The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are setting Up a Generation for Failure

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, “The Coddling of the American Mind:  How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure,” Penguin Press, 2018, 269 pp.

Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising. How did this happen?

As I read this book's indictment of today’s college students in the iGen generation and their violent protests against both left and right speakers they disagree with, I questioned the frightened response of the college administrators.  I believe college students have always responded to a lack of supervision and a lack of consequences with predictable anarchy.  This book only incidentally comments on the enabling behavior of administrators.

In addition to criticizing the political correctness culture on college campuses, Lukianoff and Haidt diagnose the debilitating effects of the current belief that young people are fragile. It’s not just the kids’ fault. The authors tell a tale of overprotective parents eager to make everything safe for their offspring, leaving little room for young people to learn from their mistakes because they were shielded from ever making any. “Safetyism,” as they put it, is a symptom of the “paranoid parenting” styles that the authors claim reached a peak in the 1990s. Every age seems to have its own cures for the previous generation’s supposedly poor child-rearing. These authors sing the praises of popular websites about free-range kids, and they support the current fashion of making playgrounds a little riskier. (Observation Halloween night 2018: there were more adult chaperons than kids that came to our house; I used to go alone when seven years old in Madison WI.).

The authors are right to push back hard against the cultivation of fragility, victimhood, and to defend free speech as essential to the mission of higher education. Professors and students shouldn’t be afraid to express themselves, make mistakes, and find better ways of thinking and living through passionate disputation. Lukianoff and Haidt’s insights on the dangers of creating habits of “moral dependency” are timely and important.

My Notes:

Pg. 4:  This is a book about three Great Untruths that seem to have spread widely in recent years:

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.

While many propositions are untrue, in order to be classified as a Great Untruth an idea must meet three criteria:

1.      It contradicts ancient wisdom (ideas found widely in the wisdom literature of many cultures).

2.      It contradicts modern psychological research on well-being.

3.      It harms the individuals and communities who embrace it.

Pg. 20:  Peanut allergies were rare among American children up until the mid-1990s;  one study then found that only four out of a thousand children under the age of eight had such an allergy.  But by 2008 the rate had more than tripled to fourteen out of a thousand.  It turns out that protecting children from exposure to peanuts is harmful.  Regular eating of peanut-containing products, when started during infancy, will elicit a protective immune response instead of an allergic immune reaction.  Our immune systems are a miracle of evolutionary engineering, designed by natural selection to learn rapidly from early experience.  It requires exposure to a range of foods, bacteria, and even parasitic worms in order to develop its ability to mount an immune response to real threats.  Vaccination uses the same logic by exposing children to threats in small doses, thereby giving children’s immune systems the opportunity to learn how to fend off similar threats in the future.  The hygiene hypotheses is the leading explanation for why allergy rates generally go up as countries get wealthier and cleaner.

Pg. 30:  When safety begins to trump everything and children are raised in a culture of safetyism, which teaches them to stay ‘emotionally safe’ while protecting them from every imaginable danger, it may set up a feedback loop: kids become more fragile and less resilient.  The end result may be similar to what happened when we tried to keep kids safe from exposure to peanuts: a widespread backfiring effect in which the ‘cure’ turns out to be a primary cause of the disease.

The preoccupation with safetyism is particularly present in the generation that began to enter college around 2013.  Jean Twenge, a psychologist, has found a surprisingly sharp discontinuity that begins around birth-year 1995 (the iGen generation).  This generation suffers from far higher rates of anxiety and depression than did Millennials at the same age—and higher rates of suicide.  Something has changed.  Twenge focuses on the rapid growth of social media in the years after the iPhone was introduced, in 2007.  By 2011 most teens could check in on their social media status every few minutes, and many did.  It is this generation that is obsessed with safety and they define safety as including ‘emotional safety.’  Many of them believe they need safe spaces and trigger warnings lest words and ideas put them in danger.  (By 2013 the idea that college students should not be exposed to ‘offensive’ ideas is now a majority position on campus. (In 2017, 58% of college students said it is ‘important to be part of a campus community where I am not exposed to intolerant and offensive ideas.’ Pg. 48)

Pg. 36:  Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) was developed in the 1960s by Aaron Beck, a time when Freudian ideas dominated psychiatry and therapist assumed that depression and the distorted thinking it produces were just the surface manifestation of deeper problems, usually stretching back to unresolved childhood conflict.  Beck, on the other hand, noticed that his patients tended to get themselves caught in a feedback loop in which irrational negative beliefs caused powerful negative feelings, which in turn seemed to drive patients' reasoning, motivating them to find evidence to support their negative beliefs.  He noticed a common pattern of beliefs: ‘I’m no good, ‘My world is bleak,’ and ‘My future is hopeless.’  Beck’s great discovery was that it is possible to break the disempowering feedback cycle if you can get people to examine these beliefs and consider counterevidence.  With CBT, there is no need to spend years talking about one’s childhood.

Pg. 47:  As the idea that the mere presence of a speaker on campus can be ‘dangerous’ has spread more widely, efforts to disinvite speakers have become more common.  A Foundation for Individual Rights (FIRE) has been tracking disinvitation attempts going back to 2000; the FIRE disinvitation database currently contains 379 such events.  About 46% of the attempts were successful: the speaker was disinvited, or the event was otherwise canceled.  Of the events that proceeded, about a third were disrupted by protesters to some degree.  The protests were as likely to come from the Right as from the Left. (Only about 1% of students say they themselves would use violence to stop someone from speaking, but 20-30% say they are willing to support other students who use violence. Pg. 94).

Pg. 58:  The human mind is evolutionarily prepared for tribalism.  Human evolution is not just the story of individuals competing with other individuals within each group; it’s also the story of groups competing with other groups.  Tribalism is our evolutionary endowment for banding together to prepare for intergroup conflict.  When the ‘tribe switch’ is activated, we bind ourselves more tightly to the group, we embrace and defend the group’s moral matrix, and we stop thinking for ourselves. 

Pg. 59f:  Identity Politics:  its basic meaning is political mobilization organized around group characteristics such as race, gender, and sexuality, as opposed to party, ideology, or pecuniary interest.  This is not new in America: if cattle ranchers, wine enthusiasts, or libertarians banding together to promote their interests is normal politics, then women, African Americans, or gay people banding together is normal politics, too.  But how identity is mobilized makes an enormous difference.  Identity can be mobilized in ways that emphasize overarching common humanity while making the case that some fellow human beings are denied dignity and rights because they belong to a particular group, or it can be mobilized in ways that amplify our ancient tribalism and bind people together in shared hatred of a group that serves as the unifying common enemy.

Pg. 90:  Violent events at colleges provoked by Leftists included Berkeley, Middlebury, and Claremont McKenna.  Then there was the Right’s event in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 with ‘good people on both sides.’

Pg. 99:  The most famous witch hunt in US history occurred in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692.  Legal action was taken against at least 144 people (38% of them male).  Nineteen were executed by hanging, one was crushed by heavy stones.

Pg. 101:  Witch hunts arise quickly.  A community seems to suddenly find itself infested with all sorts of subversive elements.  Whether one thinks of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, the Stalinist Show Trials, or the 1950s McCarthy period in the US, the phenomenon is the same: a community becomes intensely mobilized to rid itself of internal enemies.

Pg. 110:  The ratio of professors (across all fields) who self-identified on a survey as being on the left was 2:1 in the early 1990s and rose to 17:1 in social sciences to 10:1 in all humanities.  Things had begun to change rapidly in the late 1990s when the professors from the Greatest Generation (mostly white males who had fought in WWII) were replaced by members of the Baby Boom generation.  (I found this a bit misleading as over 30% of people are now Independents--I assume the same is true in the College environment.  I, for instance, am fiscally conservative and culturally liberal).

Pg. 130:   Since the 1970s, Americans have been increasingly self-segregating into politically homogeneous communities.  We live in increasingly economically and politically segregated communities right down to the city block.  The Republican Party has become disproportionately older, white, rural, male, and Christian, the Democratic Party is increasingly young, nonwhite, urban, female, and nonreligious. 

The media environment has changed in ways that foster division.  By the 1990s there was a cable news channel for most points on the political spectrum, and by the early 2000s, there was a website or discussion group for every conceivable interest group and grievance.  People are encased in echo chambers like Facebook and Twitter.  (We don’t see the same ‘facts’ as each other; entertainment and sensationalism drive the output).  Also, the increasingly bitter hostility in Congress ever since Newt Gingrich changed the work schedule and culture has harmed the country.

Pg. 147:  The brief span between 2007 and 2012 with the introduction of the iPhone has substantially changed the social life of the average American teen.  The iGen generation is the first generation that spent its formative teen years immersed in the giant social and commercial experiment of social media.  What could go wrong?  Compared to the early 2000s, nearly twice as many teenage girls now end their own lives. (Pg. 150).  One out of every seven women at US universities now thinks of herself as having a psychological disorder, up from just one in eighteen women in the last years of the Millennials (P. 156).

Pg. 171:  In Bristol Connecticut, in 2014, a woman left her eleven-year-old daughter in the car while she went into a CVS pharmacy.  A passerby called the police and issued a misdemeanor summons to the Mother and forced her to appear in court.  (When police endorse safetyism, it forces parents to overprotect.  The police chief of New Albany, Ohio, advised that children should not be allowed outside without supervision until the age of 16. (When I was in second grade, 1949, I often took the bus or my bike, unaccompanied, all over Madison, Wisconsin.  Statistics show that children are as safe now as they were in 1963.)

Pg. 176:  America’s selective universities are dominated by children from the upper class and upper-middle class.  A recent analysis found that thirty-eight top schools, including most of the Ivy League, there are more undergraduate students from families in the top 1% of the income distribution than from the bottom 60%.

Pg. 213:  People’s ordinary, everyday, intuitive notions of justice include two major types: distributive justice (the perception that people are getting what is deserved) and procedural justice (the perception that the process by which things are distributed and that rules enforced are fair and trustworthy).  The most common way that people think about distributive justice is captured by equity theory, which states that things are perceived to be fair when the ratio of outcomes to inputs is equal for all participants.  But when social justice efforts aim to achieve equality of outcomes by group, and when social justice activists are willing to violate distributive or procedural fairness for some individuals along the way, these efforts violate many people’s sense of intuitive justice.

Pg. 236:  By the 1990s for families in the middle class and higher, parenting methods became very labor-intensive involving overprotecting, overscheduling, and over-parenting children in hopes of giving them an edge in a competitive society.  Along the way, they have forgotten the importance of play and the value of unsupervised experience.

Pg. 242:  Author recommends two books for an overview of CBT:  Dr. Leahy’s book The Worry Cure.  Also, Freeing Your Child from Anxiety by Tamar Chansky.  They also recommend that American children take a gap year after graduating from High School as they are too immature for college life. (Pg. 250).