Hair-Trigger Warning 

And this week’s prize for the stupidest bloody university in Britain goes to…Nottingham University!

Sadly, we are almost inured to the inanities we now witness on a daily basis. If it isn’t a bag of nuts with a ‘this bag contains nuts’ warning, sleeping pills that ‘may cause drowsiness’ and bottles of gas that proclaim they are ‘flammable’ it is the evolving insanity of trigger warnings attached to works of art, principally plays, films and books.

The snowflake generation we have raised seems to need to be told about scenes of violence, depictions of smoking and themes of one sort or another: wide open spaces for agoraphobics and enclosed spaces for the claustrophobic. Well used to books containing trigger warnings about sex, bloodshed and drugs (the kind of stuff that makes most books readable), Nottingham University has excelled itself with a trigger warning related to Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales which, much to one’s surprise, contains “expressions of Christian faith”.

The Britannica website entry on The Canterbury Tales opens with: ‘The framing device for the collection of stories is a pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury, Kent.’ It goes on to describe how and why the pilgrims entertain themselves with stories once considered so bawdy that the book was temporarily banned under the Comstock Act of 1873 in the United States. The book has not been banned in Britain, but it has suffered censorship over the centuries.

Common sense, The First Amendment and a general distrust of censorship prevailed across the civilised world for most of the past century, and The Canterbury Tales is now freely available and widely studied for the insights it provides into medieval culture. That and depictions of ye olde rumpy pumpy. The Wife of Bath boasts, after a string of satisfied (but exhausted) husbands that she had “the best quoniam myghte be” (I’ll leave readers to look that one up themselves).

But, surely, the trigger warning that a book about a bunch of Christian pilgrims on the way to an important Christian shrine written at a time when Christianity was—barring some adherents to Judaism—the only religion in Britain contains “expressions of Christian faith”, reaches new heights of hilarity and plumbs new depths of utter daftness.

Whatever next? Mathematics books that contain “depictions of equations”, chemistry books that contain “depictions of chemicals”? Lest we upset the friendless, perhaps Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series ought to have a warning about “expression of friendship” or for the net zero nutters that Noddy books contain “depictions of motor cars”.

Of course, this is all heading one way. You can laugh your socks off at the type of idiots who take home good salaries, yet produce the kind of drivel being perpetuated by places like Nottingham University. But if they can attach a warning related to Christianity to The Canterbury Tales, then why not John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or Aquinas’s Summa Theologica?

In fact, why not attach a warning about “expressions of Christian faith” to the Holy Bible, and especially to The New Testament? I am sure that few will be expecting to encounter such upsetting themes therein. It may ‘trigger’ feelings of sinfulness or bring up repressed memories of being forcibly baptised against their will. Don’t laugh, this is more than likely to happen; we are only a hair’s breadth away.

But fish out that proverbial bottom dollar, as I have a sure-fire bet that you cannot lose. Get along to the bookies and put your bottom dollar to win on the fact that there is one book that will never receive a trigger warning.

Of course, that book is The Koran (or Quran as right on Wikipedia chooses to label it). We are as likely to see a trigger warning on The Koran about “expressions of Muslimness”, “depictions of misogyny” and “apostasy” (albeit the wrong kind of apostasy) as we are to see a queue of immigrants waiting to enter Afghanistan.

We will not have heard the last of trigger warnings on great works of literature as our increasingly diverse student body returns to our seats of learning in this increasingly septic isle. I predict—if indeed these have not already happened—trigger warnings on the works of Dickens (“depictions of poverty”), Jane Austen (“expressions of poshness”), and Emily Brontë (“descriptions of windy moors”).

I do, however, advocate a trigger warning on most university English literature departments to the effect that “this department is liable to contain complete morons”.

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.

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