Their latest, The Coddling of the American Mind, was released the same day as Yoram Hazony’s book. Coddling is getting plenty of media buzz. This half-hour podcast is probably worth your time.
I might have thought that I would be more inclined to resist Hazony’s defense of nationalism and to defend L-H’s resistance to political correctness on campus. But it might turn out differently after I read the two books. Lukianoff and Haidt (L-H) write,
many parents, K-12 teachers, professors, and university administrators have been unknowingly teaching a generation of students to engage in the mental habits commonly seen in people who suffer from anxiety and depression.
I think that college administrators could make a difference. My fantasy of a courageous college administrator would be one who says:
1. If you don’t want to get up in the morning regretting the sex you had last night, then stay sober and say “no.” I would be surprised to find forcible rape on campus, but if you don’t feel safe, carry pepper spray.
2. If you engage in rioting, assault, or vandalism, then you deserve to be arrested and dealt with by the criminal justice system.
3. If you don’t like what someone says, then write an essay explaining what is wrong with it, and try to get other people interested in your essay.
I am not sure I will buy the L-H story. They want to draw an equivalence between right and left, and that is fair if you are talking about the propensity to be uncharitable to those who disagree. But my sense is that the depression/anxiety parallel to political demeanor is a better fit for the left than for the right.
Another problem I have with the psychological emphasis is that it might lead someone to think that if the parents, teachers, and professors could just realize that coddling has adverse psychological consequences, then they would take a different approach. Instead, I think that problem is more deep-seated. I see parents, teachers, and professors as having intellectual weaknesses (such as a lack of appreciation for evolution as a characteristic of markets and an influence on human behavior patterns) and character flaws (such as a lack of courage to talk to students as I would like) that are much harder to correct.
But this is all preliminary to reading the book. I need to give L-H a chance to change my mind.
Any administrator who said #1 would be publicly shamed and drummed out.
It’s not fashionable with those people who think they are morally superior, but I’ll be teaching my kids to be very careful about who they drink with. And I’ll refuse to admit I’m morally inferior.
There’s one really catchy song on Deap Vally’s Femejism album that is clearly designed to get fans to sing along and shout out the lyrics:
Don’t wanna be in your movie
If you really wanna get it on
Turn off that camera
The woman who wrote the song wants the young women in her audience to be assertive and to say no to stuff they don’t want to do. A college administrator could say it too, but I think it’s better the way Lindsey Troy sings it.
Have you seen Everett Piper”s book Not a Daycare?
F.H. Buckley’s “The Republican Workers Party” arrived the same day as Hazony’s “The Virtue of Nationalism” so quite a different competition for attention. Buckley seems to have given up on reforming higher education:
“Too often student are taking courses that mark them as disasters waiting to happen. Would you want to hire someone whose college transcript includes courses like Oberlin’s ‘Beginning Dungeons and Dragons,’ Cornell’s tree climbing course or USC’s course on selfies? [… …] To remedy this, Trump has propsoed better skills training, with an emphasis on the jobs that are out there. This would include online learninig and public-private apprenticeship programs, courses that ‘prepare people for trade, manufacturing, technology, and other really well-paying jobs and careers.’ [… …]this has bothered critics who think that it slights the broad, humanistic learning that American universities are imagined to provide. But humanistic learning doesn’t describe what’s happening today in most of our universities, even the best of them. Rather, what students are getting is simply another kind of vocational training, where the vocation is membership in the New Class of lawyers, government aides, and NGO staffers. It’s not humanistic education so much as coaching in how our clever barbarians might master cultural signifiers in order to joing a credentialed elite.”
If you want to see your courageous college administrator, the incentive of meaningful competition for young minds would be my best guess as to how you are going to get it.
Buckley also goes into great depth on why meaningful school choice is the right thing to do.
Haidt and Lukianoff have been promoting various blue sky reforms for what seems like ages now to no effect. I’d put my money on Trump on getting things done.
Although to be sure, the clip from Haidt and Lukianoff closely resembles an article Buckley did for Fox News on October 27, 2017:
Do you believe the foundational American rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Maybe at one time, but no longer. Now it’s the right to express one’s pain and the duty to attend to the Pain Monster that lies within us.
And the oh-so delicate students at many colleges and universities across the country are eager to share their inner pain with all who will listen – and demand to be sheltered from anything that could cause yet more inner turmoil.
In times past, the college student who tells you of his pain for some imagined slight would have been scolded and mocked for his self-indulgent, bruised feelings. If you’re so thin-skinned, grow thicker skin, we’d have told him. Grow up. But we don’t talk like that anymore.
We’ve been sensitized and disciplined and sued when we talk like that. As a result we’ve grown the wobbliest and most spineless generation the country has ever seen. Bear in mind, I’m talking about the adults administrators and professors at America’s colleges, not the students. The students are just taking their cues from us. When they profit from our indulgence they show themselves braver than we are, if more malevolent.
Through our weakness, through our unwillingness to discipline infantilized behavior, we’ve created the Pain Monsters at Yale University, Middlebury College, Evergreen State College and a growing number of other colleges. We’ve signaled that they can behave as outrageously as they want, so long as they justify themselves by uttering the magic words: “I want to talk about my pain.”
In regards to #3, your essay doesn’t have to be some boring piece as they teach in the English department. Academia had a long history of scathing, but polite, rebukes. It is a skill worth rejuvenating. Imagine how much more enjoyable social media would be if more of the combatants could write with wit and sophistication.
I came across this article from 1922 that is of the genre. Not only does it make its rebuttal, but is an entertaining read. I never found the original article, but it is not necessary to enjoy the takedown.
“My Dear modern Novelist:
You have recently given pleasure to the public by picturing what you would do if you were a teacher of English. Your sketch is racy, persuasive and true to life.
…
“Yet your patent truthfulness will be misunderstood in the strangest way–a way which a novelist, unaccustomed to the perverting power of literal minds, would never suspect. Some thousands of teachers and superintendents and pedagogical experts will apply your merriment to the whole body of actual teachers in actual schools; they will pass on to one another the glad message that M. N. advises all teachers to discard grammar in all schools.”
Poking Fun At Grammar, C.H. Ward, 1922, Scibner’s Magazine
http://www.archive.org/stream/scribnersmag71editmiss#page/228/mode/2up
Gonna fit in Schneier’s “Click Here to Kill Everybody”?
definitely planning to look at it