Back in my day, I had an outspoken atheist professor who said at the start of every semester that if we didn’t like something in his class: “Tough shit. Suck it up or leave.” I didn’t care because he was funny and was good at learnin’ me logic and philosophy, and I actually got to know him better after taking more and more classes.
Never once did it ever enter my mind that I should feel uncomfortable with being nearly targeted directly in class at times. Even if I was uncomfortable, the rhetorical tools to complain about it simply didn’t exist, and more importantly the outrage culture of social media was almost decades away. Truly, it was a suck it up or leave situation.
See, some of the myths Ovid recounts involve sexual violence. Zeus’ daughter Persephone (aka Prosperina), for instance, is kidnapped, raped, and taken as a bride by Hades, king of the underworld. The op-ed writers suggest this ancient Greek and Roman myth is too triggering to be taught in today’s classroom:…
It’s really a symptom, not a root cause, of decline, but a culture of increasing sissiness is going to reach mission-critical defective status rapidly.
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Well, perhaps it’s a matter of degree, since cultural prissiness has been around for more than a century, but not so crazy silly as we have it now. Then again, I suspect it’s more a matter that, if you see this silly stuff with a certain range of other symptoms of decline, it serves as a warning of impending doom.
Seems like a “necessary but not sufficient” scenario.