As we delve into Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind, we begin by looking at the problem. Before we can get into how we got here and what needs to be done now that we’re here, we need to understand what the problem is, and that specifically begins with the three Great Untruths.
The Untruth of Fragility
The authors begin chapter one not with a university shout-down anecdote or data from a free-speech survey but with a discussion of childhood dietary restrictions. Haidt tells of his son’s preschool in which the parents were prohibited from bringing peanuts, nuts of any kind, or even dried fruit which may have come into contact with peanuts onto school grounds for fear of causing an allergic reaction (even though none of the students in that class had a peanut allergy). The authors explain that while this sort of restriction—becoming increasingly more common—is well intentioned, it has inadvertently led to even more harm. Though peanut allergy awareness is up and similar restrictions have been put in place across the country, children have developed peanut allergies at far higher rates than they have in the past. Children are actually becoming more susceptible to allergic reactions.
This is because children’s immune systems are what Nassim Nicholas Taleb would call “antifragile.” Taleb’s categories of fragile, resilient, and antifragile are used to describe how things or systems react to adversity. When fragile things encounter problems, they break and should thus avoid them. When resilient things encounter problems, they can endure them to a certain point. But when antifragile things encounter difficulties, they adapt and grow and are thus encouraged to experience such difficulties lest they wither. Immune systems are antifragile and, according to Haidt and Lukianoff, so are people in general.
From here the authors move into a discussion on concept creep—something that clearly happened regarding the peanut prohibitions—and they utilize Nick Haslam’s influential article, “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology.” Haslam explains that the concept of trauma has grown over the years, and this growth has not necessarily been a good thing. “Trauma” for a time referred purely to physical trauma, such as “head trauma.” After WWII, its scope was expanded to include mental afflictions like PTSD, which were generally caused by physical events (war, rape, etc.). However, the term eventually began to refer to perceived afflictions, and in this way took on a subjective meaning. From here it quickly entered colloquial usage.
Because people were viewed as fragile rather than antifragile and because of the widened interpretation of trauma, safe spaces began to develop in recent years. The purpose of a safe space is to protect people from hard experiences or ideas which may, in a sense, break them.
It is also worth mentioning that in this first chapter, the authors introduce Jean Twenge’s research on the newest generation which she suggests begins sometime around 1995. She labels this group iGen (which, personally, I think is a far superior name to the lazy title “Generation Z”), and they will come up more in later chapters.
The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning
According to the authors, the second untruth—that people ought to embrace their immediate emotional responses—has been formalized in Derald Wing Sue’s concept of microaggressions. Sue defines microaggressions as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.”
Haidt and Lukianoff recognize some value in this category, in acknowledging these small offenses. But beyond this, microaggressions may represent the triumph of impact over intent as some of Sue’s examples clearly do not suggest hostility. By including in the definition “unintentional,” the term “aggression” becomes misleading.
This untruth is immediately suspicious to the authors on account of its dismissal of centuries of accepted wisdom. Found across many cultures at many different times is the idea that our experience is dependent on our perception of events:
“What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.”
Epictetus
“Our life is the creation of our mind”
Buddha
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”
Shakespeare
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
Milton
This wisdom suggests it is our duty to perceive rightly, to give the benefit of the doubt rather than let our gut anger control the value of an event.
Beyond this the tendency to accept our first gut reaction is against the best, current research in psychology, namely cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT is an easy to learn methodology for recognizing cognitive distortions (such as emotional reasoning, catastrophizing, overgeneralizing, negative filtering, etc.) and addressing them. CBT is one of the most effective and most well-accepted methodologies in the psychological community, and its core is rejecting emotional reasoning.
At the end of this chapter, the authors note that emotional reasoning and the fear of harming people internally has led to a massive increase in disinvitations in recent years. After inviting speakers to a university or event, protests have led not to people not attending these speeches but to the speakers being turned away entirely.
The Untruth of Us Versus Them
The last untruth is dichotomous thinking that views those you disagree with as enemies to be defeated. The human tendency to divide ourselves over trivial or arbitrary criteria has been proven out by Henri Tajfel’s experiments concerning the minimal group paradigm and is discussed extensively as tribalism in Haidt’s previous work, The Righteous Mind.
This concept has become more familiar to us through the phenomenon of identity politics, defined by Jonathan Rauch as “political mobilization organized around group characteristics such as race, gender, and sexuality, as opposed to party, ideology, or pecuniary interest.” Haidt and Lukianoff do not label identity politics as inherently bad or even new; organizing around common characteristics has been happening for a long time.
Martin Luther King, Jr. might even be included among those who practiced identity politics. But the difference between his work and much of that going on today is that he offered common-humanity identity politics rather than common-enemy politics. That, in the opinion of the authors, is the key difference.
The authors see much of the current approach as rooted in the work of Herbert Marcuse and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. Marcuse, a Marxist, argued the need for reversal and uprising. Crenshaw’s contribution is less directly subversive in the concept of intersectionality. Intersectionality seeks to acknowledge the multiple axes that affect someone’s privilege or oppression.
The authors see this specific form of intersectionality as unhelpful for students and the untruth of us versus them as destructive for both students and professors. It leads to cultures of fear in which no one is given the benefit of the doubt.
Having explained the three Great Untruths, Haidt and Lukianoff turn to how these ideas have manifest, particularly in escalations of violence and the resurgence of witch hunts.
They begin their fourth chapter recounting the Berkeley riot in February 2017 in expectation of the invited speaker, Milo Yiannopoulos. Yiannopoulos, a skilled provocateur, had in a previous lecture shown a photo of a trans woman in order to mock her; it was rumored that in his Berkeley presentation he would release the names of undocumented immigrants (something he denied). To prevent Yiannopoulos from speaking, 1500 people participated in the riot, 150 of which were associated with Antifa. The riot caused half a million dollars in damage and resulted in several people being attacked, including men and women and even sympathizers.
It is important to note that hardly any students think violence is an acceptable response to hate-speech. However, a sizable minority surveyed believe violence is appropriate for other students in order to prevent hate-speech. Many believe that the injuries and damage were thus justified.
The logic for this justification can be traced through an article published days before in a Berkeley student newspaper expressing the danger of letting a man like Yiannopoulos come speak at your campus. The piece included a phrase that has become increasingly common and indicative of the attitudes involved: that by fighting hate-speech, the writer was fighting for their “right to exist.”
The authors describe similar situations as Berkeley at Middlebury College and Claremont McKenna College. The aggressors in each of those cases were from the left and so they add the Charlottesville riot to demonstrate that these violent reactions are coming from both sides. They add to this several more examples, including an incident at Evergreen State College which starts as a left-on-right thing before those on the right grow violent.
Much of the rationale for these events comes in the syllogism that hate-speech is violence and thus violence is an acceptable response. The authors accept that words can cause stress and thus harm, but they maintain that causing harm is not the same as violence. Breaking down this distinction is counterproductive and logically flawed.
In the following chapter on witch hunts, Haidt builds on the social psychologist he’s been most influenced by, Emile Durkheim, and his work on social cohesion. Citing him and Albert Bergesen’s work, four common attributes can be found in political witch hunts: (1) they arise quickly, (2) they involve crimes against the collective, (3) the charges are often trivial or fabricated, and (4) there is fear of defending the accused. (Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting podcast on this phenomenon worth checking out: “The Imaginary Crimes of Margit Hamosh”).
One of the modern witch hunts they delve into involves Rebecca Tuvel’s recent essay, “In Defense of Transracialism.” Without going into the details of her article, what is relevant is that an advocate of the left (Tuvel) was attacked by the left for her work that questioned common left-wing ideals. The journal was pressured to retract her essay (rather than provide a rebuttal), and many peers came out after the tumult that they had supported her but did not want to voice their opinions.
Durkheim and Bergesen’s work suggests that these sort of witch hunts occur in homogenous groups without viewpoint diversity. This is precisely the sort of environment that can be found on most university campuses. It is no secret that professors and those in academics naturally lean left (due to their openness to new ideas and learning), but in the 90s, the ratio of professors on the left to the right was 2 to 1. It has been steadily growing since then; in 2011 it was 5 to 1, and in 2016 it was 10 to 1 (in the field of psychology it was 16 to 1).
The authors argue that these sort of ratios are bad not only for students’ need to learn opposing ideas but also for development in those fields. A field of study cannot progress without voices on opposite sides critiquing and building on one another. They note that economics has comparatively the healthiest ratio at 4:1, and by some measures has had the strongest scholarship in recent years.
Across the first three chapters, Haidt and Lukianoff demonstrate the problems inherent in the Great Untruths as well as their resurgence in American culture. In the subsequent two chapters, they begin to explore how these untruths are manifesting in academia. By the end it becomes hard to not see the problem—constant anxiety by students and faculty, shout-down and humiliation cultures on major campuses, lack of intellectual diversity, and unhealthy cognitive habits by millions of students.
I think of the three untruths that the first—that humans are fragile—has the most merit and scholarship behind it. The Coddling of the American Mind is joined by a host of recent books that bear out this same reality. The latter two are a little trickier, though I think they make a good case for the nuances of their arguments: that we disadvantage ourselves (and make society unbearable) when we default to our immediate emotional response rather than giving the benefit of the doubt, and that those who disagree should be viewed as enemies leads to intellectual stagnation.
The latter claim is something most interesting to me and something Haidt has been dealing with since The Righteous Mind. As a liberal himself, he has been shocked at how his peers handle or dismiss the insights of their conservative counterparts. This loss led him to start Heterodox Academy, a project concerned with viewpoint diversity in the university setting.
Another brief note concerning intersectionality: while I think Haidt and Lukianoff bring out a lot of the issues in thinking surrounding intersectionality, it’s important to admit (as they themselves do) that the concept has lots of legitimate merit. To explore that, check out Lauren’s post from a couple months ago.
There’s a lot more to discuss here, obviously, but we’re gonna have to wait a couple weeks. Now that we understand the problem, we need to try and understand how it got there.
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