The Coddling of the American Mind is a book I had been wanting to read for a while, as a way to understand why it is that campus environments have changed so drastically since I came to Wake Forest in 2011. It was a great, quick read that I took a lot from as an individual and as a future parent.
The Three Untruths
The book is centered around three concepts, what Lukianoff and Haidt call the Great Untruths:
- What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker
- Always trust your feelings
- Life is a battle between good people and evil people
The idea is simple: Parents have raised iGen children (born 1995+) to believe in the three above concepts, all of which run counter to what centuries of human experience and philosophy tell us to be true. As a result of the Great Untruths, children enter the world unprepared for conflicting ideas, unwilling to see perspective other than their own, and unable to challenge beliefs they hold that are untrue. In short, they enter the world set up to fail.
1. What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker
This concept is best explained by peanut allergies, which were rare among school age children until parents and schools started banning peanut-based products from school grounds. Once that happened, and the majority of children were no longer exposed to peanuts at a young age, rates of allergic reaction spiked.
The authors then quote Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist who explains the bridge between peanut allergies and the larger trends seen among young adults today:
In the same way, by shielding children from every possible risk, we may lead them to react with exaggerated fear to situations that aren’t risky at all and isolate them from the adult skills that they will one day have to master.
They then introduce two great concepts:
Antifragility – “A system that requires stressors in order to learn, adapt and grow.”
A kid would be an example of an anti-fragile system – they require exposure to new challenges (riding their bike around the corner, being yelled at by a difficult teacher, getting lost) in order to learn how to be a grownup, as cliched as that sounds. Many young adults today (myself included at times) don’t know how to do basic things required of independent adults because our parents have chosen to do them for us.
Safetyism – “A culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.”
This emphasis on safety is why emotional distress is now equated with physical harm. The authors refer to an early example at Brown, when a “safe space” filled with stuffed animals and art supplies was established for students who needed a place to go during a talk given by Wendy McElroy, a sexual-assault survivor who did not believe America was a “rape culture.” Rather than attend the talk to debate the controversial ideas, or simply stay away from the talk, students who felt the talk re-traumatized them or challenged their beliefs about American culture were encouraged to seek out the safe space.
Any talk about safe spaces will become heated – that’s how polarizing the idea has become. But the authors raise it as a precursor to the next Great Untruth, in which safe spaces allow young adults to avoid challenges to their beliefs.
2. Always Trust Your Feelings
I’ll start this with two of my favorite Stoic quotes, one from the book and one from elsewhere:
What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.
Epictetus
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
Marcus Aurelius
Both get at the crux of the second Untruth – our emotions are not always the best judge of reality, and by changing the way we think about something we can change the way we experience that event.
This section opens with a great hypothetical, in which an anxious student goes to speak to a campus counselor. The counselor, rather than questioning the student’s beliefs about their life – Are you really the only one getting C’s in your classes? Will your parents really be disappointed in you if you quit club soccer? – amplifies them, telling the student that many of their peers are anxious, that they are correct in thinking their academic career is over and their parents are ashamed.
Clearly, that’s not how we envision good therapy going, particularly not cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which helps people question their harmful thoughts and replace them with ones based in reality. It’s been shown to be as successful as, last longer than, and have fewer side effects than anti-depressant medications.
Here are the nine cognitive distortions CBT seeks to address:
- Emotional reasoning: “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”
- Catastrophizing: “It would be terrible if I failed.”
- Overgeneralizing: “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”
- Dichotomous Thinking: “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”
- Mind Reading: “He thinks I’m a loser.”
- Labeling: “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.”
- Negative Filtering: “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”
- Discounting Positives: “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”
- Blaming: “My parents caused all my problems.”
Lukianoff and Haidt lay these out because they help illustrate how we arrive at the concept of microaggressions, which are intentional or unintentional slights against someone on the basis of a marginalized group identity. The authors believe that those unintentional slights, which make up a large chunk of the total, would not be viewed as aggressions if young adults were trained to question their thoughts in the mold of CBT. They are most worried that we are teaching children these days to interpret events in an unfavorable way first.
We all know where this is headed. A student’s belief that ideas they disagree with can be physically harmful, and an unwillingness to question whether or not they’re engaging in any of the nine cognitive distortions above, will lead to a lot of anger, accusations and intolerable ideas. And that is what we’re seeing emerge on campuses today, with many speakers unable to come to campuses where students find them offensive.
3. Life Is a Battle between Good People and Evil People
This Untruth is all about identity politics. The idea that our “group” is good, has accurate world views, and that the other “group” is bad, and has inaccurate world views. I’ll quote directly here:
Imagine an entire entering class of college freshmen whose orientation program includes training in the kind of intersectional thinking described above, along with training in spotting microaggressions. By the end of their first week on campus, students have learned to score their own and others’ levels of privilege, identify more distinct identity groups, and see more differences between people. They have learned to interpret more words and social behaviors as acts of aggression. They have learned to associate aggression, domination, and oppression with privileged groups. They have learned to focus only on perceived impact and to ignore intent.
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. 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. Call-out culture requires an easy way to reach an audience that can award status to people who shame or punish alleged offenders. This is one reason social media has been so transformative: there is always an audience eager to watch people being shamed, particularly when it is so easy for spectators to join in and pile on.
Armed with the belief that challenging ideas pose a danger, unwilling to question thoughts and interpretations of events, we fall into an us versus them mentality, where we give ourselves a very charitable interpretation and others an uncharitable one.
This is tough one for me because I think it can be misinterpreted as a call for “color-blindness” and other concepts that are now being used to disregard racial injustice in the U.S. But I don’t see that as the book’s argument. Instead, I think it’s a challenge for us all to see the common-humanity in each other and to assume good intentions where possible, as opposed to viewing entire groups as the enemy and then experiencing the world through that lens.
Where Do We Go From Here?
I’ll skip the middle section of the book, which dissects some interesting college campus events from the last five years to illustrate the Great Untruths in action.
The book finishes by highlighting six drivers of where we are today:
- Greater polarization: Increased emotional divide between political parties has coincided with an increase in campus events like that at Brown discussed above
- Rises in anxiety and depression: iGen are growing up more slowly, have higher rates of anxiety and depression, and are more active on social media than previous generations, and the generation’s college years represent the beginning of the shift seen on campuses
- Paranoid parenting: Overprotected children are more likely to see harm where there is none, and to seek out adult figures (i.e. administrators) to solve their problems, and overprotected parenting has risen sharply in the US in the last few decades
- The decline of play: Children today are much less likely than previous generations to be left alone to play with others, which gives them fewer opportunities to learn to socialize effectively (share, argue, compromise, etc…)
- The bureaucracy of safetyism: A rise in campus administrators and the financial pressure of winning over students has led young adults to be viewed as consumers who must be catered to, resulting in policies that protect students in ways that restrict key academic principles like free speech/open discourse
- The quest for justice: Political events in the US in the last few decades have driven an increase in justice initiatives that seek equity (equal outcomes) as opposed to equality (equal opportunities), which often do not allow for any explanations that downplay the role of discrimination and emphasize the role of other factors
And then highlights some remedies for the future:
- Prepare your children to experience a world that is messy and filled with challenge
- Teach your children the basics of CBT
- Limit screen-time/social media use
- Establish free speech as a fundamental principle in universities
- Educate students to disagree productively
- Foster a common, inclusive identity among students, instead of highlighting differences
Lukianoff and Haidt finish with another piece I have to quote directly:
Putting this all together: We predict that things will improve, and the change may happen quite suddenly at some point in the next few years. As far as we can tell from private conversations, most university presidents reject the culture of safetyism. They know it is bad for students and bad for free inquiry, but they find it politically difficult to say so publicly. From our conversations with students, we believe that most high school and college students despise call-out culture and would prefer to be at a school that had little of it. Most students are not fragile, they are not “snowflakes,” and they are not afraid of ideas. So if a small group of universities is able to develop a different sort of academic culture—one that finds ways to make students from all identity groups feel welcome without using the divisive methods that seem to be backfiring on so many campuses—we think that market forces will take care of the rest. Applications and enrollment at those schools will surge. Alumni donations will increase. More high schools will prepare students to compete for slots at those schools, and more parents will prepare their kids to gain admission to those schools. This will mean less test prep, less overprotection, more free play, and more independence. Entire towns and school districts will organize themselves to enable and encourage more free-range parenting. They will do this not primarily to help their students get into college but to reverse the epidemic of depression, anxiety, self-injury, and suicide that is afflicting our children. There will be a growing recognition across the country that safetyism is dangerous and that it is stunting our children’s development.
Read the article that preceded the book here
Buy the book here