Bartleby, the Safe-Spacer

https://www.the-american-interest.com/2019/09/16/bartleby-the-safe-spacer/

by quickfox • 7 years ago

9 9 7 years ago

droithomme• 7 years ago

The author Colin Fleming presumes that Melville's works are for the most part fabricated or exaggerations, and is a "sell out", yet he offers no evidence for these claims.

lidHanteyk• 7 years ago

And yet, sometimes, we really rather would prefer not to.

Bartleby was broken twice, first by the weight of the world at the dead-letter room of the post office, and then by the realization that his worth in life was as a scribe. Note how he goes from hard-working to burnt-out as his days fill with the copying of somebody else's qualified work and original thoughts.

pram• 7 years ago

Bartleby is a fantastic story that haunts you. I also agree with the author of this article in that it seems like it could have been written by Kafka. Very ahead of its time.

mirimir• 7 years ago

Indeed. I've wondered whether it could have influenced Kafka in writing "A Hunger Artist".

patientplatypus• 7 years ago

This...seems like a stretch.

The author fits the 'safe space' narrative to the story, but it's a little difficult to discount that maybe young people are just tired of the awfulness.

I mean stuff like this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_among_LGBT_youth_...) - you have gay girls who are fleeing home because they're families are trying to "rape them straight".

The Hetrick-Martin Institute showed that among homeless queer girls aged 13–15 in New York City, that 50% of them were homeless because they were fleeing familial corrective rape.

So, yeah. Young people get defensive about how others use words because the world is terrifying. That makes perfectly rational sense to me and it seems pretty sad that the author can't see that.

Not to mention the huge uptick in gun violence or lack of mental (or any other healthcare) or lack of good paying jobs or the fact that half the country is addicted to Oxy or heroin.

But no, it's the youth of today that are wrong. /s

geofft• 7 years ago

The author of this piece certainly could try to figure out why the people behind a "PC-infested safe space" believe what they believe. He could investigate to what extent apparent virtue signaling is genuine and to what extent it is mere signaling.

But he would prefer not to.

rendall• 7 years ago

> _The Hetrick-Martin Institute showed that among homeless queer girls aged 13–15 in New York City, that 50% of them were homeless because they were fleeing familial corrective rape._

That is a pretty astonishing claim. However, I could not find the cited paper. It seems to be an unsubstantiated claim on a blog. Perhaps you can find the original paper?

ubu7737• 7 years ago

Bartleby is clearly depressed, as many of us are in these times. He’s broken, not committed to repair. And he’s encouraged to stay that way, in part, because no one really knows what the hell to do with him.

As Szasz points out, this is the basic attitude of modern psychiatry. "What the hell do we do with these depressed people? They should repair themselves and get lively in the world (that we have miserably abused)."

valenciarose• 7 years ago

Patientplatypus was overly kind in describing this as a stretch. It hinges on an obscene misrepresentation of the intent behind safety spaces and total ignorance as to what goes on inside them.

Discussing safe spaces without mentioning trauma and PTSD is evidence of disinterest in investigating the topic at best and deception at worst. The purpose of content warnings and taking care to use respectful language is not about shielding participants from learning that bad things happen or that our everyday language encodes bias about the relative value of human beings. The participants whose well-being it seeks to promote already have this knowledge to a greater degree than Colin Fleming ever will.

Content warnings about rape matter because almost every classroom has a few women who've been raped, very possibly by someone in the classroom. PTSD evokes strong physiological responses that are more likely to be manageable with advanced warning.

Similarly, derogatory language about LGBTQ people is often delivered with the threat of violence or actual violence. I don't know a queer person who hasn't experienced some anti-queer violence. My wife worked in a LGBTQ center and had to hit the floor when someone emptied a gun into it from a car. The initial trauma is deepened by subsequent threat and fear.

So what goes on in safe spaces? I'm a Boomer, so I don't spend much time in classrooms, but I do spend a lot of time in spaces like activist conferences. Let me tell you, none of the discussions I see elsewhere are as passionate or as vigorously contested. This is a benefit of safety, not a casualty of it. I see the same thing at work when I succeed in creating psychological safety for my teams: passionate discussion in engaged teams.

Bartleby, the Safe-Spacer

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