There
is a peculiar temptation in our time to extend the moral vocabulary
of harm beyond its proper bounds. Words that once named grave
realities, such as violence, abuse, or trauma, have steadily
been stretched to cover an ever-widening field of human experience.
What began as a sincere effort to recognise genuine suffering
has, in many quarters, become an undisciplined expansion of
language, a verbal inflation, making it increasingly difficult
to sustain the distinction between actual injury and mere
discomfort.
For
example, a poster recently seen in a local coffee shop advised
that “abuse” should not be confined to physical
or sexual violence. Rather, it extends into other areas, such
as the technological, the financial, and the spiritual.
Of
course, no one doubts that humans have ingenious ways of behaving
badly in any domain of life one cares to name. A spouse who
monitors the family finances with ungenerous rigidity, a colleague
who uses technology to exclude others from decisions, and
a partner who treats shared obligations with habitual carelessness
may all behave badly. These are failures of judgement, character,
or consideration.
Such
behaviours may frustrate, disappoint, or corrode trust. But
they are not, without further qualification, forms of abuse
or violence, and to name them as such is to blur distinctions
that moral clarity requires. When everything is called abuse,
the word loses its moral gravity, and when that happens, those
who suffer real abuse are not better served but quietly obscured.
Harm
takes many forms, and a moral vocabulary requires us to make
the appropriate distinctions. If the terms we use to identify
injury are loosened from their moorings, our capacity for
judgement is weakened. The result is not greater sensitivity
to those who are truly abused, but a moral flattening in which
all forms of harm and discomfort appear equally urgent.
Nowhere
is this verbal inflation more evident than in higher education.
The modern university, once understood as a place where young
people are initiated into a demanding intellectual inheritance,
has increasingly adopted a therapeutic model and its accompanying
vocabulary. Students are no longer said to be challenged by
uncongenial ideas; they are said to be harmed by them. What
was once contested in argument is now experienced as “violence”,
a desecration of the student’s emotional well-being.
The language of injury has migrated into the domain of ordinary
intellectual disagreement, and the university, which should
know better, has largely promoted it.
The
consequences for higher education are serious. To call words
violence is not merely to intensify disapproval but to collapse
an essential distinction. Violence, properly understood, involves
the coercive violation of a person. It constrains freedom
in the most immediate and tangible way. Speech, even when
harsh, false or misguided, belongs to a different order. It
can wound, offend, and unsettle. But equating it with violence
confuses categories that a free society has long laboured
to keep distinct, and which the university, of all institutions,
ought to defend.
The
confusion arises from a laudable desire to take suffering
seriously, but it hardens into a habit of viewing all difficulty
through the same moral lens. In a culture that rightly condemns
harm, claims of injury carry moral authority, inviting attention
and deference.
As
this dynamic becomes more widely understood, the threshold
for what counts as harm tends to be lower. What was once disagreement
becomes aggression; what was once discomfort becomes trauma;
what was once merely offensive is now recast as violence.
There
is a certain strategic convenience in this. I do not like
what Professor X has to say. Her arguments unsettle me, and
her conclusions offend my convictions. But notice the rhetorical
shift here; by claiming that her words constitute violence,
I need not answer her claims. I need only report her to the
authorities.
In
brief, the claim of harm short-circuits the very process that
liberal education exists to sustain: the patient, rigorous
contest of ideas in which the better argument, not the more
aggrieved party, is supposed to prevail. To name disagreement
as injury is not to deepen moral seriousness but to evade
it. It is to replace the hard work of intellectual refutation
with the much simpler work of accusation.
The
cost of such verbal inflation is twofold. First, it erodes
our capacity to respond proportionately to genuine abuse.
If all harms are treated as equivalent, none receives the
seriousness it deserves. The victim of actual violence or
real abuse finds their suffering rhetorically assimilated
to far lesser grievances.
Second,
it diminishes the individual. To interpret every difficulty
as harm is, paradoxically, to treat the student not as a person
capable of intellectual growth but as a patient requiring
protection. Liberal learning has always insisted otherwise.
We read challenging writers not because we endorse their conclusions,
but because wrestling with a powerful and uncongenial mind
is itself a form of intellectual formation. The encounter
with difficult or demanding ideas is not an obstacle to education,
but the very formative work of education itself. Hence, what
presents itself as compassion is, in effect, a failure of
respect, a quiet declaration that students cannot be trusted
to think for themselves.
This
is not an argument for indifference to suffering. It is an
argument for clarity. To preserve the moral force of our language,
we must be willing to make distinctions—to say that
some things are genuinely harmful, while others are merely
difficult, uncomfortable, uncongenial or offensive, without
being injurious. Such distinctions are not acts of callousness.
They are the conditions of justice. A culture that cannot
distinguish between violence and disagreement will find its
moral energies dissipated and its judgments uncertain.
The
task is not to contract our moral concern but to discipline
it by recovering a language of harm that is both humane and
exacting, one that makes the distinctions our moral and intellectual
life requires. Only then can we respond to genuine suffering
with the gravity it deserves while preserving the space for
intellectual encounter on which a free society depends. That
space is not incidental to the university; it is its defining
charge and its highest obligation.
