These "tunnels of oppression" are examples of the graphical/sensorial approach to knowledge, in the sense defined by Neal Stephenson. See my post here.

Indeed. That's why watching Shakespeare plays for a few hours will make you a better human as well.

Eleanor Rigby. Wasn't she the wife of the President during World War II? Wasn't she pretty famous on her own?

Tunnels of Oppression are strange productions mainly because of where they are staged - on college campuses, where very few people are treated badly. The sensitivity police have been pushing this crap ever since I was in college in the 70s. One part good intentions, 12 parts hysteria, the Tunnels of O and the Vagina Monologues, etc., are sorry spectacles that lend themselves to well-deserved wicked parody and derision.

Some readers may recall that it was in the 70s that we started hearing that there was terrible abuse going on in America's families and that it was occurring on a massive scale. The only reason more wasn't known about it was because of a "conspiracy of silence." Parents were oppressing their children and fathers were oppressing everyone. Oooh. Never mind that in the US, the post WWII generations have had a quality of life that is better, and on a larger scale, than any group in history. Of course, there was no conspiracy. Most parents and their offspring were doing just fine - they even liked one another. Imagine that.

The people foisting the sensitivity events on 18 year olds who haven't done much in the way of harming anyone, have bought into a pathetically neurotic view of life. It is unfortunate that college administrations and taxpayers reward them with jobs.

Sally Satel and Christina Hoff Sommers address our current mass neurosis in One Nation Under Therapy, which was published a year or two ago.

PS: Watching Othello or Macbeth won't necessarily make one a better person, but great stories and poetry, not to mention acting talent, usually will be on display. I'm not an expert, but I feel it is likely that the Tunnel of Oppression and Vagina Monologue scripts may not rise to the level of Shakespear's efforts.

I'd always heard Mike's version, but looking it up, that story doesn't appear to be true. That said, it's not obvious to me that knowing the story behind songs more than twice as old as the teens themselves is a particularly a good use of their brains. Must they know that Layla and Janie Jones *were* real people, also?

And it's not clear that there wasn't a real King Arthur...

The illusion of understanding it gives has been mentioned. What disturbs me is when it works: the manipulative, brainwashing aspect of it. The intention seems to be to subject students to an emotional battering, breaking them down to emotional vulnerability, rather like some harsh initiation. This makes them unusually receptive to any consoling ideas in counseling sessions that follow, i.e., provides a "teaching moment".

Interesting discussion. As a literature student, in a way I'm reluctant to accept the idea that graphical and sensorial knowledge is necessarily inferior to intellectual engagement per se, because I feel that literature and art can often provide a more emotive but also more complex (and less ideologically-driven) portrait of social issues than , say, social science or historical knowledge. For example, Akhmatova's 'Requiem' or Chukovskaia's 'Deserted House' can bring alive the horrors of Stalinism in a way that Robert Conquest can't; Munch's 'Scream' offers a portrait of insanity which is much more piercing and immediate than Black's Medical Dictionary and so on.

That said, we need to be careful to remember the limitations of the sensorial or aesthetic experience that the work of art (poem, painting, song) offers. It should make no claim to objectivity and should not be expected to be objective. That said, the critic can (and should) feel free to point out the contradictions between what the work of art purports to do and what it does. Most importantly, no-one should expect to a gain an understanding of society based on sensory experience alone. We learn little about Mozart's Vienna from listening to his fine Requiem. We learn a little more about the Native American society by taking a Native American poetry class, but it should not be the primary reason for taking such a class. Combining study of the poetry with readings of rigorous scholarship from history / social science, however, does begin to produce a clearer picture of what the society looked like.

Some sensory experiences are more sophisticated than others. There is more to say about Severini's 'Suburban Train' than your typical TV commercial. From what I've seen of these tunnels of oppression, the problem is not that they are sensory experiences, but it is that the images are predictable, trite and lack any sense of nuance. I've seen far more challenging representations of domestic violence, racism, and homophobia in soap operas which at least make some effort to try to interrogate the roots of these problems rather than simply aiming to provoke a sense of moral indignation.

The other major problem is the disjunction between what the experience purports to do and what it actually does. It claims to be make oppression 'real', so the stakes are high. Oppression is a loaded term which now seems to cover much from offensive verbal jibes to genocide. How one is supposed to understand the complexity of the experience of oppressed peoples like the Jews in Medieval Europe, the blacks in the anti-bellum South or the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica is really beyond me.

You've drawn some interesting parallels between campus radicals and the Religious Right in the past, Erin. I wonder if the Tunnel of Oppression can be seen as some kind of public penance, where redemption is supposedly obtained through the experience of discomfort and undergoing suffering.

Although the song's narrative is fictional, there was indeed a real Eleanor Rigby (1895-1939). Her gravestone is in St. Peter's Parish Church, Woolton, Liverpool, where Paul McCartney and John Lennon were known to have spent time as teenagers.

Thorkild.."As a literature student, in a way I'm reluctant to accept the idea that graphical and sensorial knowledge is necessarily inferior to intellectual engagement per se, because I feel that literature and art can often provide a more emotive but also more complex (and less ideologically-driven) portrait of social issues than , say, social science or historical knowledge"...while I can't speak for Stephenson, in my interpretation of his model there is a continuum between the modes of knowledge--and a Shakespeare play in written form would be closer to the "textual" pole than the stage performance of the same play.

I don't think Stephenson means to position the graphical/sensory mode as inferior to the textual mode, only to argue that *by itself* it is a dangerous guide to truth.