Understanding Generation Snowflake: “I Find That Offensive!”

When faced with the mewling and puking of campus Social Justice Warriors about hate speech, tone, safe spaces, micro-aggressions, and trigger warnings, the temptation for those who value free speech, vigorous argument, and the right to dissent is to exclaim like the Pharisees, “I thank you, Lord, that I am not like others, especially these representatives of ‘Generation Snowflake’ over there!” Yet that response, attractive as it is, is problematic, because it fails to see that the current chaos in higher education is simply one part of a set of wider problems of which we are all a part.

This is why Claire Fox’s book “I Find That Offensive!” is such a signally helpful volume, for she eschews cheap criticism targeted at the thinness of the students’ skins and the triviality of some of their causes by looking rather at the world that has produced them. Though it is excellent, it makes for depressing reading. If Fox is right, what we have witnessed over recent years is not simply the routine generational rebellion of immature students but a symptom—and perhaps even a structural part—of Western society as it now exists.

Fox is a British writer, the founder and director of the Institute of Ideas, an organization committed to providing forums where ideas can be debated and contested without restraint. While she draws significantly (though not exclusively) on British examples in order to make her case, there are so many parallels and affinities with the situation in the United States that American readers will find themselves resonating with both the narrative and the analysis. Generation Snowflake is the monopoly of no Western nation but part of the pathology of the contemporary West as a whole.

Fox’s basic thesis is this: the fear of free speech on university campuses and the concomitant culture of “safe spaces” is one result of a nexus of social, educational, and philosophical factors that have been transforming society since the 1970s. The primary responsibility for our current problems thus lies with people over forty, not with the students themselves. The problem is deeper and more significant than we might at first imagine. It is not simply the typical youth rebellion one expects on campuses but a sign of more notable changes in society as a whole.

Read here