Coddling of the American Mind

I previously read Lukianoff's "Unlearning Liberty" earlier this year. While I thoroughly enjoyed that work, I was somewhat disappointed by this joint venture with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. This is partly because while "Unlearning Liberty" was a searching examination of how higher education in recent years has failed in its central purpose to discover "truth" by prohibiting many forms of offensive speech on campus, this book tries to further that inquiry in some ways by putting together a composite of factors for why "iGen" (those who were born c. 1996) have embraced "safetyism" on college campuses. "Safetyism" is essentially the conflation of being offended with being in physical danger.

The book is divided into three parts. The first unpacks what the authors call the "three great untruths" that iGen embraces: the world is divided between distinctly "good" people and wholly "bad" people; trust your feelings (i.e. emotional reasoning over logic); and "safetyism" which the authors describe as "what doesn't hurt you, makes you weaker." The second narrates a series of recent episodes of censorship and both far left/far right violence on college campuses, such as Berkeley Antifa protests against Milo Yiannopolis, the Alt-Right protests at UVA; and the Charles Murray episode at Middlebury. The final part explains what the authors believe are the six contributing factors that are the "bad ideas [that] are setting up a generation for failure." The last two chapters in this section deal with a) how parents should ideally raise children to be thick-skinned and critically thinking adults and b) how primary and secondary education can offer adolescents and teenagers the mental toolset to confront offensive ideas and grow intellectually from such debates.

There is a lot of ground to cover in any review of this book (and much of what follows in this paragraph I explain in more detail in my review of Unlearning Liberty). But, the gist is that colleges and universities should be wholly focused on discerning "truth." Various public intellectuals, such as Van Jones, have argued that colleges provide people with a rare opportunity to grapple with offensive ideas and speech by using reasoning and argument. College should be a "gym," to borrow from Van Jones, that trains people to debate and compromise within our democratic system. Since the early 2010s, though, many colleges (and almost exclusively the most liberal ones) have become distracted from the goal of seeking "truth" by protecting students from potentially offensive speech. There's an appropriate discussion within this section of how the left has stretched the definition of "violence" to include intuitively nonviolent actions, such as speech. By construing offensive speech as "violent," college administrators, faculty, and students have effectively nullified the free speech privileges of a wide swathe of conservative intellectuals (and alt-right wackos) by appealing to the need to keep students "safe" on campus.

The six factors that have contributed to the current climate of "Safetyism," censorship, and unrest are best summed up as follows:

1) American politics have become increasingly polarized (entering a "polarization cycle") where very little compromise is ever reached between left and right.
2) The advent of social media and the internet has made "iGen" far more depressed and anxious than previous generations.
3) Parents since the 1980s have increasingly become "helicopter" parents, not allowing their children to experience any discomfort and sheltering them from the real world, so to speak.
4) What the authors term the "decline of [free] play." In other words, children have far less time relative to previous generations to socialize, initiate play, and be creative. This is caused by the fact that elite colleges and universities select from those with an abundance of extracurriculars (etc.) and parents respond by over-structuring their children's time with various activities.
5) Primary and secondary education have become obsessed with keeping students "safe" from offensive ideas and taboo subjects.
6) "Social justice" and its quest for equal outcomes has created a "common enemy identity politics" focused on subdividing people into various "intersectional" identities. The authors compare this to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "common humanity" identity politics that sought to authentically include all Americans in the civil rights movement by appealing to the American civic religion.

These six factors (covered in six chapters) are unevenly persuasive, although I generally agree with the authors that the cult of "safe spaces" and "free speech zones" on campuses is extremely problematic. I think I agree with some of the other reviews on Goodreads that some of their solutions contain assumptions grounded in a middle-class ethos. Specifically, their idea that children should be given more rein to explore their neighborhoods, talk to strangers, and even use public transportation at young ages (i.e. nine years old). The authors argue that our perception of danger is massively inflated by the 24 hour news cycle and John Walsh's crusade to catch "America's Most Wanted." I agree in part, but would argue that many parents (and single parents) living in certain rural or urban areas with high crime rates have legitimate concerns about allowing their children to be "free range children." Being a parent myself, I generally found their Dr. Spock parental advice annoying, at best, and naive at worst.

Overall, an informative book that resonated well with my experience on campus the past seven years. Excepting the final two concluding chapters, I completely recommend this book to anyone seriously interested in learning more about what is happening on America's college campuses. But you should first read "Unlearning Liberty."