Jordan Peterson was interviewed at the Aspen Ideas Festival a few years ago and, during the Q and A portion, John McWhorter asked him a question: How do you know when a student with unusual preferred pronouns is earnestly searching for identity and acceptance, versus just playing a game of manipulation and posturing?
Peterson answered the question, then addressed his opposition to compelled speech, then, in classic Petersonian fashion, he continued to think out loud.
“…you have a Type 1 and Type 2 error problem. So one error is you don’t call students what they deserve to be called… And the other error is you call students what they want to be called even though they don’t deserve it. And so, what you’re trying to do, optimally, is you’re trying to minimize those errors, and to do that, you have to take a middle route. Now, what you’ve decided to do, and I’m not criticizing it, is you’ve decided to allow for the possibility 100% of one of those errors because you think it’s a less significant error. And, you know, you might be right. But it’s not like you’re acting in an error-free manner. You’ve just decided to minimize one form of error at the expense of the other.”
In Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s book The Coddling of the American Mind, they discuss, among other things, the fact that the word “trauma” is used much more loosely than it used to.
Originally, trauma meant either a permanent physical injury or an emotional event “outside the range of usual human experience” that causes “significant symptoms of emotional distress in almost everyone.”
Trauma, therefore, also has a Type 1 and Type 2 error problem. One error is you push through genuine trauma and cause greater damage. And the other error is you treat smaller stresses and inconveniences as genuine trauma, thereby causing non-trauma to have many of the effects of real trauma.
It’s absolutely true that trauma, by the original definition, can “dysregulate the nervous system” and “steal your sense of self.”
However, as Haidt and Lukianoff have noted, modern, enlightened culture has decided to minimize one form of error at the expense of the other. And, because of that decision, that Type 2 error has become an epidemic. Young people across the US are suffering the effects of trauma in spite of suffering no traumatic events.
I, like Peterson, would recommend a middle route. Genuine trauma does sometimes happen. And also, what doesn’t kill you does make you stronger.
After all, when Edward Jenner famously deliberately infected everyone he knew with cowpox, they all got sick. And getting sick made them stronger. Down the line, when they all caught smallpox and the people around them were dropping dead, they didn’t.
