April 30, 2024
Dear Friends and Family,
Both the last segment (Millennials) and the next segment (Generation Z) reveal there is reason to be concerned about our youth in this country. Much of that concern comes from what is happening on the country’s college campuses.
The excerpts in this segment, all of which come from The Coddling of the American Mind published in 2018, provides a perspective on how the modern-day university environment has and is influencing the development of both the Millennials and Gen Zers. Their research focuses on a culture of safetyism which is prominent on most college campuses and shields students from the exploration of ideas and suffocation of the not-in-vogue ideology. They noted this began in 2013 – 2014 thus influencing college students since. They report the impact on the two generations as significant.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Both the last segment (Millennials) and the next segment (Generation Z) reveal there is reason to be concerned about our youth in this country. Much of that concern comes from what is happening on the country’s college campuses.
The excerpts in this segment, all of which come from The Coddling of the American Mind published in 2018, provides a perspective on how the modern-day university environment has and is influencing the development of both the Millennials and Gen Zers. Their research focuses on a culture of safetyism which is prominent on most college campuses and shields students from the exploration of ideas and suffocation of the not-in-vogue ideology. They noted this began in 2013 – 2014 thus influencing college students since. They report the impact on the two generations as significant.
Happy Learning,
Harley
THE STUDY OF AMERICAN GENERATIONS – SEGMENT 9
THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND:
HOW GOOD INTENTIONS AND BAD IDEAS ARE SETTING UP A GENERATION FOR FAILURE
We have always been ambivalent about the word “coddling.” We didn’t like the implications that children today are pampered, spoiled, and lazy, because that is not accurate. Young people today – at a minimum, those who are competing for places at selective colleges – are under enormous pressure to perform academically and to build up a long list of extracurricular accomplishments. Meanwhile, all teens face new forms of harassment, insult, and social competition from social media. Their economic prospects are uncertain in an economy being reshaped by globalization, automation and artificial intelligence, and characterized by wage stagnation for most workers. So, most kids don’t have easy, pampered childhoods. But adults are doing far more these days to protect children, and their overreach might be having some negative effects. Dictionary definitions of “coddle” emphasize this overprotection: for example, “to treat with extreme or excessive care or kindness.” The fault lies with adults and with institutional practices.
Culture of Safetyism: We widened the lens and looked at how we got here – a set of interrelated ideas, which we call a culture of safetyism, swept 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 the cause?
We believe its six interacting explanatory threads. Specifically, 1) rising political polarization and cross-party animosity; 2) rising level of teen anxiety and depression; 3) changes in parenting practices; 4) the decline of free play; 5) the growth of campus bureaucracy; and 6) a rising passion for justice in response to major national events, combined with changing ideas about what justice requires. We believe that it is impossible to understand the state of higher education today without understanding all six.
1) Political Polarization: The rising political polarization in the United States, in which universities are increasingly seen as bastions of the left, has led to an increase in hostility and harassment from some off-campus right-wing individuals and groups. Some of these events qualify as hate crimes and are targeted especially at Jews and people of color. Rising rates of teen depression and anxiety affect both boys and girls but have hit young women particularly hard. The rise in overprotective or “helicopter” parenting and the decline of free play have negatively affected kids from wealthier families (mostly white and Asian) more than kids from working class or poor families. The increase in campus administrators, along with the scope of their duties, are having an effect at all schools, but new ideas and stronger passions about social justice may matter most on campuses where students are more engaged politically.
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 animosity combined with generally high levels of social trust and trust in government. From the 1940s to around 1980, American politics was about as centrist and bipartisan as it has ever been. One reason is that, during and prior to this period, the country faces 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. Given the psychology of tribalism, the loss of a common enemy after the collapse of the Soviet Union can be expected to lead to more intratribal conflict.
A second major reason is that since the 1970s, Americans have been increasingly self-segregating into politically homogeneous communities. Research has shown that we live in increasingly economically and politically segregated communities right down to the city block. 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. As a result, party affiliation goes hand in glove with differences in the world view and individual’s sense of social and cultural identity.
A third major reason is the media environment, which has changed in ways that foster division. Long gone is the time when everybody watched one of three national networks. By the 1990s, there was a cable news channel for most points on the political spectrum and by the early 2000s there was a website or discussion group for every conceivable interest group and grievance. By the 2010s, most Americans were using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, which make it easy to encase oneself within an echo chamber. 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. Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with all the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.
These trends have combined to produce a very unfortunate change in the dynamics of American politics, which political scientists call negative partisanship. 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. This must stop at all costs. Americans are now easily exploitable, and a large network of profit-driven media sites, political entrepreneurs and foreign intelligence agencies are taking advantage of this vulnerability. The vulnerability comes with an unfortunate asymmetry: the faculty and students at universities have shifted to the left since the 1990s, while the “outrage industry” of talk radio, cable news networks, and conspiracy websites is more developed and effective on the right.
The United States has experienced a steady increase in at least one form of polarization since the 1980s: affectively (or emotionally) polarization, which means that people who identify with either of the two main political parties increasingly hate and fear the other party and the people in it. Rising political polarization is an essential part of the story of why behavior is changing on campus, particularly since 2016. This is our first of six explanatory threads that will help understand what has been changing on campus.
2) Anxiety and Depression: In 2015 we began to hear the first alarms being raised by college mental health professionals, who said they were being overwhelmed by rising demand. We suggested that perhaps some of the very things colleges were doing to protect students from words and ideas ended up increasing the demand for mental health services by inadvertently increasing the use of cognitive distortions. By 2017, however, it was clear we had misunderstood what was going on. Colleges were not the primary cause of the wave of mental illness among their students; rather the students seeking help were part of a much larger national wave of adolescent anxiety and depression unlike anything see in modern times. Colleges were struggling to cope with rapidly rising numbers of students who were suffering from mental illness – primarily mood disorders. The new culture of safetyism can be understood in part as an effort by some students, faculty, and administrators to remake the campus in response to this new trend. If more students say they feel threatened by certain kinds of speech, then more protections should be offered. But this way of thinking may be wrong: college students are antifragile, not fragile. Some well-intended protections may backfire and make things worse in the long run for the very students we are trying to help.
Marking the line between generations is always difficult, but based on their psychological profiles, Jean Twenge, a social psychologist at San Diego State University, suggests that 1994 is the last birth year for Millennials and 1995 is the first birth year for Gen Zers. One possible reason for the discontinuity in self-reported traits and attitudes between Millennials and Gen Z is that in 2006, when Gen Z’s oldest were turning eleven, Facebook changed its membership requirement. No longer did you have to prove enrollment in a college; now any thirteen-year-old – or any younger child willing to claim to be thirteen – could join. The entire period from 2007 to roughly 2012 was 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 (2020), Snapchat (2011), and a variety of others. Over time, these companies became every more skilled at grabbing and holding “eyeballs” as they say in the industry. Social media grew more and more addictive. In short, Gen Z 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. What could go wrong? In sum:
3) Paranoid Parenting: We believe that efforts to protect children from environmental hazards and vehicular accidents have been very good for children. Exposure to lead and cigarette smoke confer no benefits, being in a car crash without a seat belt does not make kids more resilient in future car crashes. But efforts to protect kids from risk by preventing them from gaining experience – such as walking to school, climbing a tree, or using sharp scissors – are different. Such protections come with costs, as kids miss out on opportunities to learn skills, independence, and risk assessment. Putting the case succinctly: “The problem with this ‘everything is dangerous’ outlook is that over-protection is a danger in and of itself.” 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.
The blame for creating the culture of safetyism does not fall entirely on individual parents. At a fundamental level, overparenting and safetyism are “problems of progress.” Thankfully, gone are the days when families routinely had five or more children and expected one or more of them to die. When countries attain material prosperity and women gain educational equality, full political rights, and access to good healthcare and contraception, birth rates plunged, and most couples have just one or two children. They invest more time in these fewer, healthier children. In fact, even though mothers today have fewer children and spend more time working outside the home they did in 1965, they are spending more total time taking care of their children. Fathers’ time with kids has increased even more. Parents spending time with their kids is generally a good thing, but too much close supervision and protection can morph into safetyism. When we overprotect children, we harm them. Children are naturally antifragile, so overprotection makes them weaker and less resilient later on.
4) The Decline of Play: 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. There is a tendency of kids to introduce danger and risk into outdoor free play, such as when they climb walls and trees, or skateboard know staircases and railings. They seem to dose themselves with moderate degrees of fear, as if deliberately learning how to deal with both the physical and emotional challenges of the moderately dangerous conditions they generate … All such activities are fun to the degree that they are moderately frightening. If too little fear is induced, the activity is boring; if too much is induced, it becomes no longer play but terror. Nobody but the child himself knows the right dose. Unfortunately, outdoor physical play is the kind that has declined the most in the lives of American children.
5) The Bureaucracy of Safetyism: Some administrative growth is necessary and sensible, but when that rate of growth is several times higher than the rate of faculty hiring, there are significant downsides, most obviously in the cost of a college degree. A less immediate obvious downside is that goals other than academic excellence begin to take priority as universities come to resemble large corporations.
In 2013, experts began noticing similar changes on many campuses – the interlocking set of new ideas about microaggressions, trigger warnings, and safe spaces. They noted the emerging morality of victimhood culture was radically different from dignity culture. They defined a victimhood culture as having three distinct attributes. First, “individuals and groups display high sensitivity to slight;” second, the “have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to third parties;” and third, they “seek to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance.” A university that encourages moral dependence is a university that is likely to experience chronic conflict, which may then lead to more demands for administrative remedies and protections which may lead to more moral dependence.
6) The Quest for Justice: Not since the Vietnam War and the civil rights struggles of the 1960s have so many Americans been exposed to a seemingly endless stream of videos showing innocent people – mostly people of color – being beaten, killed, or deported by armed representatives of the state. Today’s college students have lived through extraordinary times, and, as a result, many of them have developed an extraordinary passion for social justice. That passion drives some of the changes we are seeing on college campuses in recent years is our sixth explanatory thread.
Intuitive justice is not just about how much each person gets. It’s also about the process by which decisions are made. People are much more willing to accept a decision or action, even one that goes against themselves, when they perceive that the process that led to the decision was fair. There are two basic concerns that people bring to their judgments on procedural justice. The first is how is the decision being made. This includes whether the decision-makers are doing their best to be objective and neutral and are therefore trustworthy, or whether they have conflicts of interest, prejudices, or other factors that lead them to be biased in favor of a particular person or outcome. The second basic concern is how is a person being treated along the way, which means primarily: Are people being treated with dignity, and do they have a voice – do they get to fully state their case, and are they taken seriously when they do?
“Social justice is the view that everyone deserves equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities. Social workers aim to open the doors of access and opportunity for everyone, particularly those in greatest need.” Most Americans would agree that everyone should have equal rights and opportunities and that doors should be open for everyone. Much of the left-right divide on social policy involves how far the government should go to equalize opportunities for children who are born into unequal circumstances (and whether it is the federal government, state governments, or local governments, that should be responsible for that equalization).
Students today are fighting for many causes that we believe are noble, too, including ending racial injustice in the legal system and in encounters with the police; providing equal educational and other opportunities for everyone, regardless of circumstances at birth; and extinguishing cultural habits that encourage or enable sexual harassment and gender inequalities. On these and many other issues, we think student protesters are on the “right side of history,” and we support their goals. But if activists embrace the equal-outcomes form of social justice – if they interpret all deviations from population norms as evidence of systemic bias – then they will get drawn into endless and counterproductive campaigns, even against people who share their goals Along the way, they will reinforce the bad mental habits that we have described throughout this book.
Wiser Societies: The more serious a problem gets, the more inducements there are for people, companies, and governments to find innovative solutions, whether driven by personal commitment, market forces, or political pressures. How might things change? Let us sketch our one possible vision, that we already see. These are countertrends that may already be underway today, as this book goes to press in May 2018.
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Johathan Haidt (2019)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND:
HOW GOOD INTENTIONS AND BAD IDEAS ARE SETTING UP A GENERATION FOR FAILURE
We have always been ambivalent about the word “coddling.” We didn’t like the implications that children today are pampered, spoiled, and lazy, because that is not accurate. Young people today – at a minimum, those who are competing for places at selective colleges – are under enormous pressure to perform academically and to build up a long list of extracurricular accomplishments. Meanwhile, all teens face new forms of harassment, insult, and social competition from social media. Their economic prospects are uncertain in an economy being reshaped by globalization, automation and artificial intelligence, and characterized by wage stagnation for most workers. So, most kids don’t have easy, pampered childhoods. But adults are doing far more these days to protect children, and their overreach might be having some negative effects. Dictionary definitions of “coddle” emphasize this overprotection: for example, “to treat with extreme or excessive care or kindness.” The fault lies with adults and with institutional practices.
Culture of Safetyism: We widened the lens and looked at how we got here – a set of interrelated ideas, which we call a culture of safetyism, swept 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 the cause?
We believe its six interacting explanatory threads. Specifically, 1) rising political polarization and cross-party animosity; 2) rising level of teen anxiety and depression; 3) changes in parenting practices; 4) the decline of free play; 5) the growth of campus bureaucracy; and 6) a rising passion for justice in response to major national events, combined with changing ideas about what justice requires. We believe that it is impossible to understand the state of higher education today without understanding all six.
1) Political Polarization: The rising political polarization in the United States, in which universities are increasingly seen as bastions of the left, has led to an increase in hostility and harassment from some off-campus right-wing individuals and groups. Some of these events qualify as hate crimes and are targeted especially at Jews and people of color. Rising rates of teen depression and anxiety affect both boys and girls but have hit young women particularly hard. The rise in overprotective or “helicopter” parenting and the decline of free play have negatively affected kids from wealthier families (mostly white and Asian) more than kids from working class or poor families. The increase in campus administrators, along with the scope of their duties, are having an effect at all schools, but new ideas and stronger passions about social justice may matter most on campuses where students are more engaged politically.
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 animosity combined with generally high levels of social trust and trust in government. From the 1940s to around 1980, American politics was about as centrist and bipartisan as it has ever been. One reason is that, during and prior to this period, the country faces 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. Given the psychology of tribalism, the loss of a common enemy after the collapse of the Soviet Union can be expected to lead to more intratribal conflict.
A second major reason is that since the 1970s, Americans have been increasingly self-segregating into politically homogeneous communities. Research has shown that we live in increasingly economically and politically segregated communities right down to the city block. 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. As a result, party affiliation goes hand in glove with differences in the world view and individual’s sense of social and cultural identity.
A third major reason is the media environment, which has changed in ways that foster division. Long gone is the time when everybody watched one of three national networks. By the 1990s, there was a cable news channel for most points on the political spectrum and by the early 2000s there was a website or discussion group for every conceivable interest group and grievance. By the 2010s, most Americans were using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, which make it easy to encase oneself within an echo chamber. 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. Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with all the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.
These trends have combined to produce a very unfortunate change in the dynamics of American politics, which political scientists call negative partisanship. 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. This must stop at all costs. Americans are now easily exploitable, and a large network of profit-driven media sites, political entrepreneurs and foreign intelligence agencies are taking advantage of this vulnerability. The vulnerability comes with an unfortunate asymmetry: the faculty and students at universities have shifted to the left since the 1990s, while the “outrage industry” of talk radio, cable news networks, and conspiracy websites is more developed and effective on the right.
The United States has experienced a steady increase in at least one form of polarization since the 1980s: affectively (or emotionally) polarization, which means that people who identify with either of the two main political parties increasingly hate and fear the other party and the people in it. Rising political polarization is an essential part of the story of why behavior is changing on campus, particularly since 2016. This is our first of six explanatory threads that will help understand what has been changing on campus.
2) Anxiety and Depression: In 2015 we began to hear the first alarms being raised by college mental health professionals, who said they were being overwhelmed by rising demand. We suggested that perhaps some of the very things colleges were doing to protect students from words and ideas ended up increasing the demand for mental health services by inadvertently increasing the use of cognitive distortions. By 2017, however, it was clear we had misunderstood what was going on. Colleges were not the primary cause of the wave of mental illness among their students; rather the students seeking help were part of a much larger national wave of adolescent anxiety and depression unlike anything see in modern times. Colleges were struggling to cope with rapidly rising numbers of students who were suffering from mental illness – primarily mood disorders. The new culture of safetyism can be understood in part as an effort by some students, faculty, and administrators to remake the campus in response to this new trend. If more students say they feel threatened by certain kinds of speech, then more protections should be offered. But this way of thinking may be wrong: college students are antifragile, not fragile. Some well-intended protections may backfire and make things worse in the long run for the very students we are trying to help.
Marking the line between generations is always difficult, but based on their psychological profiles, Jean Twenge, a social psychologist at San Diego State University, suggests that 1994 is the last birth year for Millennials and 1995 is the first birth year for Gen Zers. One possible reason for the discontinuity in self-reported traits and attitudes between Millennials and Gen Z is that in 2006, when Gen Z’s oldest were turning eleven, Facebook changed its membership requirement. No longer did you have to prove enrollment in a college; now any thirteen-year-old – or any younger child willing to claim to be thirteen – could join. The entire period from 2007 to roughly 2012 was 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 (2020), Snapchat (2011), and a variety of others. Over time, these companies became every more skilled at grabbing and holding “eyeballs” as they say in the industry. Social media grew more and more addictive. In short, Gen Z 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. What could go wrong? In sum:
- The generation born between 1995 and 2012 called Gen Z, is very different from the Millennials, the generation that preceded it. According to Jean Twenge one difference is that Gen Z is growing up more slowly. 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.
- A second difference is that Gen Z has far higher rates of anxiety and depression. The increases for girls and young women are generally much larger than for boys and young men. The increases do not just reflect changing definitions or standards; they show up in rising hospital admission rates of self-harm and in rising suicide rates. The suicide rate of adolescent boys is still higher than that of girls, but the suicide rate of adolescent girls has doubled since 2007.
- According to Twenge, the primary cause of the increase in mental illness is frequent use of smartphones and other electronic devices. Less than two hours a day seems to have no deleterious effects, but adolescents who spend several hours a day interacting with screens, particularly if they start in their early teen years or younger, have worse mental health outcomes than do adolescents who use these devices less and who spend more time in face-to-face social interactions.
3) Paranoid Parenting: We believe that efforts to protect children from environmental hazards and vehicular accidents have been very good for children. Exposure to lead and cigarette smoke confer no benefits, being in a car crash without a seat belt does not make kids more resilient in future car crashes. But efforts to protect kids from risk by preventing them from gaining experience – such as walking to school, climbing a tree, or using sharp scissors – are different. Such protections come with costs, as kids miss out on opportunities to learn skills, independence, and risk assessment. Putting the case succinctly: “The problem with this ‘everything is dangerous’ outlook is that over-protection is a danger in and of itself.” 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.
The blame for creating the culture of safetyism does not fall entirely on individual parents. At a fundamental level, overparenting and safetyism are “problems of progress.” Thankfully, gone are the days when families routinely had five or more children and expected one or more of them to die. When countries attain material prosperity and women gain educational equality, full political rights, and access to good healthcare and contraception, birth rates plunged, and most couples have just one or two children. They invest more time in these fewer, healthier children. In fact, even though mothers today have fewer children and spend more time working outside the home they did in 1965, they are spending more total time taking care of their children. Fathers’ time with kids has increased even more. Parents spending time with their kids is generally a good thing, but too much close supervision and protection can morph into safetyism. When we overprotect children, we harm them. Children are naturally antifragile, so overprotection makes them weaker and less resilient later on.
4) The Decline of Play: 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. There is a tendency of kids to introduce danger and risk into outdoor free play, such as when they climb walls and trees, or skateboard know staircases and railings. They seem to dose themselves with moderate degrees of fear, as if deliberately learning how to deal with both the physical and emotional challenges of the moderately dangerous conditions they generate … All such activities are fun to the degree that they are moderately frightening. If too little fear is induced, the activity is boring; if too much is induced, it becomes no longer play but terror. Nobody but the child himself knows the right dose. Unfortunately, outdoor physical play is the kind that has declined the most in the lives of American children.
5) The Bureaucracy of Safetyism: Some administrative growth is necessary and sensible, but when that rate of growth is several times higher than the rate of faculty hiring, there are significant downsides, most obviously in the cost of a college degree. A less immediate obvious downside is that goals other than academic excellence begin to take priority as universities come to resemble large corporations.
In 2013, experts began noticing similar changes on many campuses – the interlocking set of new ideas about microaggressions, trigger warnings, and safe spaces. They noted the emerging morality of victimhood culture was radically different from dignity culture. They defined a victimhood culture as having three distinct attributes. First, “individuals and groups display high sensitivity to slight;” second, the “have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to third parties;” and third, they “seek to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance.” A university that encourages moral dependence is a university that is likely to experience chronic conflict, which may then lead to more demands for administrative remedies and protections which may lead to more moral dependence.
6) The Quest for Justice: Not since the Vietnam War and the civil rights struggles of the 1960s have so many Americans been exposed to a seemingly endless stream of videos showing innocent people – mostly people of color – being beaten, killed, or deported by armed representatives of the state. Today’s college students have lived through extraordinary times, and, as a result, many of them have developed an extraordinary passion for social justice. That passion drives some of the changes we are seeing on college campuses in recent years is our sixth explanatory thread.
Intuitive justice is not just about how much each person gets. It’s also about the process by which decisions are made. People are much more willing to accept a decision or action, even one that goes against themselves, when they perceive that the process that led to the decision was fair. There are two basic concerns that people bring to their judgments on procedural justice. The first is how is the decision being made. This includes whether the decision-makers are doing their best to be objective and neutral and are therefore trustworthy, or whether they have conflicts of interest, prejudices, or other factors that lead them to be biased in favor of a particular person or outcome. The second basic concern is how is a person being treated along the way, which means primarily: Are people being treated with dignity, and do they have a voice – do they get to fully state their case, and are they taken seriously when they do?
“Social justice is the view that everyone deserves equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities. Social workers aim to open the doors of access and opportunity for everyone, particularly those in greatest need.” Most Americans would agree that everyone should have equal rights and opportunities and that doors should be open for everyone. Much of the left-right divide on social policy involves how far the government should go to equalize opportunities for children who are born into unequal circumstances (and whether it is the federal government, state governments, or local governments, that should be responsible for that equalization).
Students today are fighting for many causes that we believe are noble, too, including ending racial injustice in the legal system and in encounters with the police; providing equal educational and other opportunities for everyone, regardless of circumstances at birth; and extinguishing cultural habits that encourage or enable sexual harassment and gender inequalities. On these and many other issues, we think student protesters are on the “right side of history,” and we support their goals. But if activists embrace the equal-outcomes form of social justice – if they interpret all deviations from population norms as evidence of systemic bias – then they will get drawn into endless and counterproductive campaigns, even against people who share their goals Along the way, they will reinforce the bad mental habits that we have described throughout this book.
Wiser Societies: The more serious a problem gets, the more inducements there are for people, companies, and governments to find innovative solutions, whether driven by personal commitment, market forces, or political pressures. How might things change? Let us sketch our one possible vision, that we already see. These are countertrends that may already be underway today, as this book goes to press in May 2018.
- Social Media. Social media is a major part of the problem, implicated both in rising rates of mental illness and in rising political polarization. But after two years of scandals, public outrage, and calls for government regulation, the major companies are finally responding: they are at least tweaking algorithms, verifying some identities, and taking steps to reduce harassment. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytics fiasco, there is likely to be far more pressure applied by governments. Parents, schools, and students will respond, too, gradually adopting better practices, just as we adapted (imperfectly) to life surrounded by junk food and cigarettes.
- Free play and freedom. The adolescent mental health crisis has finally caught the attention of the public. As more parents and educators come to see that overprotection is harming children, and as we move further and further away from the crime wave of the 1970s and 1980s, more parents will try harder to let their kids pay outside, with one another, and without adult supervision.
- Better identity politics. With the rise of the alt-right and white nationalism since 2016, more scholars are writing about the ways in which emphasizing racial identity leads to bad outcomes in a multiracial society. It has become increasingly clear that identitarian extremists on both sides rely on the most outrageous acts of the other side to unite their group around its common enemy.
- Universities committing to truth as a process. The University of Chicago has long been an outlier in the intensity of its academic culture. When safetyism was sweeping through many other top American universities, it has less effect at Chicago. It is no coincidence that the best recent statement on freedom of expression was drafted there. Many universities are adopting the Chicago Statement and are beginning to push back against the creep of safetyism. If that stance works out well for them and if those schools move up on various rankings and lists, then many more universities will follow suit.
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Johathan Haidt (2019)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| generations_9l_coddling_--_segment_9.pdf |