What safe spaces do we truly need? I don’t think there is such a thing as an intellectual safe space that insulates you and protects your from words or ideas that might contradict your own or cause you distress. That’s the sort of thing you might expect from your family, maybe your closest friends, but if all your friends and family are so similar to yourself that they can’t possibly rub against you uncomfortably in any way, then you’re in a rare and unusual situation. Most of us find that it’s even within our closest groups that we discover deep differences and conflicts and need to negotiate and be tested. Those places aren’t safe because we won’t encounter anything there that contradicts us and our identity, but because there’s a shared contract of love and respect between us. There’s a bond that unites us and allows those differences to cohabitate in a way that enriches rather than degrades our experience. There’s a commitment to one another that goes beyond mere uniformity or freedom from offense to a kind of active balance and growth. There are rules and conventions of politeness that maintain the good faith space between us.
The idea of an intellectual safe space based on the removal of all that could provoke us is rather like the idea of a gym based on the removal of all equipment that might strain your muscles. You’re certain unlikely to receive any injury, but being trapped in such a safe space won’t make your strong, it will make you weak, frail, easy to injure. To be honest, being trapped in such a room will debilitated you and make you sick as surely as a world of dangers and challenges.
Human systems, for example the immune system, are regulatory systems. They’re meant to have something to work against. If you take away too much of their proper work and stress, they go haywire. You end up with allergies, the system reacting to everything as if it were a hostile invasion, because it was so protected that it never got a good sense of what was an actual threat, what wasn’t, and how to regulate the reaction to the real amounts of present danger.
Similarly, depriving human children of the chance to learn from rough and tumble play how to regulate their own strength, as well as assess the use of strength by others, figuring out how much is ok, how much is fun, how much is helpful, how much is too much, how to respond appropriately, deprives them of the ability to regulate an essential aspect of human capacity and survival (strength and aggression).
Safe space to forgive, to make mistakes, to make difficult hypotheses, to come back
Mr Nobody's Patented Blog 