You can watch yesterday’s AEI event.
1. Apparently the book is selling well. That is probably a good sign.
2. Is Haidt now a full-blown conservative? It sort of seems that way. Near the end, I thought I heard him talking about the fragility of our society in a way that suggested the civilization vs. barbarism axis. But maybe I think he has become conservative because I believe he ought to be conservative, given what he has observed. But my theory is that he’s afraid to come out of the closet, and that keeps him from admitting it, even to himself.
3. I used my question, at one hour and seventeen minutes in, to try to get them to admit that the right is not as closed-minded as the left. Haidt tried to parry that by saying that conservatives are starting to talk about themselves as victims, which means that they are joining victimhood culture. Moderator Jonathan Rauch brought up Sen. Lindsay Graham’s speech at the end of the Kavanaugh-Ford hearing as an example of that. To me, the most powerful line of Graham’s was “Boy, you guys want power. God, I hope you never get it.” That does not sound like victimhood to me.
Conservatives on campus and in the media are subject to antagonism and double standards. That is simply a fact. Left-wing students have gotten speakers disinvited. Right-wing students have not. Left-wing students have demanded protection from having to listen to opposing views. Right-wing students have not. Conservative professors, and even centrist professors, have to be very careful about expressing their beliefs. Meanwhile, there are departments and administrative offices that are garrisons for radical leftists. On the panel, Prof. Allison Stanger, who says that she, too, is no conservative, made an impassioned defense of free speech and intellectual rigor. But does she or anyone else hold the Gender Studies Department or the Office of Inclusion to the same standards she expects of her students?
4. Afterward, I thought of an even more obnoxious question. Haidt talked about the high rates of anxiety and increased rates of suicide among young people. I wanted to ask whether other trends are more favorable. The obnoxious way to put it would have been:
You know what p-hacking is. It’s when you search through a hundred relationships to find one or two that have “significant” p-values. Maybe there is something that we could call danger-hacking. We look through generational trends to find the ones that suggest danger. You brought up teenage anxiety and suicide rates. But other indicators look better. Homicide is down. Teenage pregnancy is down. I’ll bet that the most recent yearbooks of certain DC-area prep schools are not as bacchanalian as the ones from 35 years ago. Shouldn’t we stop danger-hacking and take a more holistic view of Gen Z or I-Gen, which might suggest that they are actually in pretty good shape?
Your “obnoxious” formulation is not obnoxious at all. It’s aggressive but in a good way.
“But other indicators look better. Homicide is down. Teenage pregnancy is down. I’ll bet that the most recent yearbooks of certain DC-area prep schools are not as bacchanalian as the ones from 35 years ago.”
The “positive” stats you mention all concern the frequency of bad events, rather than actual life outcomes. A kid can avoid homicide, pregnancy and “bacchanalian” extracurricular life, and, these “achievements” notwithstanding, his life may be progressing very poorly. He may not be a “danger,” he may just be an incurious, risk-averse bump on a log, playing video games in his parents’ basement and getting a useless degree in junior college. But maybe libertarians think a whole generation like that would be actually in “pretty good shape,” since they’re “choosing” that existence. I suppose that’s the conclusion you reach if you have no concept of human flourishing.
Once again I think Haidt’s take here is both futile and deeply misguided.
The “political abuse of psychiatry” is a well-studied topic, but Haidt’s work now really seems to me to be joining the genre of “political abuse of social psychology”.
It’s futile, because “exhortation is over.” Haidt’s been at this a while now with a variety of projects, but I don’t see any sign of decreasing polarization, partisanship, or announcements of prestigious, influential institutions that they are specifically going to take his advice and make hiring decisions to increase ‘viewpoint diversity’.
Compare all that failure and impotence to FIRE’s stream of successes, which are due to the face that they don’t have to rely on merely hectoring: they can leverage the real coercive power of the state through the courts. If Haidt wants to talk about some new laws to give him FIRE’s ammunition, as it were, or withholding of public funding or prosecutions for prevention of the exercise of civil rights based on viewpoint, then we’re talking about something that has a chance of having a real impact.
But I don’t think Haidt is down with any of that, which raises the question why not.
His approach is deeply misguided for two reasons.
First, because what we are actually seeing on campuses in not in fact a culture-wide mass psychological phenomenon affecting everyone equally because of risk-averse helicopter parenting, but an almost exclusively leftist phenomenon abusing BS claims of mental distress to bully and suppress their opponents and accomplish ideological and political ends by underhanded means, e.g., silencing, deplatforming, shouting-down, etc. His answer to your question was completely evasive and non-responsive on the matter at issue.
Taking those claims at face value and seriously as if they were real reflections of genuine mental states is just naive in the extreme. “Fake Blues”. (Yes, there is a Straussian take that he doesn’t take any of that seriously, but that trying to convince administrators and other authorities to dismiss all that bogus nonsense is a lost cause, so one has to work within the ‘mental health diagnostic’ framework.)
The way we can tell this is by looking at the response of administrators to students and faculty who are responsible for conduct that clearly violates institutional behavioral standards and occasionally the criminal law as well. These are not circumstances of psychological debilitation or anxiety but intentional disruptions, vandalism, and violence, sometimes quite serious. The evidence we have is that university administrators seem to almost always have very little interest in even identifying miscreants, and when these authorities are practically forced into responding to someone else’s investigative work and complaint, the result is usually a mere slap on the wrist. In the case of the few faculty terminations we know about, it’s remarkable how many immediately land on their feet at another institution.
So, it’s clear that most university administrators are really on the side of the leftist disruptors, and are eager to entertain all those bogus assertions of psychological sensitivity as a cover story to achieve ends which would otherwise lack any acceptable justification.
And second, because he still hasn’t explained why psychologically-disturbing messages and ideas shouldn’t just be banned, in addition to any maturing and toughening work the education system should be doing. Why not do both?
This gets back to the fully valid leftist critique of Haidt’s call for viewpoint diversity, which he never justified. If we know certain ideas are wrong (e.g., flat earth theory), or hateful, then why tolerate them? What’s the value in viewpoint diversity if we’re all so open minded our brains fall out? Certain truths are well-established enough that constantly re-litigating them is a waste of time that leaves a wrong impression of false equivalence in the minds of impressionable students.
The only way out of that challenge that makes sense is to claim that free speech and viewpoint diversity are important because leftists are wrong about some things that conservatives are right about. If Haidt said that, the response would be, “Like what? How do you know that?” And then the devil’s in the details, which he’d rather talk around in terms of abstractions. That means he doesn’t get into trouble, but it also means he’s preaching to a choir, and he’s not actually persuading anyone that matters to do anything radically different.
So, the fact that the book is selling well is probably not a good sign. Not only is that probably mostly the choir buying the preaching, but the psychological claims themselves are suspect, and to the extent the choir buys into that narrative, he’s done the mission to spread true knowledge a disservice.
Re Handle’s next to last paragraph, Haidt could still have a case for viewpoint diversity if he said the Left might be wrong about certain things that conservatives might be right about – that some questions are still open – if he just cannot bring himself to say that the Left is known to be wrong about something. Haidt could also make his case by pointing out the Left’s many inconsistencies and incoherencies (e.g. equality of the sexes is a universal moral imperative, but supporting advocates for that view within Islamic societies is “oppressive”). But no such argument would make any headway with today’s progressives, who speak and act very much like a fundamentalist religious sect and have turned academic humanities departments back into seminaries.
I don’t think Haidt could even get away with “open questions”. A progressive could just say, “Now you are just making things up. Of course we never have a problem on any issue on which there is genuine uncertainty about some topic and the field remains open to legitimate debate and airing of opposing views in a dialectical process trending towards truth. It is only on those matters on which all right-thinking people have long settled that we protect the welfare of members of our communities and strive to include them in all matters and make sure they feel welcome and safe in all circumstances. And you can’t point to any time we’ve done otherwise.”
Either he concedes that it doesn’t happen, or he has to point to at least one time when progressives were clearly wrong to stifle or suppress speech because they were clearly wrong on the merits, and the speaker was right.
The progressives have built an inpenetrable wall around their conception of regulated speech. There is just no way to breach that wall without directly engaging with and criticizing core errors they have sanctified and bolstered with ruinous social sanctions.
The argument that “we need free speech so we can tell the kids they are mentally tough enough to listen to it, and train them to be mentally tough in other ways in part by exposing themselves to tough-to-take speech, and that will make them mentally healthier” is just bogus. The argument that “we need free speech because you guys are really wrong about reality and implementing your wrong conception with coercive policy is repeatedly inuhmane and disastrous” is forbidden.
As I said at the end of my comment, I don’t think an “open questions” gambit would work for Haidt, either.
Afterward, I thought of an even more obnoxious question. Haidt talked about the high rates of anxiety and increased rates of suicide among young people. I wanted to ask whether other trends are more favorable.
Social trust has been declining for a half century (trust in other individuals, trust in the government, trust in the press).
Marriage rates, too. (The “unpartnered” percentage is climbing.)
The incarceration rate is stratospheric. If people seriously reflected on what we had to do to reduce the homicide rate since 1970, I don’t think they’d crow about it.