Interview with Jonathan Haidt on: "The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure", co-authored with Greg Lukianoff.
Has something gone wrong with our conception of social justice?
Social justice has many meanings. I think the term was used [to refer to] a Catholic social justice in the 19th century. Some people, on the right especially, claim that the term is meaningless, that there’s only justice. I think that’s not right. I think that there are certain conceptions of justice that are about groups in society; and especially when groups are shut out or treated with lack of dignity, then I think talking about social justice as a particular subset of justice is useful.
What I’ve observed on campus—and what Greg Lukianoff and I wrote about in our book—is that there’s an increasing tendency to define, to look at any place where there’s not numerical parity, where any group is underrepresented relative to the population and to say, “that is unjust.” And any social scientist who’s thinking in any other domain would say, “well, no, wait a second. You have to know the pipeline. You have to know how many people were trying to get in, were people treated differently because of their group membership?”In fact, just today, The New York Times announced that it’s going to commit to publishing an equal number of letters from men and women, even though 75 percent of the letter writers are men. Men like to put themselves out in public and show off. But The New York Times has committed to this equal outcomes social justice, which says we’re gonna treat people unequally in order to attain equal outcomes.
That I think is unfair. Most Americans think it’s unfair. Most Americans think that you should treat people as individuals and not discriminate against anyone because of their race or gender. So yes, we are in the middle of a time in which many people who call themselves social justice activists are trying to achieve policies that most people think will treat individuals unfairly.
How should we understand the concept of intersectionality?
Intersectionality is a very important concept on campus these days and it starts with an insight that I think is important and absolutely right. Which is that the experience of any person is not just the sum of the experiences of the various identities. So to be a black woman in American today is not just the sum of what it’s like to be a woman added on to what it’s like to be black. So Kimberle Crenshaw, the woman who popularized the concept and developed it, makes the point that there are distinctive indignities that black women would face that might not be faced by women or by black men let’s say.
So if the point is just that identities intersect or interact, it’s absolutely right. You can’t argue that. Where it’s gone wrong I believe is that it has become such a part of teaching on campus, it becomes wedded to a notion of society as a matrix of oppression in which young people learn to see society as being composed of all kinds of binary distinctions where the people on top are powerful and therefore bad. They are oppressors so they are morally bad. People on the bottom are the victims and therefore morally good.
Now of course oppression is bad, but to teach young people whose minds are ... human minds evolved to do tribalism. We evolved to do us versus them, binary thinking, black and white thinking, good versus evil. To take 18-year-olds, and rather than try to turn that down and say “okay hold on, don’t be so moralistic. Let’s try to give people a chance. Let’s judge people as individuals.” That was the great achievement of the 20th century—to make progress there. Instead in the 21st century to say, “okay welcome to campus. Here are five or six dimensions; we’re going to teach you to see men, maleness, masculinity as bad, everyone else is good. White is bad, everyone else is good. Straight is bad, everyone else is good.” This is Manicheism. This is ramping up our tendency to dualistic thinking.
How did this sort of dualistic thinking that students are learning gain purchase in the academy?
Within each school, there are discrete departments that have a lot of autonomy. Deans and presidents can’t really tell departments what to teach or who to hire. So each department, each field in the academy evolves over the course of decades according to its own logic and the logic of its broader field outside of the university.
So I think that there are certain fields that are colloquially called the grievance studies departments. Fields that are not focused on doing basic research or on understanding social dynamics, but on activism, on changing social dynamics. In general, trying to change things and trying to understand them don’t go well together. The mission of a university I believe should be to understand. And if you do a great job of research, that can be the basis for all kinds of activism later. But if you start with a commitment to a certain way of seeing the world, and you start with a belief that some people are good and some people are bad, I think it makes it very hard to understand real social systems.
I think that there are certain areas, certain departments, certain majors that have more of an activist flavor than a research flavor. Students who major in those departments—I mean students get a lot of different experiences—but those who major in those departments and tend to socialize with people who think that way may come out of the university less wise than when they went in.
How should students leaving college think about trying to advance social justice?
Many students come to college with a dream or desire or goal of making the world a better place. This is an aspect of post-materialist societies: Prosperity, and general peace lead people to care more about women’s rights, gay rights, animal rights, the environment. This is a trend that happens all over the world. It’s happening in Asia as well. So increasingly students want to make a different in the world in a certain way in terms of social justice-type concerns. And that would be great if they were to commit to understanding first. If they would commit to understanding institutions first before they try to change them, then they’d have some success.
Unfortunately, social institutions are incredibly complicated and difficult to change. If you get a group of 20 top experts to study poverty let’s say, or child abuse or anything else, it’s often very difficult to really find a solution. It can take years of study. We then roll out programs, and it often turns out that the programs backfire. So I think that college students, if they really want to make a difference in the world, they should not become activists in their freshman year. They should devote themselves to studying and learning, and maybe by senior year, if they’re really expert in something, maybe they could get behind it.
Now there is one nice exception. The students at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, they did a wonderful job of reviewing the research on gun control. Because, it’s a much harder problem than many people think. They really researched it, they came up with a set of recommendations that I read and I thought, “wow, this is really well informed. This is great.” And then they went to the legislature and tried to put pressure on them to pass those reforms. That’s the way to do it.
Unfortunately, what we have on campus often is certain popular ideas that have no empirical support: mandatory diversity training, more ethnic identity centers, bias response teams so that anybody can report anybody else anonymously. These might sound good to some people, but there’s no evidence that they’ll make a more inclusive, open, trusting environment. And there’s sometimes evidence that they’ll make things worse. So I believe that if you really want to make a difference in the world, you need to commit to really studying the world. Don’t get caught up in a group that is so passionate and so committed that it’s going to basically be blind to counter evidence.
Tell us the six explanatory threads that make up your book, The Coddling of the American Mind.
So in The Coddling of the American Mind, my co-author Greg Lukianoff and I are trying to figure out why campus culture changed so rapidly. Not everywhere—not even at most schools—but at most of the elite schools in the northeast and the west coast and elsewhere. Why was there suddenly this huge influx of these new ideas about safe spaces, microaggressions, trigger warnings, speech is violent, protect us from this violent speaker. Greg runs the foundation for individual rights in education. He’s always been trying to protect student free speech rights. And suddenly in 2014, students themselves were saying ban this, protect us from that, that’s violent, shut that down. And they were talking about safety. And they meant emotional safety. Where did this come from?
So Greg and I dug into it for several years, and what we came up with in our book—we’re very proud of—is a kind of social science detective story. We don’t say, “oh it’s all social media. Or oh it’s …”—it’s no one thing. So in the book, we show that there are at least six intersecting or interacting threads.
The rise in polarization of the country, as left and right hate each other more and more every year since the 1990s. There’s much more of an impetus to yell and scream, become passionate, and shut down speech that in any way seems to give comfort to the other side. That’s a huge one. The nastiness of our culture war. And related to that, the 2016 election and the inauguration of Trump. Right around then is when we see most of the actual violence. There hasn’t been a lot of violence on campus, but what there was especially happened right after the inauguration.
Another intersecting thread is the huge rise in depression and anxiety that began around 2012. Students who were born after 1995 are not millennials—they are Gen Z. Gen Z has much higher rates of anxiety and depression. And when you bring that cognitive style onto campus—there’s research we talk about in the book—there’s research showing that depressed and anxious people are more prone to put the worst possible reading on things. If there’s ambiguity, they’ll see the most threatening, negative version possible and it’s very difficult to change their minds about it. So that makes it very hard to have a seminar class. It makes it very hard to have a discussion about complex topics. So rise in mental illness.
Third is paranoid parenting. We started telling kids in the 1990s, and especially after 9/11 and Columbine: The world is dangerous. If you’re outside, you’ll be kidnapped. Now, this was never true. The world’s getting safer and safer. I grew up in the ’70s during a gigantic crime wave. Just as the crime wave was ending in the 1990s, we freaked out and thought the world too dangerous to let kids out.
Related to that then, the fourth thread, is that in addition to telling the world is scary, we said “you don’t get to play anymore. You don’t get unsupervised playtime.” Lots of soccer practice, lots of organized activities after school. But we’re never gonna give you the chance to just be outside on your own, exploring the woods, going to town, buying a candy bar with your friends. Not until you’re 14, or 12, something like that. So we took the most important experiences of childhood away from kids in the 1990s. That’s the fourth one.
Fifth one is bureaucratic changes driven in part by fear of liability that led university administrators to crack down on speech more and to implement reforms that put us all on eggshells. So, for example, in every bathroom at NYU, there are signs telling students how to report me anonymously if I say something that they find offensive. That means I can’t take chances, I can’t tell jokes, I can’t trust them, even though most of them are great. But if one student in the class takes offense to one thing I say it could mire me in weeks and weeks of bureaucratic difficulty. So I don’t take chances.
And then, the last one is new ideas about social justice. Everybody agrees that people should have equal opportunity. That, there’s widespread agreement about. But when some groups are now arguing that nothing is fair until it’s exactly proportional, 50 percent female, 15 percent African American, that might be a desirable endpoint, but if you treat every institution as corrupt and evil until it achieves that, you’re misunderstanding institutions and you’re committing yourself to kinds of activism that will never be successful. If you won’t look at the pipeline, if you won’t look at the preconditions, you cannot understand how an institution works. So you put those all together and I think we have the package of almost like fuses that sort of all came together and came to a single point around 2014, 2015. (...)
What advice do you have for new fathers like myself?
So my book... began as a book about what’s going on on campus—but it quickly became a book on child rearing and parenting. Originally, when we wrote our Atlantic article in 2015, Greg and I thought that the problems—the fragility, the claims about emotional safety—we thought those originated on some college campuses. But we very quickly learned: no, the problems are baked in by the time students get to college. What we didn’t understand back then is that the social world for kids born in 1995 and later is really different from the world of kids born before then.
Before the 1990s, kids had a lot of independence. They went out to play. They had time unsupervised. That’s crucial for child development. Kids are anti-fragile, they need to fall down, they need to get in fights, they need to get lost and find their way back. In doing so, in facing risk and facing challenges, we get stronger, stronger, stronger, stronger until we’re ready to go off to college and live independently. But in the 1990s, we decided: no more of that, the world’s too dangerous, no more practice being independent until you go off to college—and then you’re not independent. The cost has been devastating. The rates of anxiety and depression are skyrocketing, especially for girls. And so I think the most important lessons that we can take for child rearing now are that we have grossly overdone the protection and the academic pressures in elementary school.
by Brian Gallagher, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: Charles Mostoller/Reuters via
[ed. Linked below but expanded for broader viewing. See also: Judith Rich Harris: Children Don't Do Things Half Way (Edge).]
