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February 1 - March 13, 2025
in today’s culture of safetyism, intent no longer matters; only perceived impact does, and thanks to concept creep, just about anything can be perceived as having a harmful—even violent—impact on vulnerable groups.
Solidarity can interfere with a group’s efforts to find the truth, and the search for truth can interfere with a group’s solidarity.
One of the most brilliant features of universities is that, when they are working properly, they are communities of scholars who cancel out one another’s confirmation biases.
One of the strongest personality correlates of left-wing politics is the trait of openness to experience, a trait that describes people who crave new ideas and experiences and who tend to be interested in changing traditional arrangements.
Social conservatives tend to be lower on openness to experience and higher on conscientiousness—they prefer things to be orderly and predictable, they are more likely to show up on time for meetings, and they are more likely to see the value of traditional arrangements.
The only field among all of the humanities and social sciences that is known to have enough political diversity to allow for institutionalized disconfirmation is economics, where the left-to-right ratio found in a study of the voter registrations of professors was a comparatively low four to one.
when a field lacks political diversity, researchers tend to congregate around questions and research methods that generally confirm their shared narrative, while ignoring questions and methods that don’t offer such support.
roughly 20% of incoming students identify as conservative, and that figure has held steady since the early 1980s.
viewpoint diversity is necessary for the development of critical thinking, while viewpoint homogeneity (whether on the left or the right) leaves a community vulnerable to groupthink and orthodoxy.
Politically homogeneous communities are more susceptible to witch hunts, particularly when they feel threatened from outside.
Viewpoint diversity reduces a community’s susceptibility to witch hunts.
the mid-twentieth century was a historical anomaly—a period of unusually low political polarization and cross-party animosity7 combined with generally high levels of social trust and trust in government.
today, differences in party affiliation go hand in glove with differences in world view and individuals’ sense of social and cultural identity.”
Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.
As political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt put it, “Parties [have] come to view each other not as legitimate rivals but as dangerous enemies. Losing ceases to be an accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a catastrophe.”14
Americans are now motivated to leave their couches to take part in political action not by love for their party’s candidate but by hatred of the other party’s candidate.
Negative partisanship means that American politics is driven less by hope and more by the Untruth of Us Versus Them. “They” must be stopped, at all costs.
In physics, as Newton’s law tells us, every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. In a polarization spiral, however, for every action there is a disproportionate reaction.
Provoking uncomfortable thoughts is an essential part of a professor’s role, but professors now have reason to worry that provocative educational exercises and lines of questioning could spell the end of their reputations and even careers.
In short, iGen is the first generation that spent (and is now spending) its formative teen years immersed in the giant social and commercial experiment of social media.
The bottom line is that when members of iGen arrived on campus, beginning in the fall of 2013, they had accumulated less unsupervised time and fewer offline life experiences than had any previous generation. As Twenge puts it, “18-year-olds now act like 15-year-olds used to, and 13-year-olds like 10-year-olds. Teens are physically safer than ever, yet they are more mentally vulnerable.”9
Compared to the early 2000s, nearly twice as many teenage girls now end their own lives.
When kids use screens for two hours of their leisure time per day or less, there is no elevated risk of depression.21 But above two hours per day, the risks grow larger with each additional hour of screen time. Conversely, kids who spend more time off screens, especially if they are engaged in nonscreen social activities, are at lower risk for depression and suicidal thinking.
It is worth remembering that humans’ neural architecture evolved under conditions of close, mostly continuous face-to-face contact with others (including non-visual and non-auditory contact; i.e., touch, olfaction), and that a decrease in or removal of a system’s key inputs may risk destabilization of the system.
time spent using electronic devices was not generally harmful for highly sociable kids—the ones who spent more time than the average kid in face-to-face social interactions.
One out of every seven women at U.S. universities now thinks of herself as having a psychological disorder, up from just one in eighteen women in the last years of the Millennials.
safetyism is likely to make things even worse for students who already struggle with mood disorders. Safetyism also inflicts collateral damage on the university’s culture of free inquiry, because it teaches students to see words as violence and to interpret ideas and speakers as safe versus dangerous, rather than merely as true versus false.
On average, eighteen-year-olds today have spent less time unsupervised and have hit fewer developmental milestones on the path to autonomy (such as getting a job or a driver’s license), compared with eighteen-year-olds in previous generations.
These experts all came to the conclusion that modern parenting is preventing kids from growing strong and independent,
when we attempt to produce perfectly safe systems, we almost inevitably create new and unforeseen problems.
by placing a protective shield over our children, we inadvertently stunt their growth and deprive them of the experiences they need to become successful and functional adults.
parental hyperconcern has the net effect of making kids more fragile.”
To the extent that iGen college students are behaving differently from previous generations of college students, a contributing factor may be that, compared with previous generations, middle-class iGen (and late Millennial) students were overscheduled and overparented as children.
Severe adversity that hits kids early, especially in the absence of secure and loving attachment relationships with adults, does not make them stronger; it makes them weaker. Chronic, severe adversity creates “toxic stress.”
In species that are predators, such as wolves, their pups seem to prefer to be the chasers. In species that are prey, such as rats, the pups prefer to be chased.1 Our primate ancestors were both prey and predator, but they were prey for much longer. That may be why human children particularly enjoy practicing their fleeing and hiding skills.2
Play is essential for wiring a mammal’s brain to create a functioning adult.
A key concept from developmental biology is “experience-expectant development.”
Peter Gray, a leading researcher of play, defines “free play” as “activity that is freely chosen and directed by the participants and undertaken for its own sake, not consciously pursued to achieve ends that are distinct from the activity itself.”
Vigorous physical free play—outdoors, and with other kids—is a crucial kind of play, one that our evolved minds are “expecting.” It also happens to be the kind of play that kids generally say they like the most.
much of the play had shifted to indoor activities, often involving a computer and no other children.14 This kind of play does not build physical strength and is not as effective at building psychological resilience or social competence,
In contrast to the decreased time spent in play between 1981 and 1997, that same time-use study found that time spent in school went up 18%, and time spent doing homework went up 145%.
kindergarten teachers still claim that the most important skills for kindergarten are not academic but social and emotional (like listening and being able to take turns).
Opportunities for self-direction, social exploration, and scientific discovery are increasingly lost to direct instruction in the core curriculum, which is often driven by the schools’ focus on preparing students to meet state testing requirements.
“grit is often misunderstood as perseverance without passion, and that’s
Of greatest importance in free play is that it is always voluntary; anyone can quit at any time and disrupt the activity, so children must pay close attention to the needs and concerns of others if they want to keep the game going. They must work out conflicts over fairness on their own; no adult can be called upon to side with one child against another.
Denying children the freedom to explore on their own takes away important learning opportunities that help them to develop not just independence and responsibility, but a whole variety of social skills that are central to living with others in a free society.
A society that weakens children’s ability to learn these skills denies them what they need to smooth social interaction. The coarsening of social interaction that will result will create a world of more conflict and violence, and one in which people’s first instinct will be increasingly to invoke coercion by other parties to solve problems they ought to be able to solve themselves.
Children deprived of free play are likely to be less competent—physically and socially—as adults. They are likely to be less tolerant of risk, and more prone to anxiety disorders.
Free play helps children develop the skills of cooperation and dispute resolution that are closely related to the “art of association” upon which democracies depend. When citizens are not skilled in this art, they are less able to work out the ordinary conflicts of daily life. They will more frequently call for authorities to apply coercive force to their opponents. They will be more likely to welcome the bureaucracy of safetyism.
goals other than academic excellence begin to take priority as universities come to resemble large corporations—a
