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

Never Judge a Book by Its Title

Admittedly, a title like The Coddling of the American Mind might make you expect of cultural pessimist’s rant on how things in this word, or, preferably, country, are going to pot because people are just no longer what they used to be. And they never will be, any more, so that if you want to keep up with things, there is no alternative but mental potty-training. However, the authors, lawyer and First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and psychologist Jonathan Haidt, explain in their introduction how it came about that this rather provocative title was chosen, and if you care to read further than the first few words before indulging in the emotional pleasure of feeling offended, you will find that there is a second title, How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, which at least gives the other side the benefit of the doubt, by assuming they are being motivated by good intentions.

The authors are concerned about the change of the intellectual climate on university campuses with the advent of the iGen students, a development which is marked by calls for safe spaces, trigger warnings, demands to disinvite speakers who voice ideas that may challenge certain students‘ beliefs, thereby making them feel uncomfortable, the establishment of a call-out culture and the spread of the ideology of safetyism. The latter is characterized by the creep-down of the word safety, which is no longer restricted to meaning physical safety but also the more vague concept of safety from unsettling feelings, mental discomfort and doubts, or simply from having to face thoughts, ideas and beliefs which one actually opposes. In short, the climate at universities, but also in society as a whole, has become more and more hostile to the free expression of thoughts that are incompatible with mainstream beliefs.

Lukianoff and Haidt make out three ideas or modes of thinking which they hold responsible for this change in attitudes and intellectual climate and which, they say, not only endanger free speech and productive academic discussion but also, in the long run, harm those who embrace them in their daily lives. These bad ideas are

1) What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. (The Untruth of Fragility),
2) Always trust your feelings. (The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning),
3) Life is a battle between good people and evil people. (The Untruth of Us vs. Them).

I don’t want to explain these three detrimental ways of thinking in this short book review, mainly because you might want to read about them yourself in the book discussed here, but also because anyone who has noticed how indignation and public shaming competetions are run in social but also mainstream media knows in a way how these untruths work and how we are heading more and more towards a . Before I go on talking about this book, using these seemingly bad, bad words, it may be well to say that Lukianoff and Haidt are anything but polemical. Instead, they work upon the academic principle of presenting the arguments of the other side in the best light possible, trying to understand the motivations and intentions that lead to ideas and measures they themselves strongly disagree with. There is sound intellectual honesty and fairness at the bottom of this book, which is, by the way, a good example of how to avoid the third of the above-listed untruths, and which is also a prerequisite for starting a real discussion instead of shouting at and vilifying each other.

The authors show how the three untruths work in university life where they start to hamper scientific progress and the exchange of ideas and viewpoints but also make it hard, or even impossible, to really prepare students for life. Then they present the sources from which the three faulty ideas sprang, namely the change of the political and social climate as such (e.g. through the rise of a provocation culture and apodictic thinking on both sides of the political spectrum), the rise of depression and anxiety among adolescents and children, the rise of overprotective parenting and the decline of free, unsupervised play due to a culture of safetyism, a „Cover Your Ass“ bureaucracy in schools and universities, and erroneous assumptions about the concept of social justice in modern-day political discussions and governmental acts.

At the end of the book, the two authors dedicate a lot of time to showing how some of the fateful developments that lead to the spread of the three untruths can be remedied, one of them being the approach of preparing the child for the road rather than the road for the child, thus making children and adolescents actually stronger. All in all, their criticism and analysis of the three untruths is highly convincing, all the more so as they avoid simplistic finger-pointing and instead treat their subject-matter with an impressive degree of intellectual honesty. This book may be a bit repetitive at times, but on the whole, it really helped me get a better understanding of a trend I have also noticed in my own country, Germany, and which I think is something to worry about.