Trigger Warning

Dyrham House. A fine piece of English baroque, carefully restored, immaculately landscaped, and now armed with that 21st-century accessory no country estate is complete without: a trigger warning. Not, you understand, for low ceilings or slippery steps, but for an ornament – a couple of black boys in chains. The sign was tastefully worded, of course, warning that the item “may cause distress.” Which, naturally, it should. That’s rather the point. 

What’s odd is that the warning presumes distress is somehow an error to be avoided rather than the proper response to an artefact of cruelty. The thing was made to display domination as decoration – a trinket of subjugation in bronze or plaster. We should feel something when we see it. The mistake lies not in showing it, but in pretending we need padding before the truth.

This modern mania for trigger warnings began with good intentions – to shield the genuinely traumatised from shock. Fair enough. But research after research has found they don’t work. They don’t soothe trauma, they don’t reduce distress, and for some they even increase it. They’ve become a polite ritual – a social fig leaf signalling sensitivity while accomplishing nothing measurable. And those determined to take offence aren’t the wounded, but the indignant – the ones who bristle not at the artefact of cruelty, but at the mere acknowledgment that cruelty existed. They’ll stand before a chained child in bronze and complain about “wokeness” instead of the slavery it depicts.

What Dyrham and the National Trust are really wrestling with isn’t psychology but morality. You can’t scrub Britain’s past with lemon juice and elbow grease. Much of this splendour was financed by sugar, rum, and human misery. To remove the evidence would be sanitisation; to leave it unmarked would be complicity. So the little sign stands there – half apology, half explanation – trying to thread an impossible needle between honesty and sensitivity.

But here’s the thing: history isn’t safe. Nor should it be. We can’t learn from a past we’ve bubble-wrapped. The ornament is offensive because the act it represents was offensive. Seeing it, unmediated, is uncomfortable precisely because it forces recognition – that the people who built and maintained these grand estates did so while others were bound, bought, and sold.

So by all means keep the sign, but let’s call it what it is – a curatorial note of conscience, not a trigger warning. The former confronts; the latter infantilises. If we’re serious about remembering who we were, we must accept that discomfort is the price of honesty. The alternative is to drift into the sort of genteel amnesia where slavery becomes “commerce,” empire becomes “enterprise,” and the only thing left polished to perfection is our self-deception.