Making the Unthinkable Thinkable

Here's something I am struggling with at the moment. 

I am, by and large, in favour of people thinking, and indeed thinking for themselves (as my frequent posts about Nancy Kline's Thinking Environment testify).  Likewise, I am in favour of free speech, and deeply suspicious of those who try to stop others from saying things they do not wish to have said.

And yet... I think there are boundaries. Indeed, I am sure there are. The obvious ones about inciting to violence or criminal activity are easy. But that's not where my dilemma lies. I am thinking more about the erosion of public morals; or to put it another way, the undermining of values that underpin a civilised society. 

Until fairly recently, for example, there was a broad consensus that suicide is not good. It is not good for the individual, nor for his or her immediate family and friends,  nor for the wider society. But one of the results of the debate about Assisted Dying (and other cultural discourses about hyper-autonomy) is that that consensus is being eroded. 

The press have very strict guidelines about the reporting of suicides, because it is well-established that it can be socially contagious.  And such guidelines I believe to be a societal good. But the political debate about assisted suicide has been carried on vociferously and often intemperately.  And my point is this: that by making the unthinkable thinkable (in this case, suicide) we risk increasing the number of people who move from thought to action.

This is also (one of the reasons) why pornography is so harmful; and why we have a particular abhorrence of (and legal sanctions against) child pornography. For whilst it may be true that not all those who indulge in child pornography go on to act out their fantasies, it is certainly the case that nobody abused a child without fantasising about doing so first (I refer readers again to Gwen Adshead's excellent book The Devil You Know, about which I have blogged before).

And we have a new factor to make this problem considerably more complex: social media. Another book I have already blogged about is Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation. It is worth reading his account of teenagers presenting as having Tourette Syndrome with a very particular tic: the word 'beans' - and how that came about: social contagion from a popular TikTok star, Evie Meg Field. For more on Tourette social contagion, see this piece in The Atlantic, by Helen Lewis. 

It turns out that young people (whose brains, of course, are not fully developed) are very susceptible; and that social media algorithms effectively bombard their developing brains with reinforcing content of whatever catches their imagination.

It seems self-evident that many of the teenage girls who suddenly discover that they are transgender are in fact suffering the same kind of social contagion; and that girls who have other psychological, emotional and cognitive comorbidities are particularly vulnerable. When trans was 'unthinkable' (ie hardly any teenagers had heard of it) this population reached other self-diagnoses, such as anorexia (which also became 'thinkable' - and then socially contagious - at a particular point in time).

So on the one hand, I believe that ideas are amongst the most precious - and worthy-to-be-safeguarded - things that we have; not least in Higher Education, which is my particular field of interest.  But clearly, ideas are also potentially harmful, not just at an individual level but also at a societal level. When we make what was unthinkable thinkable, the consequences can be catastrophic.

How do we square that circle?  I don't know; and what is worse, we don't know, as a society. Censorship is profoundly distasteful to me, except in extremis; and I have particular mistrust of anyone who thinks that he or she is the right person to do the censoring.  Yet the impact of harmful ideas (and I haven't even started to discuss toxic ideologies such as Andrew Tate's, or racism, which again seemed unthinkable for the vast majority of us until very recently etc...) is profound and vastly amplified by modern technology and the booming echo chambers that it creates. 

Perhaps we need some previously unthought ideas to address this...