Here’s a book that was published six years ago this month, and which I read one year ago last month.
Subtitle: “How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure”
(Penguin Press, Sept. 2018, 338pp, including 70p of acknowledgements, appendices, notes, references, and index.)
In a structure similar to Robert Reich’s book just discussed, this one identifies a problem, explores how we got here, then provides suggested correctives.
By “coddling” the author mean that Americans, students in particular, are over-protected. The problem, especially on college campuses, consists of three Great Untruths. These are discussed in the first three chapters.
1, The Untruth of Fragility: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker;
2, The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always Trust Your Feelings;
3, The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life Is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People.
The second and third are familiar: conservatives in particular trust “gut feelings” or “intuition” over facts or statistics, and they (especially the religious ones) divide the world into their tribe and everyone else. In the terms I’ve been using, these are very tribal notions, and have been thoroughly discredited by anyone who has bothered to think them through. The first “untruth” is less familiar, and introduces us to the interesting and useful aspect of this book: it’s not a one-sided political or social argument, but calls out problems exhibited by both the right and the left. In particular, Greg L noticed calls for censorship on campuses that were coming from *students*, e.g. to dis-invite speakers, because they needed protection from feeling unsafe, or being “triggered.” The implicit premise was that students are fragile and need protection.
Lukianoff and Haidt wrote an article for The Atlantic in 2015, which I noted in this blog post at the time. And then as things developed, expanded that into this book.
Personally, this book identified for me that issues of intolerance do indeed come from the left as well as the right. Even if in very different ways. And it identified the sometime trivial ways small issues become big issues. (E.g., via milk cartons.)
The first Untruth involves the rise of “safetyism”: how peanut allergies rose precisely because parents began protecting their children from peanuts back in the 1990s. The immunity system requires stress in order to grow. As do personalities. [[ I would comments that the current obsession with social media bubbles is an extension of safetyism. There, you need never encounter anyone who would challenge your feelings or opinions. If they do, just defriend them! ]]
The second Untruth contradicts much ancient wisdom, from Buddha, Shakespeare, Milton. (Haidt’s first book, THE HAPPINESS HYPOTHESIS, considers ancient wisdom to modern understandings; another book I’ve read but not yet written up here.) The corrective is critical thinking. The symptoms are “microaggressions” and the intolerance of speakers on campuses that challenge conventional beliefs. (But this happened, the authors admit, partly because the right began inviting provocateurs or “trolls” like Milo Yiannopoulos, to campuses, precisely to invite student protests they could characterize as intolerance.) In here comes a discussion of CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, that Haidt discussed in that earlier book.
The third Untruth revisits familiar ideas: the human mind evolved for living in tribes, and retains an us-vs-them mentality. Examples include protests about words and identity on college campuses, and various kinds of identity politics. Students become afraid to say anything wrong; they walk on eggshells. The very opposite of what universities should be about.
The second section of the book, “Bad Ideas in Action,” is full of sourced examples of how these ideas have played out. This is a way in which this book serves to bind together, into a kind of story, or explanation, many of the events we’ve all lived through over the years, heard in the news, without really understanding any core explanation. So many campus protests, for instance.
The third section asks “How Did We Get Here?” There’s polarization (see Ezra Klein), which has increased since the 1980s, with high-profile cases of professors being harassed from the right. There’s anxiety and depression, triggered by social media and the iPhone, which has led to depression among teens, especially girls, comparing themselves to others. [[ Haidt has expanded on this idea in his new book this year, The Anxious Generation. ]]
And paranoid parenting. This was something I’ve been vaguely aware of but had not fully appreciated. In the old days, we’ve all heard, children played outside, walked to school alone (as I did) without worries. In days when actual crime was much higher than today. What triggered parental paranoia? A single particular event inspired a lot of it: a missing kid whose photo was put on milk cartons. Then a second, and a third. Suddenly, the culture became one in which children were constantly in danger. [[ This again is the pernicious nature of the news, no matter how well-intentioned; it amplifies events that are actually extremely rare. ]]
The decline of play — apparently another theme in Haidt’s new book. Play exposes children to elements of danger and risk. Social media enhances impressions of such risks.
The bureaucracy of safetyism — how university administrators treat students as if they are always right when they say they want protection; but this fosters moral dependence.
And the quest for justice. Recent political events, as powerful as any since the late 1960s, have given rise to intuitive ideas of distributive and procedural justice. For example, gaps in outcome do not necessarily imply discrimination; other explanations are possible.
The final section is about “Wising Up.” How to create wiser kids: Six principles: prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child. Train kids to harness their thoughts, via CBT or mindfulness. Realize that every human being has the potential for good or evil; practice intellectual humanity. Help schools oppose the great untruths: minimal homework, more recess, less language police. Limit and refine device time [[ a theme of Haidt’s new book ]]. And support the idea of service or work before college.
Wiser universities: Pursue truth first, then social justice. Emphasize freedom of inquiry, and don’t respond to public outrage. Pick a good mix, with more older students, those from schools that teach intellectual virtues, and include diversity to avoid orthodoxy. Encourage productive disagreement, and explicitly reject the three Untruths. And draw a larger circle around the community, not just the campus.
Wiser societies: (Authors cite Pinker and Ridley titles for their optimism.) Beware social media. Encourage free play and freedom. Be smart about identity politics. And commit universities to truth as a process.
Authors predict things will improve.
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Have things improved? Not with social media or identity politics. Two trends since the book was published are the issue of transgenders (with the demonization of JK Rowling and others), and the entire MAGA movement of (what I call) tribalistic thinking.
