Of Gumption and Grit

"Judging from what you all, say" remarked Aunt Jamesina, "the sum and substance is that you can learn -- if you've got natural gumption enough -- in four years at college what it would take about twenty years of living to teach you. Well, that justifies higher education in my opinion. It's a matter I was always dubious about before."

"But what about people who haven't natural gumption, Aunt Jimsie?"

"People who haven't natural gumption never learn," retorted Aunt Jamesina, "neither in college nor life. If they live to be a hundred they really don't know anything more than when they were born. It's their misfortune not their fault, poor souls. But those of us who have some gumption should duly thank the Lord for it."

 "Will you please define what gumption is, Aunt Jimsie?" asked Phil.

"No, I won't, young woman. Any one who has gumption knows what it is, and any one who hasn't can never know what it is. So there is no need of defining it."

-  Anne of the Island, LM Montgomery

In a world full of safe spaces, trigger warnings and hurt feelings, it seems to be very easy to lose sight of the stuff that really matters. Of course, I don’t think any individual is or should be the gatekeeper of what “really matters” as this is dependent pretty much entirely on context. This post is going to explore the burgeoning trend of bending over backwards to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of members of the community, with a bit of a bias towards online communities.

We’re bombarded with platitudes about how unique we all are, how valid all perspectives are and how simply AWFUL it is to offend someone. And this, in its basic form, is perfectly understandable. Yes, let’s not go around and insult and offend people just because we can. Yes, let’s have a bit of tact and discretion when operating within our communities and our groups. Needlessly hurting people is clearly not the right thing to do.  Having said that, it appears to me that some of the behaviour being displayed within communities, particularly online communities, seems to be going far too far up the other end of the spectrum, of which the furthest point is censorship.

I am a part of a couple of online communities, and the feverish and at first quite odd practice of placing “trigger warnings” and “content warnings” in front of everything seems to be increasing daily. 

Consider an article that a popular writer posts discussing rape in graphic detail. Yep – sure. Give your readers a little warning that this might be coming. Best case scenario, some people just don’t like to read about it. Worst, it might seriously damage someone who has had a traumatic experience of a similar vein. Its reasonable to assume that this sort of content might have a broad spread, divisive impact on it’s audience. Consider the below quote, though! Trigger warnings on… classic literature? I cannot help but wonder if this is just a TAD ridiculous.

"This is triggering" (and therefore requires a trigger warning) is a phrase you might see in the comments section of an online article that addresses racism, rape, war, anorexia or any number of subjects about which a discussion may not leave the reader with a care-free, fuzzy sort of feeling. It's a phrase that's been requested by a number of college students to be applied to classic books — The Great Gatsby (for misogyny and violence), Huck Finn (for racism), Things Fall Apart (for colonialism and religious persecution), Mrs. Dalloway (for suicide), Shakespeare (for ... you name it). These students are asking for what essentially constitute red-flag alerts to be placed, in some cases, upon the literature itself, or, at least, in class syllabuses, and invoked prior to lectures.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/20/trigger-warnings-college-campus-books

I think I’m more interested in this topic from a macro perspective. There is a lot of historical, anecdotal evidence to suggest that societies seem to go through stages of decadence. As a society gains wealth, it becomes easier to exist within that society. The easier it is for individuals to survive within a society, the easier it is for harder, tougher societies to conquer them.

Consider Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes of the thirteenth century. Before the great Khan united the warring Mongolian tribes in 1206, life as a nomadic tribesman on the harsh steppe was entirely unforgiving. Only the strong survived. What that created was an entire group of people who were tough, unflinching and militarily savage. When China came up against them, a civilisation which was among the first civilisation in the world and were leaders in technology, culture and science, they were entirely unprepared for the onslaught of these ‘barbarian’ tribes and lost battle after battle, life after life, army after army. The Mongol horde swept across Asia and Europe – ALWAYS outnumbered by their opponents – and managed to deal hitherto incomprehensible blows to ancient societies and cities -  China, yes, but also cities like Baghdad, and countries like Russia.

They were tough. Their enemies, who had enjoyed hundreds of years of prosperity and decadence, were entirely unprepared. They were soft. It was reportedly one of the reasons Genghis Khan was opposed to creating a Mongol city in his homeland while he lived - he was contemptuous of the civilisations he came up against and their lack of grit.

Fast forward 700 years to a time and place not so very far removed from our own. Have any of you ever read accounts of the soldiers in WWI? I have spent a lot of time fascinated by these people and their courage, strength and, well, GRIT. Was it really only 100 years ago? If a similar conflict was to occur today, would we be as stoic? Could we be as courageous? Are we strong enough?

Of course, I am speaking from the extremely fortunate perspective of someone in a first world country who has never seen the abject atrocities that my contemporaries in other societies are experiencing. But this is exactly my point. How long will it take one of these societies, or an amalgamation of them, toughened up by their difficult passage through life, to rise up and defeat “us”? To cause another world conflict?

Wealth is so ridiculously distributed. We sit here in our silk slippers with our soft, un-work-tainted hands talking about emotional distress being triggered by WORDS. By CONTENT. And somewhere, really not so very far away, other people are growing stronger and stronger through lives characterised by constant hunger, war and death. It is a balance that absolutely cannot last.

And if history is anything to go by, it absolutely WILL not.