In the political gunsights are, from left, Ovid, Chinua Achebe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Vladmir Nabokov | Ken Fallin forum Western Lit, shot to death by ‘trigger warnings’ American universities discourage reading of Ovid, Lolita and The Great Gatsby.

Boring bien pensant opinion in Europe has long maintained that low-brow American culture — all the greasy fast food, oafish Hollywood shoot 'em up films (often starring a muscle-bound Austrian, Belgian, or Swede), and schlock television — has done incalculable damage to highbrow European culture. And it has happened with the assent of the average European, who happily scarfs down a McRib sandwich, feet swaddled in Air Jordans, while queuing for the latest “Transformers” film.

But there is a more pernicious American cultural invasion, as irritatingly destructive as the North American gray squirrel and, unlike the Hollywood blockbuster, wholly immune from free market pressures. It was noticed in 1994 by a reporter for Reuters, who gravely reported that the scourge of political correctness, “an American import regarded by many Britons with the same distaste as an unpleasant virus, finally seems to be infecting British society.” First it poisons the local universities, then within a generation wends its way into the broader culture, wreaking havoc on the native intellectual ecosystem. It’s the most odious, implacable, and least remarked upon manifestation of American cultural imperialism.

Politically correct

And so here we are a generation after that Reuters report, with sensible Europeans now fretting over a mutated strain of that old virus. Writing in the left-leaning magazine The New Statesman, British academic Pam Lowe worried that a new fad in American academia called the “trigger warning” would soon touch down in the UK, requiring the sensible professoriate to valiantly resist the boneheaded ideas of activist students. In his new book, appropriately titled “Trigger Warning,” British writer Mick Hume warns that trigger culture has already “spread across the Atlantic,” and supine European college administrators have given in faster than Marshal Pétain.

The warning allows psychologically damaged readers to opt out of an assignment, or at least steady a nervous hand while turning pages of a triggering book.

So what exactly is a trigger warning? Precisely that: a label on a work of literature, history, and memoir, designed to forewarn students that what they are about to read might upset them or “trigger” an episode of PTSD. The warning allows psychologically damaged readers to opt out of an assignment, or at least steady a nervous hand while turning pages of a triggering book. One particularly silly American college gave an example of how professors might warn readers that Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s celebrated postcolonial novel “Things Fall Apart” could send them into spirals of despair, explaining that “it may trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide, and more.”

And more.

But last week witnessed a minor victory for the forces of common sense — and provided a glimmer of hope for Europe — when Columbia University, under pressure from its perennially aggrieved student body, ruled that it wouldn’t be affixing trigger warnings to classroom texts in the coming academic year.

Last year, multiple Columbia students objected to the inclusion of Ovid’s 1st century lyric poem “Metamorphoses” in a class devoted to classic Western literature, with one tallying that it contains “roughly 80 instances of assault.” All of them triggering. Indeed, even this tally is an underestimate, she explained, having “treated many of the instances of mass rape on the syllabus as a single data point for simplicity.”

‘Sensitive’ syllabi

Lest you think this is something promoted by silly students but resisted by clever professors, Columbia University last week conceded the point: “Metamorphoses,” that classic of Western literature, has been purged. No trigger warnings, sure, but no more Ovid.

In its place, Columbia has selected Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel “Song Of Solomon,” which has frequently been the target of bans in the United States by prissy, anti-intellectual religious types, adding a touch of diversity to the Great Books canon. But Morrison’s more famous novel “Beloved” was not chosen, probably because it’s full of vivid scenes of rape and racism that could be “problematic” for some students.

Columbia apparently had considered adding “Lolita,” Vladimir Nabokov’s masterpiece of Western literature, to the “Masterpieces of Western Literature and Philosophy” course, though it, too, failed to make the final cut. And again, one could reasonably assume that Columbia wasn’t interested in traumatizing readers with the pedophilic effusions of Humbert Humbert, whose sexual compulsions are for a prepubescent girl whom he calls — trigger warning — the “light of his life, the fire of his loins.”

European intelligentsia used to ruthlessly mock this type of censoriousness masquerading as sensitivity. Because until the mainstreaming of political correctness, these literary Carrie Nations, for the most part, all inhabited the same side of the ideological divide — they were almost all religious conservatives. I turned to the American Library Association’s 1995 list of banned books — literary works under attack by would-be censors and right-wing moral scolds — and noticed the inclusion of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic “The Great Gatsby,” which was rejected from Baptist College in South Carolina because of “language and sexual references.”

Censorious students

Twenty years later, and with social conservatism on the decline, it’s still under attack — but by philistines on the other side. Writing in the Rutgers University student paper, one particularly twitchy undergraduate suggested that professors plaster a trigger warning on “The Great Gatsby” — a book of “gory, abusive, and misogynistic violence”— that warned of the themes of “suicide,” “domestic abuse,” and “graphic violence” contained therein.

Allowing teenagers who know nothing of great literature the power to determine what should be taught as great literature seems ill-considered.

Now that books are being vacated from syllabuses and speakers blocked from campuses to protect students from some “ism” or another (racism, sexism, classism, able-ism, etc.) and the trauma of hearing dissenting opinions, the censors are getting a hearing that the religious never managed.

But still, it’s a good sign for Europe that American institutions attempting to codify trigger warnings into school policy have failed. Last year Oberlin College, always a thought leader in stupid thoughts, caved to student demands for trigger warnings. And then in the face of widespread external ridicule, they backed off. But Oberlin is still eager to cosset and protect its students from the horrors of great books and controversial thoughts. When the writer Christina Hoff Sommers appeared at Oberlin to debate the existence of “campus rape culture” (she’s a skeptic), students who disagreed with her were offered counseling in a “safe space.” A similar “safe space” was provided following a Hoff Sommers lecture at Georgetown University. Likewise students at Brown University, who were exposed to two sides of a debate on the same topic, were offered a “safe space” equipped, according to an account in The New York Times, with “cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.”

If a once-prestigious university like Columbia wants to hold itself hostage to the vicissitudes of underdeveloped undergraduate minds, they are welcome to do so. But allowing teenagers who know nothing of great literature the power to determine what should be taught as great literature seems ill-considered.

And when this Orwellian nonsense lands in the United Kingdom it will likely warn students off Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London” (racism and anti-Semitism) and Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus” (scenes of violent rape). Or a poem by that knuckle dragger Philip Larkin (racism, sexism, classism). Or that all-purpose hater V.S. Naipaul (you name it, he's said something offensive about it).

Keep the greats great

David Alderson, a professor of English literature at Manchester University, told the Daily Telegraph recently that trigger warnings are “not currently a major issue [in the United Kingdom]” and that while he is confident that “most students are smart enough” to reject them, he confessed that he doesn’t “have confidence that institutions are.”

So allow me to, just this once, encourage in my European comrades a healthy outburst of anti-Americanism: Reject this latest academic trend from the U.S. Refuse to plaster the great works of European literature with warning stickers. And realize that the enemies of European civilization are not Hollywood moguls, Uber executives, and McDonald’s franchisees but the choleric, censorious American college student determined to undo the “Eurocentrism” of Western literature and make sure great books never again challenge readers or make them uncomfortable.

Michael C. Moynihan is a columnist for The Daily Beast.

This article was corrected July 18. Ovid's "Metamorphoses" was written in 8 AD. An earlier version misstated the date.

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