Broadening on our post on the recent trend in US colleges to overprotect from potentially offensive ideas, there is much more happening in the world with a growing contradiction with the much easier accessibility to all sorts of offensive ideas, pictures on internet and the increasingly defensive behavior of society.
For example, in some respect the development of head covering and niqab in the Muslim world (where in the 1960’s uncovered hair and face was the most common) is also some sort of reaction to this wider accessibility of non politically or socially correct sources.
It may well be that the development of these overprotective trends is the consequence of the wider access to disturbing ideas. The world would then be increasingly split between those that can deal with these disturbing ideas (without necessarily condoning them of course), and those that can’t or won’t.
Over time, this might become a bigger split in the world’s population than the issue of internet access, with pockets of overprotective societies in both developed and less developed countries.
