrats, who were widely associated with the gravest threats to the nation. By 2012 the ratio of conservatives to liberals was fourteen to one. Do you suppose this transformation might affect the way the FBI did its job, or would you trust the agency’s professionalism to keep politics out of law enforcement?

Might the agency shift its resources toward conservative priorities, such as fighting terrorism and moral decay, while ignoring liberal priorities such as abortion clinic bombings, civil rights infringements, and environmental crimes? And might we begin to see law enforcement concepts creeping to the right, such that more and more citizens fall under suspicion of entitlement cheating, abetting illegal immigration, or subverting American values? Perhaps we’d even see the creation of brand new legal concepts such as “micro-treasons,” defined as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative attitudes toward the United States of America.”

The Harms of Excessive Concept Creep

Concept creep “broadens moral concern in a way that aligns with a liberal social agenda by defining new kinds of experience as harming and new classes of people as harmed,” Haslam writes, “and it identifies these people as needful of care and protection. As an expansion of the moral circle into new and milder forms of harm, concept creep might appear to be an entirely beneficial sign of moral progress. It defines previously tolerated forms of abusive, domineering, and discriminatory behavior as problematic, and extends professional care to people who experience adversity.”

However, he adds, there are many reasons to be concerned about excessive sensitivity to harm:

“by applying concepts of abuse, bullying, and trauma to less severe and clearly defined actions and events, and by increasingly including subjective elements into them, concept creep may release a flood of unjustified accusations and litigation, as well as excessive and disproportionate enforcement regimes.”
“...concept creep can produce a kind of semantic dilution. If a concept expands to encompass less extreme phenomena... then its prototypical meaning is likely to shift... If trauma, for example, ceases to refer exclusively to terrifying events that are outside normal human experience, and is applied to less severe and more prevalent stresses, it will come to be seen in a more benign light.”
“...by increasing the range of people who are defined as moral patients—people worthy of moral concern, based on their perceived capacity to suffer and be harmed—it risks reducing the range of people who see themselves as capable of moral agency.” There is a tendency “for more and more people to see themselves as victims who are defined by their suffering, vulnerability, and innocence...The flip-side of this expanding sense of victimhood would be a typecast assortment of moral villains: abusers, bullies, bigots, and traumatizers.”
Expanding mental disorder “can pathologize normal experiences, generate over-diagnosis and over-treatment, and engender a sense of diminished agency.”

While Haslam and Haidt appear to have meaningfully different beliefs about why concept creep arose within academic psychology and spread throughout society, they were in sufficient agreement about its dangers to co-author a Guardian op-ed on the subject.

It focuses on how greater sensitivity to harm has affected college campuses.

“Of course young people need to be protected from some kinds of harm, but overprotection is harmful, too, for it causes fragility and hinders the development of resilience,” they wrote. “As Nasim Taleb pointed out in his book Antifragile, muscles need resistance to develop, bones need stress and shock to strengthen and the growing immune system needs to be exposed to pathogens in order to function. Similarly, he noted, children are by nature anti-fragile – they get stronger when they learn to recover from setbacks, failures and challenges to their cherished ideas.”

They continued:

A university that tries to protect students from words, ideas, and graffiti that they find unpleasant or even disgusting is doing them no favors. It is setting them up for greater suffering and failure when they leave the university and enter the workplace. Tragically, the very students who most need the strength to face later discrimination are the ones rendered weakest by victimhood culture on campus.

The unrest on university campuses has not just been caused by creeping concepts. Black and Muslim students, in particular, must endure ignorant questions and other indignities that other students rarely face. Diversity is difficult, and more must be done to make all feel welcome on campus. But universities should be careful not encourage victimhood culture, looping effects and greater fragility.

While I agree with the potential harms identified by Haslam and Haidt, I am less inclined than they are to see concept creep and increased, sometimes excessive sensitivity to harm as exclusively liberal phenomena. Within U.S. police departments, there are many examples of creep in what constitutes probable cause, as illustrated by the thousands of black and brown men thrown against walls and frisked in New York City after cops said that they made “furtive movements.”

Unlike postal employees and meter readers, police officers fearing harm from dogs kill them by the hundreds or perhaps thousands every year in what the DOJ calls an epidemic.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration and many Americans grew increasingly sensitive to harms, real and imagined, from terrorism. Bill Maher was fired from his show, Politically Incorrect, for saying that the al-Qaeda hijackers who carried out the suicide mission were not cowardly. Dick Cheney declared, “If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response.” The invasion of Iraq was predicated, in part, on the idea that 9/11 “changed everything,” and that America could no longer afford to contain Saddam Hussein. The drone war illustrates creep in what is said to constitute an “imminent” threat.
Read Follow-Up Notes

Readers respond to Conor's piece

Before 9/11, the notion of torturing prisoners was verboten. After the Bush Administration’s torture was made public, popular debate focused on mythical “ticking time bomb” scenarios, in which a whole city would be obliterated but for torture. Now Donald Trump suggests that torture should be used more generally against terrorists. Torture is, as well, an instance in which people within the field of psychology pushed concept creep in the direction of less sensitivity to harm, as the profession became complicit in the Bush Administration’s effort to get away with “enhanced interrogations.”

Concept creep can be necessary or needless. It can align concepts more or less closely with underlying realities. It can change society for better or worse. Yet many who push for more sensitivy to harm seem unaware of how oversensitivty can do harm. The insight that concept creep spurs progress and problems alike is important, especially for those averse to doing harm in the name of sensitivity to harm. If you’ve got dissents or insights to add on this subject, email conor@theatlantic.com

phill4paul
05-12-2016, 07:47 PM
I had thought that the word following "quivering" in the title started with a "p." Wasn't exactly what I thought though after clicking and reading the full title.

DamianTV
05-12-2016, 08:27 PM
Concept Creep is what happens when govt think tanks dream up more and more auspicious ways to validate the reasons the public needs them. Its not the population thats fucked, its the govt. Govt is what grows and Concept Creeping is the inevitable result of govt efforts to continue to endlessly expand.

acptulsa
05-12-2016, 08:29 PM
Pity psychologists aren't made to take the Hippocratic Oath. We could sue them for violating it every time one of them does the government's bidding.

heavenlyboy34
05-12-2016, 11:18 PM
Loosely related:
http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=7565
During a "Managing Microaggressions (https://www.facebook.com/events/359408850849753/)" event last Monday at the University of Virginia, students spoke out against microaggressions like identifying as “American” and criticizing someone’s taste in food.
The event, which was hosted by the ***** Student Union, was described as an opportunity for students to tell “stories of microaggressions they have experienced in their lives and [frame] them inside of the larger forces of their respective worlds, such as identity, culture, and others.”

A Hispanic student from the School of Education began by declaring that “I refuse to take up [the] identity” of “American” because “this country has decided to take it upon itself to identify as an entire hemisphere,” which he called “the most blatant microaggression in the context of this country.”
Instead of American, the student said he identifies as Latinx, *****, socioeconomically disadvantaged, and from Southern California. Later, recounting the time he told his mother he was *****, he noted her response of “I love you. Do you need to speak to a counselor?” “as if though my sexuality’s…some mental health problem that I had to deal with.”
The Hispanic student also took offense when people criticized his food taste, saying “don’t insult something that I like just because you don’t….My taste, whether it’s my orientation or my food are mine….You’re insulting the taste of the people that I grew up with…an entire subculture…an entire people that you don’t even know exist.”
“Please don’t tell me you wear those together” was another microaggression, reportedly suffered by female Hispanic student Hannah Melissa Borja, when a friend saw Borja in cow skin boots and a poncho her family had passed down to her.
During her speech, Borja called out her “closest friend,” Logan, who was in the audience and allegedly guilty of perpetrating the latest microaggression against her, recalling that before she went to an interview with a Latino law firm employee, Logan told her to “remember to use your best Spanish and don’t speak with an accent.” When Borja said “I can’t help my accent,” Logan responded “you know what I meant; don’t eat your ‘r’s or your ‘s’es.”
Speaking to the event’s attendees, Borja said “I do know what he meant…don’t talk like Puerto Rican, don’t be the stereotypical, Puerto Rican girl who has no business being in the professional world. Don’t be you, go home.”
A female Muslim student in a hijab later claimed she had been told “no one’s going to be physically attracted to you; isn’t that the point of the headscarf?” and “how do we know you’re a girl? You’re probably bald under there.”
She also complained about two competing stereotypes of Muslims who wear the hijab, one in which they are “asexual, unfeminine, and prudish…the sexually uninterested veiled woman” and another “orientalist one” that has led to “privileged white men [who] think it’s okay to drunkenly grab me as I walk down the Corner and ask me what I’m hiding.”
Another speaker, Francesca Callicotte, said that if people don’t call out microaggressions, “the unintentional will become intentional and impulsive ignorance will become premeditated aggression.”
Some students had complaints that arguably went beyond “microaggressions.” A black woman described a relationship she had with a white man in which “the barrage of microaggressions began” when he called her “brown sugar” and referred to her as a “shiny token.” The relationship culminated in the man sometimes saying the n-word, “the white race is just superior, but you’re the exception,” and telling her he wanted an all-white America.
During the dialogue period, students were instructed to introduce themselves and their pronouns, “use ‘I’ statements,” and “follow proper turn-taking procedure (wait for 2 people to talk in between the times you speak and speak again).”
At Campus Reform’s table, one student noted that “a lot of older white men” speak to her in ways she deems “disrespectful.” Another said “I’m not gonna lie; when I see somebody who looks like a stereotypical frat brother, I get scared to share certain things.” A student also mentioned that she “loved” when the speakers talked about “correcting people” while still maintaining friendships.
When one student expressed discomfort with “the r-word,” or “retarded,” Campus Reform asked if she would be fine with it being used scientifically to refer to a slower growth process, to which the student said context mattered.
Another student almost referred to her older brother as “severely autistic” instead of “autistic,” but quickly corrected herself, saying “I’m still unlearning some things, too.” Regarding the r-word, she said “I just hate that word in general” and alluded to the US government’s replacement (https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2013/08/01/2013-18552/change-in-terminology-mental-retardation-to-intellectual-disability) of the term “mental retardation” with “intellectual disability.”
Campus Reform also asked students how they felt about racist and sexist jokes and games like Cards Against Humanity. Some students thought jokes were alright if they “punched up” vs. “punched down.”
When Campus Reform brought up the Charlie Hebdo shooting and the question of what is and is not acceptable as satire, some students agreed with the magazine’s right to freedom of expression, but one said “if people are being degraded by these stereotypes and they’re uncomfortable with it, I think that’s enough reason to not use it and I’m just very uncomfortable with the tendency to immediately just start picking apart Islam.”
None of the students, however, could answer precisely who should be allowed to determine which jokes are off limits.
Reflecting on the growing hostility to PC culture, one student said “the person who’s usually calling people crybabies is usually coming from a place of privilege where they’ve never been attacked on anything and then as soon as they are, it’s ‘oh God, everyone’s being so horrible.’”

pcosmar
05-12-2016, 11:23 PM
Why am I thinking a lot of young men missed a trip to the woodshed.

and several are in need,, of a hard shot of reality,,

ChristianAnarchist
05-13-2016, 01:15 AM
The worst part for me is I've seen this change over the last 64 years and it HURTS! I feel physical pain when I see what the American Sheeple have become...

pcosmar
05-13-2016, 01:23 AM
The worst part for me is I've seen this change over the last 64 years and it HURTS! I feel physical pain when I see what the American Sheeple have become...

Change?

I think very late your blinders may be slipping,, or you asked for the truth.