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

by Jonathan Haidt

Intersectionality is a theory based on several insights that we believe are valid and useful: power matters, members of groups sometimes act cruelly or unjustly to preserve their power, and people who are members of multiple identity groups can face various forms of disadvantage in ways that are often invisible to others.

But does that mean that women and people of color should think of themselves as “colonized populations” today? Would doing so empower them, or would it encourage an external locus of control? Would it make them more or less likely to engage with their teachers and readings, work hard, and benefit from their time in school?

The combination of common-enemy identity politics and microaggression training creates an environment highly conducive to the development of a “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.

Eady identifies four features of the culture: dogmatism, groupthink, a crusader mentality, and anti-intellectualism.

Identity politics takes many forms. Some forms, such as that practiced by Martin Luther King, Jr., and Pauli Murray, can be called common-humanity identity politics, because its practitioners humanize their opponents and appeal to their humanity while also applying political pressure in other ways. Common-enemy identity politics, on the other hand, tries to unite a coalition using the psychology embedded in the Bedouin proverb “I against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world.” It is used on the far right as well as the far left.

Intersectionality is a popular intellectual framework on campuses today; certain versions of it teach students to see multiple axes of privilege and oppression that intersect. While there are merits to the theory, the way it is interpreted and practiced on campus can sometimes amplify tribal thinking and encourage students to endorse the Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

Common-enemy identity politics, when combined with microaggression theory, produces a call-out culture in which almost anything one says or does could result in a public shaming. This can engender a sense of “walking on eggshells,” and it teaches students habits of self-censorship. Call-out cultures are detrimental to students’ education and bad for their mental health. Call-out cultures and us-versus-them thinking are incompatible with the educational and re...

This is another example of concept creep. 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. Outside of cultures of safetyism, the word “violence” refers to physical violence.

The rationale, as an essay in the Berkeley op-ed series argued, is that physically violent actions, if used to shut down speech that is deemed hateful, are “not acts of violence” but, rather, “acts of self defense.”38

In a call-out culture, almost anything that is interpreted by anyone as having a negative impact on vulnerable members of the community—regardless of intent—can be called hate speech.

The Columbia University linguist John McWhorter describes how the term “white supremacist” is now used in an “utterly athletic, recreational” way, as a “battering ram” to attack anyone who departs from the party line.41 McWhorter himself (who is African American) has been called a white supremacist for questioning received wisdom on matters related to race.

Stanger later described her experience in a New York Times essay. “What alarmed me most,” she wrote, “was what I saw in the eyes of the crowd. Those who wanted the event to take place made eye contact with me. Those intent on disrupting it steadfastly refused to do so. They couldn’t look at me directly, because if they had, they would have seen another human being.”

It also includes a rhetorical flourish that became common in 2017: the assertion that a speaker will “deny” people from certain identity groups “the right to exist.”60 This thinking is a form of catastrophizing, in that it inflates the horrors of a speaker’s words far beyond what the speaker might actually say.

The most common justification is that hate speech is violence, and some students believe it is therefore legitimate to use violence to shut down hate speech.

some portion of what is commonly called political correctness is just being thoughtful or polite—using words in a way that is considerate to others.

First, you can take the Stoic response and develop your ability to remain unmoved. As Marcus Aurelius advised, “Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.”

A second and more radical response opens up when you reject the “speech is violence” view: you can use your opponents’ ideas and arguments to make yourself stronger.

I 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.

Speech is not violence. Treating it as such is an interpretive choice, and it is a choice that increases pain and suffering while preventing other, more effective responses, including the Stoic response (cultivating nonreactivity) and the antifragile response suggested by Van Jones: “Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity.”

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. ERIC HOFFER, The True Believer1

During those years, the Red Guards rooted out any trace they could find—or imagine—of capitalism, foreign influence, or bourgeois values. In practice, this meant that anyone who was successful or accomplished was suspect, and many professors, intellectuals, and campus administrators were imprisoned or murdered.8

Bergesen notes that there are three features common to most political witch hunts: they arise very quickly, they involve charges of crimes against the collective, and the offenses that lead to charges are often trivial or fabricated. Here’s how Bergesen puts it: They arise quickly: “Witch-hunts seem to appear in dramatic outbursts; they are not a regular feature of social life. A community seems to suddenly find itself infested with all sorts of subversive elements which pose a threat to the collectivity as a whole. Whether one thinks of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, the Stalinist Show Trials, or the McCarthy period in the United States, the phenomenon is the same: a community becomes intensely mobilized to rid itself of internal enemies.”10 Crimes against the collective: “The various charges that appear during one of these witch-hunts involve accusations of crimes committed against the nation as a corporate whole. It is the whole of collective existence that is at stake; it is The Nation, The People, The Revolution, or The State which is being undermined and subverted.”11 Charges are often trivial or fabricated: “These crimes and deviations seem to involve the most petty and insignificant behavioral acts which are somehow understood as crimes against the nation as a whole. In fact, one of the principal reasons we term these events ‘witch-hunts’ is that innocent people are so often involved and falsely accused.”12 To Bergesen’s list we’ll add a fourth f...

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?

It is striking how many of the critics’ complaints refer not to Tuvel’s arguments but to her word choices.

“petty and insignificant behavioral acts” (to use Bergesen’s phrase) can be considered “crimes against the [group] as a whole.”25

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.

(Seriously. You can guess people’s political leanings at better-than-chance levels just from photographs of their desks.)

In a free society, therefore, it will simply never be the case that every occupation is evenly balanced, politically, and it will generally be the case that professors lean left, especially in the humanities and social sciences. This is not a problem as long as there are enough professors who don’t lean left to guarantee institutionalized disconfirmation in any field that addresses politicized topics. A left-to-right ratio of two or three to one should be enough to sustain institutionalized disconfirmation. And that’s about what the ratio was for most of the twentieth century.

The loss of political diversity among professors, particularly in fields that deal with politicized content, can undermine the quality and rigor of scholarly research.

on average, students will get closer to the truth if they are exposed to debates among credentialed scholars who approach difficult problems from differing perspectives.

This is the third problem. It is the Durkheimian problem. It is the risk that some academic communities—particularly those in the most progressive parts of the country—may attain such high levels of political homogeneity and solidarity that they undergo a phase change, taking on properties of a collective entity that are antithetical to the normal aims of a university. A collective entity mobilized for action is more likely to enforce political orthodoxy and less likely to tolerate challenges to its key ideological beliefs. Politically homogeneous communities are more susceptible to witch hunts, particularly when they feel threatened from outside.

Cohesive and morally homogeneous groups are prone to witch hunts, particularly when they experience a threat, whether from outside or from within. Witch hunts generally have four properties: they seem to come out of nowhere; they involve charges of crimes against the collective; the offenses that lead to those charges are often trivial or fabricated; and people who know that the accused is innocent keep quiet, or in extreme cases, they join the mob.

Viewpoint diversity reduces a community’s susceptibility to witch hunts. One of the most important kinds of viewpoint diversity, diversity of political thought, has declined substantially among both professors and students at American universities since the 1990s. These declines, combined with the rapidly escalating political polarization of the United States (which is our focus in the next chapter), may be part of the reason why the new culture of safetyism has spread so rapidly since its emergence around 2013.

Why did a set of interrelated ideas—which we have called a culture of safetyism—sweep through many universities between 2013 and 2017? Students who graduated from college in 2012 generally tell us that they saw little evidence of these trends. Students who began college at some elite universities in 2013 or 2014 tell us they saw the new culture arrive over the course of their four years. What is going on?

A set of new ideas about speech, violence, and safety has emerged on the far left in recent years, and the debate on campus is largely a debate within the left, pitting (mostly) older progressives, who generally have an expansive notion of free speech, against (mostly) younger progressives, who are more likely to support some limitations on speech in the name of inclusion.2

the left and the right locked into a game of mutual provocation and reciprocal outrage that is an essential piece of the puzzle we are trying to solve in this book.

Why is this happening? There are many reasons, but in order to make sense of America’s current predicament, you have to start by recognizing that 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.

One reason is that, during and prior to this period, the country faced a series of common challenges and enemies, including the Great Depression, the Axis Powers during World War II, and the Soviets during the Cold War.

A second major reason is that, since the 1970s, Americans have been increasingly self-segregating into politically homogeneous communities, as Bill Bishop showed in his influential 2008 book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart.

The two major political parties have sorted themselves along similar lines: as the Republican Party becomes disproportionately older, white, rural, male, and Christian, the Democratic Party is increasingly young, nonwhite, urban, female, and nonreligious.

A third major reason is the media environment, which has changed in ways that foster division.

And then there’s the “filter bubble,” in which search engines and YouTube 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.

A fourth reason is the increasingly bitter hostility in Congress.

Gingrich changed the work schedule to ensure that all business was done midweek, and then he encouraged his members not to move their families from their home districts, and instead fly to Washington for a few days each week. Gingrich wanted a more cohesive and combative Republican team, and he got it.

The polarization cycle influencing university life since 2017 typically proceeds in this sequence:42 A left-wing professor says or writes something provocative or inflammatory on social media, in mainstream media, in a lecture, or (less often) in an academic publication. The statement is often a reaction to perceived injustices committed by right-wing groups or politicians off campus. A video clip or screen shot is then shared on social media. Right-wing media outlets pick up the story and then retell it in ways that amplify the outrage, often taking it out of context and sometimes distorting the facts.43 Dozens or even hundreds of people who hear about it write angry posts or comments on social media, or send emails to the professor, often including racist or sexist slurs, sometimes including threats of rape or death. Some people publicly call for the university to fire the professor. Meanwhile, the college administration fails to defend the professor. Sometimes an investigation follows, and sometimes the professor is put on leave. Professors who are untenured are at high risk of being fired or of not having their contracts renewed. Most partisans who hear any part of the story find that it confirms their worst beliefs about the other side. The right focuses on what the professor said or wrote. The left focuses on the racist/sexist reaction to it. With their anger fortified, people on both sides are primed to repeat the cycle.

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.

Depressed people often stick pins into their own life rafts.

There was no “eureka” moment. My rational mind could understand that my thoughts were distorted, but nothing changed until it simply became a habit to hear the cruelest, craziest, and most destructive voices in my head without believing I had to act on them. When I stopped letting those voices win, they got quieter. Thanks to CBT, my mind is now in the habit of hearing my worst thoughts as if they are speaking in silly cartoon voices. While I still get depressed, the frequency and severity of those bouts are nowhere near as powerful as they used to be.

In the 2017 book iGen (which we discussed briefly in chapter 1), Jean Twenge, a social psychologist at San Diego State University, gives us the most detailed picture yet of the behavior, values, and mental state of today’s teenagers and college students.

In a chilling 2017 interview, Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, explained those early years like this: The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them . . . was all about: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” . . . And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you . . . more likes and comments. . . . It’s a social-validation feedback loop . . . exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.7 Earlier in the interview, he said, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”