How Good Intentions & Bad Ideas Are setting Up a Generation for Failure
Of all the non-fiction books I’ve read on politics and social policy this one is at the same time both one of the most satisfying and yet ultimately the most disappointing.
The authors, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, have impressive credentials. Lukianoff is a lawyer specializing in free speech issues in higher education and heads up the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Haidt holds a chair at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, having previously taught at U.V.A. for 16 years. (He has a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Penn.)
Their writing style is fluent and clear which is no doubt helped by having written or co-written six books between the two of them.
I was amused to see a snarky review of this book by someone who was put off by the authors’ adding a succinct summary at the end of each chapter. As a recovering lawyer, I see the influence of someone-Lukianoff- who has written his share of legal briefs, designed to be readily digested by a readership of 26 year old law clerks of political appointee judges. Make it easy for those you’re trying to convince to follow your arguments and ultimately to agree with you. Talk about a feature, not flaw!
The thesis of the book is equally straight forward.
The authors make a persuasive case that the growing political intolerance on college campuses can be linked to unsettling changes in how our young people are growing up. They set out three maxims, which they characterize as Three Bad Ideas, to wit:
The Untruth of Fragility-What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker.
The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning-Always Trust Your Feelings.
The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life Is A Battle Between Good People & Evil People.
Lukianoff and Haidt give example after example of overprotective parents and college administrators catering to the feelings of students by falling prey to these three fallacies. They don’t blame the young people, whom they see as the ultimate victims of being left unprepared for life’s vicissitudes. In fact, they see a major share of the blame going to larger social forces; beyond the control of parents, children, or educators.
Anyone who grew up the 50’s or 60’s will instantly recognize how much freer and unsupervised their own childhoods were. I was fortunate to grow up in a new suburb where I was able to range for miles after school or on weekends by myself. I would never let my own children do the same 30 years later, not because my community had changed-it hadn’t- but because the larger society had.
Everyone who has had children or grandchildren has seen the addictive quality of using the Internet and is rightly appalled by it. The authors of this book have even come up with a name for the age cohort of those who were born in 1995 or thereafter, the “i-Gen”, i.e. the first generation to have had access to the Internet (and I-phones) since birth. They even see a direct link between the advent of Cancel Culture on campus in 2013 and the arrival of “i-Gen” on campus that year, the same year that the first of them reached age 18.
Haidt and Lukianoff finally posit two other factors which stress young people in today’s universities.
With an increasingly winner-take-all meritocracy, there is heightened competition for admission to competitive colleges.With college costs soaring many students come out with staggering debt, only to face an uncertain job market.
The other factor is that with 40 percent or more of high school graduates now going onto college, many are the first in their family to attend and are struggling with pressures that too often afflict the poor in our society, i.e.: family breakdown, addiction and poverty itself.
(Such students even self-identify as “FLI”- first generation, low income.)
The authors marshal an impressive array of data to support their arguments. They tie in all these social trends with the three bad mental habits (fragility, emotionalism, and binary-black vs. white-thinking) and argue that this is what has caused the horrific scenes of violence and destruction reflecting Wokeness run amok.
I agree that all these factors work to worsen Cancel Culture and Political Correctness.
Those promoting them take full advantage of these worrisome social trends and bad mental habits to further their agenda.
However, I think the authors are dangerously naïve and are prisoners of their own ideology if they think these threatening forces can be disarmed by reasoned argument and self-help psychology.
What do I mean by this?
The authors clearly recognize their target audience, well-meaning but gullible liberals.
This is reflected in the blurbs by the usual suspects, e.g. Cornel West, Anne Marie Slaughter, Michael Bloomberg, etc. contained in the book’s frontispiece. They also are very upfront that neither of them has ever voted for a Republican candidate for President or Congress.
Any conservative worth his or her salt could have figured this out on their own, even without their disclaimers. Unsparing and dispassionate as Haidt and Lukianoff are in their descriptions of the ugly scenes of Wokeness run amok at Berkeley, Middlebury, Yale and Evergreen State, they repeatedly insist that their story is one of good intentions gone awry.
In what might be the most revealing passage in the book, the authors, however, show their naivete in making this assertion. They seem perplexed describing how two college administrators (Mary Spellman of Claremont-McKenna and Erica Christakis of Yale) had their careers destroyed by two innocuous e-mails.
They state:
“Outside observers were unable to comprehend how these two e-mails could have triggered mass movements demanding that the two women be denounced and fired, “BUT” (emphasis added) “that does not mean that the people doing this (witch) hunting lack any valid reason for their anger and fear.”
This is precisely the point, though.
The academic Left makes up things to be outraged about, i.e. Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Jussie Smollett, the MU protests, etc. They are not acting in good faith. They are driven not by anger or fear, although they stir these up amongst their followers. The aim is political gain, vouchsafed by a high degree of calculation.
Lukianoff and Haidt repeatedly bend over backward to blame conservatives for whatever the soup du jour of political correctness is. For example, you might be one of these simple souls who thought that a professor who said “White death means liberation for all!” was calling for the killing of the white race. Don’t you understand context, you big silly? Isn’t it clear that he was speaking of cultural genocide? (I feel so much better!)
Lukianoff and Haidt assure us that this was yet another example of academics just “reacting to perceived injustices committed by right-wing groups or politicians off campus.”
Despite their not unsympathetic take on Cancel Culture this book was met, however, with scorn by the hard Left.
The salient attack came unsurprisingly in The Guardian, by one Moira Weigel.
Ms. Weigel is almost a caricature of an elitist academic. She has a Yale P.H.D. in Comparative Literature and Film and Media. She was a Sociotechnical Security Fellow at the Data and Society Institute.
According to Ms. Weigel, Political Correctness does not exist.
In her words, (“Politically Correct: The History of An Accusation”) she sees “P.C. as an early meme and describes the role that debates about it played in the formation of a surprising range of digitally mediated counterpublics worldwide.”
Naturally, she finds Haidt and Lukianoff’s book a travesty and scarcely disguised apology for the white privilege which in her view the “conservative” (!) authors personify.
Even our authors’ measured and sympathetic account of the events of the last decade is too much for Ms. Weigel. Why wouldn’t it be? Ms. Weigel already knows that the real Left doesn’t want a marketplace of ideas. It doesn’t want a debate. They could care less about a diversity of viewpoint, let alone creating an environment that would promote critical thinking.
Despite this hostile reception from fellow Progressives, the authors continuously gave them the benefit of the doubt. In what is clearly meant to be an emotional high point of the book, they describe how a Trump rally was disrupted by BLM demonstrators led by a man calling himself “Hawk” Newsome.
At first there was anger and hostility on both sides but after Newsome was allowed to speak, he achieved a real kumbaya moment and was applauded by the MAGA supporters for using language of inclusion, i.e. “drawing a larger circle around everyone in the crowd.” This is what was described in Lukianoff and Haidt’s 2018 book.
Unfortunately for this feel-good story, last year Mr. Newsome said on nationwide TV, “Give us what we want, or we’ll burn this country down!” (I guess he meant culturally burn it down, not literally.) So much for the politics of inclusion. Not only does a large share of this book’s target audience reject the authors’ message but the authors offer no convincing cure to the maladies they diagnose.
The word “snow flake” is not used until the last page of the book. I suspect it is because they don’t want to appear unsympathetic to today’s students. Using the term is not only something that will alienate further their fellow progressives. (Riots? What riots?) Avoidance is necessary to reinforce the impression that the current generation of college kids are driven by a sense of vulnerability.
My own experience is that the exact opposite is true-that the intolerance that is Wokeness results from arrogance and self-righteousness. The vulnerable and insecure do not shout down speakers, do not beat people up, and do not burn down buildings.
Fragile snow-flakes did not organize the outbreak of civil unrest in 70 American cities within 72 hours of the news of George Floyd’s death. Nor did they damage 115 out of 117 retail establishments on the County Club Plaza that same weekend. All this was planned by Marxist ideologues, aided and abetted by their allies in the Democratic Party and the corporate oligarchy.
I saw an earlier iteration of this 50 years ago.
I attended two universities in the 1970’s and saw left-wing protesters shout down speakers. (By a weird coincidence it was the same person shouted down in the same year on campuses a thousand miles apart! Tell me the Left isn’t organized!)
I even remember a hapless professor having his lecture on the first day of Econ 101 interrupted by student radicals. As he started to draw the supply/demand curve on the black board, one of them stood up and started screaming, “What about the Third World?” “When I told him to shut up and let the professor speak-a Nobel Laureate, by the way-most of the other students yelled abuse at me.
This idiocy occurred decades before the first helicopter parents appeared, before anyone had thought up “trigger warnings,” “micro aggressions,” and “safe spaces.”
Perhaps the ultimate shortcoming of this book is its view that a therapeutic approach to politics is needed.
The authors seem particularly taken with a school of psychology, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (“CBT”).
Dr. Haidt credits CBT with saving him from a crippling depression. Other therapists I know have told me that it is an approach to treatment that can be very effective in helping people cope with life’s stresses.
No one I know, however, likes being told that our disagreement with them stems from their emotional or psychological shortcomings or that they need counseling. This is a liberal stand-by, e.g. worker’s unemployed due to outsourcing or environmental regulations are suffering from “status anxiety” and not from losing their jobs. Questions of fact (the loss of manufacturing employment) become questions of motive (the supposed resentment of people who “cling bitterly to their guns and their religion” towards these “who don’t look like them.”)
This approach will get an even shorter shrift from the Left than from the Right, as the contemptuously dismissive reaction of Progressives reviewers to this book shows.
The real threat we are facing is a ruthless corporate oligarchy masking its predations with a veneer of identity politics.
It will not be defeated by self-help manuals or platitudes about “fostering school spirit” and “hosting cross-partisan events for students.”
Those of us on the Right should value the book for its painstaking and exhaustive account of all the manifestations of Wokeness and Political Correctness. We must, however, reject its assessment of moral equivalence on both sides of this debate and recognize that what is going on is a culture war which will not be so easily resolved as the authors suggest.
Great article Dwight, I’ve seen Haidt on Joe Rogan and Bill Maher. I’ll admit he’s very knowledgeable about what’s going on in the schools but I don’t think he over-analyses so much he’s missing several key points. In other words, he needs to understand it’s not so complicated. Just use common sense to identify the problem.
Common Sense 1: Yes, we have a new generation who grew up on their devices. This is horrible.
Common Sense 2: Facebook is by far THE WORST in this regard? Why? Not only are millions of young people addicted to Facebook, staying on it 25 hours a day. These young people aren’t just looking at posts and pictures. They’re members of these groups. You’ve seen your Facebook friends make posts that you’re not allowed to read. This is because they are members of hate groups. For instance, women get into these groups where men are not allowed. It turns into a hate fest against men 8 days a week, 25 hours a day. That’s why 150 million women in the U.S. are totally brainwashed that men are evil rapists, that every day white police are massacring helpless non-white victims. It’s propaganda on steroids, thousands of times worse than the Nazi’s propaganda. These people BELIEVE all the lies and they’re so brainwashed THEY”LL NEVER stop believing all the crap their hate group tells them EVERY SINGLE HOUR OF EVERY SINGLE DAY.
Common Sense 3: The corporations(Verizon, GE, Universities, EVERY company)have taken over everything, and they’re spewing all this hate internally to ALL their employees. For example if you work for Verizon you literally get 150 emails a day in your inbox. I repeat 150 emails. Dozens of these are thinly veiled emails about how white men are evil. My friend who works for Verizon sends me a few regularly. Anything non-white is GREAT. Trans, women of color, men of color, they’d send an email about how trees are so much more beautiful than a white man, it’s literally this silly. Some of the Verizon emails I’ve read, GOD. Silly, Stupid, Obsene, NOTHING to do with real work. It’s a non stop hate fest. ALL the corporations have the same playbook.
Common Sense: EVERYTHING I mentioned above is happening in the Universities(although we know it starts before then, I’ve seen it dozens of times with high schoolers and even younger kids). So this is why I say Haidt is really missing the true core of the problem.
Common Sense: JOBS. Who works in these corporate jobs? Who runs these companies? Who is CAUSING all this HATE to happen? I don’t think I need to answer this it’s SO FREAKING OBVIOUS.
Talk about scared rabbits. Talk about a turn about. White supremacists are getting the same rhetoric they have used for hundreds of years. See it’s called Karma and whites will be dealing with the changing rules from now on. See in about 20 years due to whites being afraid to procreate and immigration, whites will be a minority and that scares the shit out of those who have built a life on keeping the people of color in their place, because the whites are scared of pay back. Maybe when the black teacher cuts the hair of a white boy and nothing happens to the black teacher, then you will understand why you whites are so scared.
You nailed it KK. There is no more eloquent statement against systemic racism than looting big screen TVs and liquor stores.
Some very good points.
Let’s see the left/BLM protesters did not breach the capitol to change an election that they did not like, they have torn up thier own neighborhoods. . It was your brothers, Dwight, by electing and supporting the orange one, you knew who he was and what he was about yet you and yours elected him like the snow flakes cats you are. You have not stood up and condemned the traitors who stormed the capitol, you just move on, still supporting the racist Hawley and his ilk, have you gotten your “frank” credentials yet? Your supported the attempted coup by your inaction and your continued attack on the students who are tired of your hate and ignorance, shows how scared you really are.
Have you condemned the attack on democracy? or do you still believe trump won?
No you haven’t you whiny snowflake.
“A riot is the language of the unheard.” Dr. Martin Luther King,September 27th,1966
Said the community of people of color as the white cop supported blindly by the “law and order” party pressed their collective knee on their neck. A bunch of scared privileged whiny white morons attacked the capitol to get their voice heard, was that the voice about the eating of babies? What was it they wanted? The big lie? Were is the evidence, there is none and the way you white whiners are contorting your selves to support the worst golfer to inhabit the White House, though he tried he still cheated and that is what you guys like, those who cheat to get power. The folks with the collective knee on their neck are justified in demanding the government do what the constitution says, but the white police are there to make sure that does not happen, their original and continued purpose.
The real question is Do you have an outfit like the q boy?
I wrote a review of a book dealing with campus cancel culture. The authors noted its advent long before Trump became president. Why don’t you talk about that instead of going off on some wild tangent about unrelated events that occurred three years after the book was published?
“Let’s see the left/BLM protesters did not breach the capitol to change an election that they did not like, they have torn up thier own neighborhoods.”
The “left/BLM protestors” tore up black and brown neighborhoods and destroyed the small businesses there. They didn’t destroy their own rich white neighborhoods. That’s the trouble, it’s the rich white elite class educated at Yale and Harvard doing this, that’s where all of the “woke” racism is coming from – and it benefits megacorps like Amazon and the like, the tech giants. And if you look at the corporate support for BLM and the Democratic Party, it’s going to be pretty obvious who benefits. This isn’t a workers’ revolution, it’s the revolt of the elite class against the workers – it’s straight out, real time class warfare. And identity politics – from Critical Race Theory – is just the old ruling class strategy of “divide and conquer” and “divide and rule”. Check this out: “When the Brunswick canal was built in Georgia, the black slaves and white Irish workers were segregated, the excuse being that they would do violence against one another. That may well have been true, but Fanny Kemble, the famous actress and wife of a planter, wrote in her journal:
But the Irish are not only quarrelers, and rioters, and fighters, and drinkers, and despisers of niggers-they are a passionate, impulsive, warm-hearted, generous people, much given to powerful indignations, which break out suddenly when not compelled to smoulder sullenly-pestilent sympathizers too, and with a sufficient dose of American atmospheric air in their lungs, properly mixed with a right proportion of ardent spirits, there is no saying but what they might actually take to sympathy with the slaves, and I leave you to judge of the possible consequences. You perceive, I am sure, that they can by no means be allowed to work together on the Brunswick Canal.” https://libcom.org/a-peoples-history-of-the-united-states-howard-zinn/9-slavery-without-submission-emancipation-without-freedom
So racism was used as a tool by the elites, the slaveowner class, who held both Irish and blacks in subjection, to divide any opposition to their rule. If you can get your opposition to fight amongst themselves, your rule over them is assured – and that’s why Critical Race Theory is being pushed by the elite schools, the government and the megacorporations which own it – it gets people atomized, and it stops them from thinking about their common interest as the working class. It prevents them from rising up against their common oppressors.
As for “still supporting the racist Hawley and his ilk”, you probably haven’t seen this: “The Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act will:
Ban all mergers and acquisitions by companies with market capitalization exceeding $100 billion
Example: Google could not purchase Waze and incorporate it into the Maps app
Empower the FTC to designate “dominant digital firms” exercising dominant market power in particular internet markets, which will be prohibited from buying out potential competitors
Example: Facebook’s dominance in social networking should prevent it from acquiring startups seeking to build new social media platforms
Prohibit dominant digital firms from privileging their own search results over those of competitors without explicit disclosure
Example: Google could not promote its own reviews over Yelp reviews without disclosing the affiliation up front
Reform the Sherman and Clayton Acts to make clear that direct evidence of anticompetitive conduct is sufficient to support an antitrust claim, which will allow enforcers to effectively pursue the breakup of dominant firms and prevent antitrust cases from devolving into battles between economists
Example: Facebook’s complete acquisition of a major competitor, Instagram, should be sufficient to justify antitrust action without needing to bring in specialists to define the “social networking market”
Replace the outdated numerically-focused standard for evaluating antitrust cases, which allows giant conglomerates to escape scrutiny by focusing on short-term considerations, with a standard emphasizing the protection of competition in the U.S.
Clarify that “vertical” mergers are not exempt from antitrust scrutiny
Example: Amazon could not acquire additional companies in its supply chain
Drastically increase antitrust penalties by requiring companies that lose federal antitrust suits to forfeit all their profits resulting from monopolistic conduct…” https://www.hawley.senate.gov/senator-hawley-introduces-trust-busting-twenty-first-century-act-plan-bust-anti-competitive-big
Looks like “Kansas Karl” is just a running dog lackey for the megacorps – he probably *does* know his class interests, from his estate in Mission Hills…
Traitor Josh wouldn’t give two shits about any of this if he felt the “megacorps” were closer to “MAGACorps”.
He’s a hypocrite of biblical proportions that screams censorship from his platforms on right-wing news stations, radio stations and various podiums at the Capitol. Seems to me that his ability to spew his bullshit is fully intact. The QOP is all about capitalism and letting the free market decide until that same free market has a different political bent than his own. That’s when it’s censorship.
Come to find out, an overwhelming majority of Americans don’t like insurrectionists and political grifters. Who knew?
“Apropos May 1.
Soviet Union of my time. Red banners. Demonstrations of fake workers solidarity on Red Square and other public spaces, mass media is unified in its persistent presentation of fiction as fact, westerners as adversaries; uniformity of mediocre books and films; brainwashing in education with constant reprimand of the giants of the past failing to rise to the level of scientific communism; fake speeches, tired feelings and tired cliches on radio; self-censorship and fear of denunciations for anti-communist views or actions. Public dissent persecuted, silenced, ignored, mocked. All this was punctured by free debates among friends, by discussion of tamizdat and samizdat in the kitchens, by real life of love, pain, dreams, drinking, great books, and lots of free time to enjoy them.
United States of my time. Rainbow banners. Demonstrations of fake solidarity of pussy hatters and other virtue signalers, mass media is unified in its persistent presentation of fiction as fact, murderers in Ukraine as democracy builders, Russia as an adversary, PC bullshit as Gospel’s truth. Uniformity of mediocre TV and Hollywood, fake speeches, tired cliches and tired emotions on NPR, constant correction of the giants of the past for failing the current PC criteria, self-censorship, fear of exposure and denunciation for racism or sexual abuse. Public dissent is silenced, de-platformed, ignored, mocked and de-legitimized. All this is punctured by books, opinions, or conversations published by tiny presses, expressed in obscure websites and platforms, exchanged among very close friends during solitary walks, and by real life of anxiety, insecurity, worries, ambitions, drinking and great classics of human thought and creativity.
In Russia, they would say, За что боролись, на то и напоролись.
In United States — it is Deja Vu all over again.” – Prof. V. Golstein
After all that… not one of you, not one, made hardly any sense to this person, coming in cold to this discourse, without bias, without prejudice, but with an open mind ready to consider your points, and agree or disagree with what was written. But none of you really made any points at all.
Well, except for the direction of your finger.
I’’m glad you took the time to read my post and the resulting comments. I’m afraid you’re right-things tend to dissolve into partisan sniping. I would hope my review of the book-which I tried to make balanced and fair minded-would spark some interest. In fact,I just sent a copy of it to Dr.Haidt and a check to his organization. The point is that people can have disagreements and still remain civil,although you might not know it reading this blog.Thanks for your input.
“Anyone who grew up the 50’s or 60’s will instantly recognize how much freer and unsupervised their own childhoods were. I was fortunate to grow up in a new suburb where I was able to range for miles after school or on weekends by myself. I would never let my own children do the same 30 years later, not because my community had changed-it hadn’t- but because the larger society had.”
Except for the people suffering from Jim Crow, redlining, and other aspects of the systemic white supremacy that resulted in the new suburbs that this insular moron is waxing nostalgic about.
Hey, I grew up on 51st Street in good, ol KCMO…
Just south of the Plaza and a long block west of Wornall. Went to Bryant for several years and walked – and/or hitchhiked home when my mom couldn’t come get me. Right down Wornall, guess I wasn’t smart snuff to think I could have ended up like…wait for it…Bobby Greenlease (a famous rich kid who was kidnapped a killer or something when I was a pretty young child.
Back then, some heinous liken that was so rare (it seemed) that when it did go down the entire town was aghast!
My twin grrrl grew up in South Overland Park, where they could walk to their grade school maybe two bucks or less away.
On second thought, uh…which “moron”?
I’m curious why you waited two years after the post appeared to attack me. I also wanted to know why regret that your children didn’t grow up with the safety and freedom you did makes you a racist.
“Those of us on the Right should value the book for its painstaking and exhaustive account of all the manifestations of Wokeness and Political Correctness. We must, however, reject its assessment of moral equivalence on both sides of this debate and recognize that what is going on is a culture war which will not be so easily resolved as the authors suggest.”
Because nobody can possibly remember recent history, which includes countless examples of right-wing cancel culture. Often carried out with government power. This dude is probably snacking on Freedom Fries in his safe space from reality.
http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/index.php?title=List_of_things_Conservatives_have_“canceled”
There is a difference between cancelling your subscription to a paper whose news coverage is biased and shouting down a speaker whose views you don’t like. Unless some one calls for violence or preaches religious or racial hatred he or she should be free to hold their own opinions and should not be fired from their jobs or blacklisted from employment for their beliefs. I looked at the list you linked me to and almost all the examples I saw were calls to not buy goods or services from businesses whose political stances offended someone. I don’t see many instances of people being prevented from speaking out or of people losing their jobs for having the wrong political beliefs by those of us on the Right. I personally know of tenured professors being fired for political reasons by leftists. I don’t know of conservatives doing anything remotely similar.