One or two perhaps are fine, but it's when there are lots of them that we sit up and wonder. If I were Robert Frost or John Clare or Henry Vaughan, or even Henry David Thoreau, I might well be talking about snowflakes – you know those white things that come out of the sky when it's cold. But I'm not.
The snowflakes in this case are (to quote the OED): 'a person mockingly characterised as overly sensitive or easily offended'. These can be seen as 'real people' or, if we believe those people who see other people as stereotypes, as 'people who gasp in horror when they hear an opinion they don't like', who think they're special and who prefer feelings to facts. Players in a cultural landscape where race and gender and even free speech is up for grabs.
Writer and journalist, Hannah Jewell, has produced a lively survey of what we might call socio-cultural snowflakes, just in case we get confused with something from the weather forecast (though metaphors do inevitably spring to mind). Her recent book is called
We Need Snowflakes (published by Hodder & Stoughton under their Coronet paperback imprint in 2022). Her earlier
100 Nasty Women of History is also recommended for fans.
Snowflakes is captioned 'in defence of the sensitive, the angry and the offended', something we've all been at one time or another. In fact, Jewell reminds older readers (above all that literate commentariat who frame and analyse cultural paradigms) that, once upon a time (such as the student protests at Berkeley in the 1970s) they too challenged the status quo. Mutterings of 'hypocrite lecteur' creep into the mind, suggesting that a read of such a book will throw up a lot of thoughtful ideas – and even cause the most bigoted among us to throw up, above all those who take pride in seeing themselves as members of the alt-right.
Mention of ultra-conservative social and political attitudes, and the demonised stereotypes of leftist and leftie beliefs they spawn, is timely since, Jewell argues, one of the main sources of anti-snowflake thinking has been the alt-right. Such guys as Steve Bannen and his Breitbart outfit, thriving of course in a Trumpian America which shows signs like Frankenstein's monster of coming back to life once again next year. An era in which the term 'binarism' has been weaponised in so many ways – from political separatism to the gender wars both here and abroad, and where being right (or at least not being wrong) seems a hallmark of identity.
Conservative sentiments (and let's be plain – sentimentalities too, since a lot of it seems based on fake nostalgia for a fake dream of a fake utopian past) have 'seeped' into the mainstream liberal establishment (if that's what it is – I mean 'mainstream' and 'liberal'). Jewell suggests we consider writers such as Claire Fox whose 2016 book,
I Find That Offensive!, and its sequel 'introduced a hatred of snowflakes to an ever-widening audience'. It was fortuitously timed to coincide with Nigel Farage's rants about Leave 'that defined their opponents as emotional fragile, and overly politically correct'.
Journalists of many colours and academics of every flavour from blue to red have added to the clamour, so that no self-respecting intelligent person today can be unaware that Agatha Christie needs updating, Roald Dahl is harmful to children, and Peter Pan is 'emotionally challenging'. We'll get on to J K Rowling shortly, but note here that some would have her return to Hogwarts for re-education.
Jewell's book opens up the snowflake territory in a clear and plain-speaking way. Already we sense how her case is going to unfold: lots of stereotyping going on (rightists of snowflakes and vice versa) and more than a little condescension and hypocrisy from an Olympian academically-inclined commentariat. Add to the recipe the media, including social media, for which and in which opinion is truth and where feelings matter more than facts (so the argument goes). The narrative trips along with a convenient focus on that suspicious form of pond-life – students. And in the argot of the red tops, it's better to be called a snowflake than an idiot.
Like Commedia del'Arte caricatures, students have been turned into agents of mischief, subverting university courses and administration (a synecdoche for power itself) and undermining free speech by using free speech. Because students are sensitive and special, they want a 'safe place' (presumably called 'Yoonie') where they can be free from the cultural tyrannies and hand-me-downs of a pantheon of white privileged writers whose insidious views persist in syllabuses up and down the land, live in a Hobbiton where true gender inclusivity and feelings are properly respected and where Scotland is still called North Britain. As a result, political correctness and cancel culture can flourish, and all will be well in the best of all possible worlds. Pangloss with the nose of Pinocchio.
Were it not for the fact that I am overwhelmingly and implausibly sensitive to the merits of emotional intelligence, I would go along with this sardonic narrative myself. Even though it does deserve spelling out, as Jewell does rather well, since she then launches herself on a rather splendid attack on the anti-snowflakes. Hers is indeed 'a case for snowflakes'. Already we can see how the case will be set out – we've heard about stereotypes, we already distrust crude rightist thinking and binarism, we recognise hypocrisy and self-righteousness among commentators who have climbed up and now taken away the ladder.
And already cliches like 'one man or woman's free speech is another's case for censorship'. Think of the First Amendment, reflect on the matter and manner dimensions of hate speech/hate crime, and consider where you stand yourself. So Jewell puts the case
for snowflakes. Let's start with red-face and black-face at Yale some time back: protests took place, we know that, but weren't the protesters right to raise the issue of racism? How else did the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King start? The analogy rather stretches the point, but the point is well made. Press comparisons between rioting students and violent Chinese Red Guards sensationalised what took place. It's all too easy to dismiss or euphemise the harm 'mere' words can do.
Jewell then examines the spurious medicalisation of 'the snowflake syndrome'. Drawing on psychiatric ideas about 'cognitive distortion', Lukianoff & Haidt's 2018 book,
The Coddling of the American Mind, argues that students (notice how snowflakes and students have been conflated in current narratives) have 'succumbed to… three Great Untruths'. These are fragility (what doesn't kill you makes you weaker), emotional reasoning (always trust your feelings) and 'us versus them' (life is a battle between good people and bad). In trying to resist the power-play of what they see as the far right, snowflakes have over-reacted and have 'misperceived reality'.
As in CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), where exposure to triggers enable the patient to cope with reality, snowflakes need a wake-up call. So, face up to the likelihood that Huckleberry Finn might have been bi-sexual and Lewis Grassic Gibbon's
Sunset Song contains material that might disturb. Where do we go next? To the case about feelings or emotions. Are not students right to 'cancel' speakers from xenophobic racist political parties? Is it not reasonable to ban advocates of 'race science'?
However you argue for academic freedom at a university, a place where ideas freely flourish and where intellectual inquiry goes whither it goes, are there not reasonable boundaries which if crossed do more than disrespect – but demean, harass, discriminate against, harm and threaten other people? The age-old arguments of harm and responsibility in the public realm. Connect this up with the personal argument: what would
you see, as a reasonable and compassionate human being, as trespassing beyond the limits of the tolerable?
Are there times when, for want of a better term, we have to trust censorship for the public good? Is this, then, in its turn, not also part of a case for trusting in political correctness, which after all reflects contemporary sensibilities and norms? The prejudices and distortions of the past (think slavery and Colston, think the repatriation of Nigerian artefacts) need to be re-evaluated, and if necessary re-contextualised – and perhaps even revised. When does this process become air-brushing out 'facts' we don't care to face – when, in other words, do we
all turn into snowflakes?
Jewell picks up this argument cleverly by arguing that so-called snowflakes ask all these questions and have a right to do so. They are right to join J K Rowling in the debate about gender, asking whether her version of feminism is an exclusive form of binarism (men and women, biologically different) based on literalism, questioning the tacit assumptions in the capitalistic workplace that work has the value it is said to have, and asking entirely valid questions about race and gender because underneath all of them are central questions about equality.
Snowflakes demand inclusivity, are tolerant of ambiguities that older generations and ways of thinking find threatening, and showing empathy and compassion often absent from much of the self-styled news analysis – and for sure absent from a lot of conservative thinking. 'If people say you're a snowflake' you should be proud: 'you're more likely to be a principled and compassionate human being'.
So goes the case for and against snowflakes. It's an on-going debate, raising important issues way beyond what seems its original envelope. The case
for and the case
against both clash and blend at all points. Jewell is right to say that the case for the prosecution has been virtually the only one we've heard. People find stereotypes convenient and easy. I find the case
against glib, patronising and crudely generalising. I find the case
for sententious, partisan and sentimental. Both are oppositional, both much need evidential corroboration beyond anecdote and prejudice. 'Snowflakes' may vanish but the debate goes on. Jewell ends her book with the words 'otherwise, we're all fucked'. It's that important.
Dr Stuart Hannabuss is a writer and reviewer based in Scotland
