Ryan's Reviews > The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

Much as I've come to admire Haidt, I'll admit that I was worried to see this title, which seems like a typical "culture wars" click bait. How did the book hold up upon reading it?

This is a reasonably argued book about extreme incidents on American college campuses and how they relate to the larger culture. The title is bad, however, because it makes the text at first glance combative in a way that I don't associate with Haidt. (I generally view him as persuading from a pretty easily established common ground, such as when he discusses his use of prozac in The Happiness Hypothesis or how he explains in Righteous Mind that he was motivated by Al Gore's defeat in the 2000 American presidential election to study moral psychology.) In my humble opinion, it is easy to see where Haidt is coming from and why he finds his conclusions convincing. That is true here, even if the title is awful.

Briefly, the book worries about a culture of "safetyism." There are three "great untruths" in safetyism, which are: 1) Fragility: what doesn't kill you makes you weaker 2) Emotional reasoning: always trust your feelings and 3) Us vs. Them: life is a battle between good and evil. They also highlight 10 distorted automatic thoughts, which are: mind reading, fortune telling (negatively predicting the future), catastrophic thinking, labelling, discounting the positive, negative filtering, overgeneralizing, dichotomous thinking, shoulds ("I should do well; if I don't, then I'm a failure"), and personalizing blame. The culture of safetyism does not challenge these distorted automatic thoughts, perhaps because it fears that it will make people feel bad about themselves, which sets off the untruths. As much as I distrust "great" anythings in social commentary about the present, I don't think it's hard to understand what they're talking about.

For anyone who's reluctant to engage with a book that gives off even a whiff of "culture wars" discourse, I'll note that there are other interesting ideas here, such "concept creep." Haidt and Lukianoff explain that "trauma" originally described physical injury. It was then expanded to psychological trauma, but with the caution that psychological trauma happens in response to extreme situations. The unexpected death of one's spouse from a sudden illness would not qualify as traumatic under the second generation definition. However, the third generation definition now is determined by how the person characterizes the emotion. So if the unexpected death of one's spouse feels awful and the bereaved labels it traumatic, by this definition it is traumatic.

As much as I'd like to promote Coddling as more than a book about culture wars questions, it does explore how they play out in Gen Z on college campuses. I was familiar with some of the violent protests the book explored, but not all of them. They really are awful, sometimes obnoxious, to read about. Are they typical of the larger culture or does it just feel like it?

I was also surprised by Haidt and Lukianoff's history of how right-wing media outlets respond to anything that even vaguely threatens their worldview. At one point, they discuss a professor's theory about ancient statues--that they were not alabaster white originally but only later aged to those colors. In other words, the ancient world has become whiter in historical accounts. Fascinating! What happened when this theory was reported on right-wing news outlets? Threats of rape and death from people near and far.

Let's imagine that we might include Coddling as part of a stack. What else might one read? I'd include Haidt's previous book, Righteous Mind, Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed, and Nagle's Kill All Normies. What about Storr's Unpersuadables, a book that explores things that seem ridiculous and twists them until they seem convincing, or at least not ridiculous. (Russell is also quite good at this in his History of Western Philosophy, perhaps because he feels one should understand why people feel they are right before figuring out why they are wrong.) I've since read Saslow's Rising Out of Hatred, which may be one very effective demonstration of how campuses are not inherently dysfunctional. In it, the college population ostracizes a white nationalist, but some students also reach out to him to try to reverse his views. Maybe Haidt is focusing on atypical scenarios.

We are not as good at empathy as we think we are, and it's difficult but worthwhile to charitably study views we are skeptical of. It's perhaps worth noting that I only picked up this book, with its click baity title, because I had a reading relationship with Haidt from his previous work. We live within bubbles that we are hardly aware of.

*P.S. Since reading this book, I've heard Ezra Klein talk about these issues on his podcast (It's the Ask Ezra episode, somewhere around 3/4s in.) He is also going to have Haidt on the show--update again: it was interesting.