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October 20 - October 29, 2024
Part of Dr. King’s genius was that he appealed to the shared morals and identities of Americans by using the unifying languages of religion and patriotism.
the American civil religion.38 Some Americans use quasi-religious language, frameworks, and narratives to speak about the country’s founding documents and founding fathers, and King did, too.
“I against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world.”
There has never been a more dramatic demonstration of the horrors of common-enemy identity politics than Adolf Hitler’s use of Jews to unify and expand his Third Reich.
It’s a set of approaches in which things are analyzed primarily in terms of power. Groups struggle for power. Within this paradigm, when power is perceived to be held by one group over others, there is a moral polarity: the groups seen as powerful are bad, while the groups seen as oppressed are good.
If we want to create welcoming, inclusive communities, we should be doing everything we can to turn down the tribalism and turn up the sense of common humanity.
“call-out culture,” in which students gain prestige for identifying small offenses committed by members of their community, and then publicly “calling out” the offenders.69 One gets no points, no credit, for speaking privately and gently with an offender—in fact, that could be interpreted as colluding with the enemy.
(Virtue signaling refers to the things people say and do to advertise that they are virtuous. This helps them stay within the good graces of their team.)
Since then, many students on the left have become increasingly receptive to the idea that violence is sometimes justified as a response to speech they believe is “hateful.”
In just the last few years, the word “violence” has expanded on campus and in some radical political communities beyond campus to cover a multitude of nonviolent actions, including speech that this political faction claims will have a negative impact on members of protected identity groups.
However, now that some students, professors, and activists are labeling their opponents’ words as violence, they give themselves permission to engage in ideologically motivated physical violence.
No one should have to pass someone else’s ideological purity test to be allowed to speak.
“I need to be safe ideologically. I need to be safe emotionally. I just need to feel good all the time, and if someone says something that I don’t like, that’s a problem for everybody else, including the [university] administration.”
don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym.
violent and dehumanizing tactics are self-defeating, closing off the possibility of peaceful resolution.
Those who apply such terms are claiming that what we are witnessing on campus exemplifies a situation long studied by sociologists in which a community becomes obsessed with religious or ideological purity and believes it needs to find and punish enemies within its own ranks in order to hold itself together.
Research shows that synchronous movements like singing and swaying make groups more cooperative and make people who participate physically stronger in challenges they undertake right afterward.
Why were the protests strongest and most common at schools known for progressive politics in the most progressive parts of the United States (New England and the West Coast)?18 Are these not the schools that are already the most devoted to enacting progressive and inclusive social policies?
According to Bergesen, anything that can be construed as an attack on a group can serve as an opportunity for collective punishment and the enhancement of group solidarity.
Many students graduate with an inaccurate understanding of conservatives, politics, and much of the United States.
Second, the loss of viewpoint diversity among the faculty means that what students learn about politically controversial topics will often be “left shifted” from the truth.
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
In Part III, we present six interacting explanatory threads: rising political polarization and cross-party animosity; rising levels of teen anxiety and depression; changes in parenting practices; the decline of free play; the growth of campus bureaucracy; and a rising passion for justice in response to major national events, combined with changing ideas about what justice requires.
If the people on the “other side” are moving farther and farther away from you on a broad set of moral and political issues, it stands to reason that you would feel more and more negatively toward them.
Given the psychology of tribalism that we described in chapter 3, the loss of a common enemy after the collapse of the Soviet Union can be expected to lead to more intratribal conflict.
algorithms are designed to give you more of what you seem to be interested in, leading conservatives and progressives into disconnected moral matrices backed up by mutually contradictory informational worlds.
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.
“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.”
In other words, 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.
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.
search engines don’t change social relationships. Social media does.
think about the entire period from 2007 to roughly 2012 as a brief span in which the social life of the average American teen changed substantially. Social media platforms proliferated, and adolescents began using Twitter (founded in 2006), Tumblr (2007), Instagram (2010), Snapchat (2011), and a variety of others.
The years since 2010 have been very hard on girls.
For example, the annual per capita consumption of cheese in the United States correlates almost perfectly with the number of people who die each year from becoming entangled in their bedsheets, but that’s not because eating cheese causes people to sleep differently.
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.
Humans love teams, team sports, synchronized movements, and anything else that gives us the feeling of “one for all, and all for one.”
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.
From 2010 to 2015, the percentage of teen boys who said they often felt left out increased from 21 to 27. For girls, the percentage jumped from 27 to 40.30
Given the difference in preferred forms of aggression, what would happen if a malevolent demon put a loaded handgun into the pocket of every adolescent in the United States? Which sex would suffer more? Boys, most likely, because they would find gunplay more appealing and would use guns more often to settle conflicts. On the other hand, what would happen if, instead of guns, that same malevolent demon put a smartphone, loaded up with social media apps, into the pocket of every adolescent?
it is also the greatest enabler of relational aggression since the invention of language,
it is clear that iGen college students think about themselves very differently than did Millennials.
But safetyism does not help students who suffer from anxiety and depression. In fact, as we argue throughout this book, 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.
there is enough evidence to support placing time limits on device use (perhaps two hours a day for adolescents, less for younger kids) while limiting or prohibiting the use of platforms that amplify social comparison rather than social connection.
Free-Range Kids
We should all take reasonable precautions to protect our children’s physical safety—for example, by owning a fire extinguisher—but we should not submit to the pull of safetyism (overestimating danger, fetishizing safety, and not accepting any risk), which deprives kids of some of the most valuable experiences in childhood.
At a fundamental level, overparenting and safetyism are “problems of progress,” which we mentioned in the introductory chapter.
Good parents are expected to believe that their children are in danger every moment they are unsupervised.
