The Coddling of the American Mind

The Coddling of the American Mind

From leftists, to leftists: A warning against wokeism.

Recently, I’ve reviewed Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds. For a conservative like myself, it’s an easy book to like. Murray criticizes modern woke thought in terms that resonate with my own beliefs, indicting modern Marxism’s quest to re-invent itself as the genesis of our current madness.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure is, for me, a harder book to love. Yet it is a worthwhile read, nevertheless.

One cannot, as I often do, criticize the dogmatism of the modern left without opening one’s mind to other perspectives. Lukianoff and Haidt offer a criticism of the modern drive to ideological lockstep thinking from a very different perspective; that of two liberals concerned that this thinking imperils the very causes they love.

I’ve long argued that some of the worthwhile accomplishments of the left in recent decades, such as increased racial equality, gay rights, and equal rights for women, are at risk thanks to the excesses of the radical left. Lukianoff and Haidt, who are refreshingly honest about their political leanings, seem equally concerned.

They make a methodical and convincing argument that the embrace of victimhood and single-viewpoint thinking at modern universities, a trend which has serious consequences for society as a whole, is firmly rooted in what they call “safetyism,” an idea that every experience and encounter a child faces must be inherently safe. Since the early 1980s, a trend has been developing, towards sheltering children from the risky experiences of unstructured play, towards an over-supervised, risk averse culture of protection. Lukianoff and Haidt argue, persuasively, that this trend has been increasingly acute in “iGen” the children who have started school post 9/11, and entered universities starting 2013.

Why is iGen particularly vulnerable? First, raised in the aftermath of a horrific, hitherto unimaginable terrorist attack, they came of age in the ear of “If you see something, say something.” A well intention culture of protection reinforced already intense fear and anxiety among parents, inevitably resulting in greater fragility and perception of risk. Helicopter parenting, and the reduction of unsupervised play, couple with the anxiety-producing effects of social media and electronic device dependence, resulted in a generation which has come to expect “safe spaces” and a lack of any sort of challenge to cherished ideas.

This change in childhood has, according to Lukianoff and Haidt, resulted in the conversion of universities into institutions designed to cater to prejudices instead of challenging them. Debate is seen as threat. Words become violence. Children not allowed to play on their own, are now unable to resolve conflicts and intellectual conundrums on their own. They “need an adult” well past the point at which they ought to be adults themselves.

The end result? A culture in which the graduates of America’s most prestigious universities, people earmarked for leadership roles, cannot understand or tolerate alternative ideas, because they have been sheltered from them.

Lukianoff and Haidt, however, for all their consistency of message and structured arguments, do not always hit the mark. Their main goal seems to be to preserve leftism from its own excesses, a worthy goal to be sure, but one which blinds them to certain issues.

Unlike Murray, they pay almost no mind to the pervasive influence of Marxists on campus, and the relationship between modern wokeism and Marxism’s desperate attempt to maintain relevance after the fall of the Soviet Union. They do, however, pay admirable attention to the decline of viewpoint diversity in American university faculty.

Lukianoff and Haidt also uncritically accept the doubtful tenets of the anti-police movement, never questioning the blanket condemnation of police action that is at the core of so much modern leftist action. This is a regrettable blind spot. I suspect that, if they were better informed on policing, they might have examined the basic ludicrousness of the supposed police “war on Blacks.”

Lastly, the authors give a dubious amount of space to condemnations of “right-wing provocations” inspiring leftist overreaction. Given the examples they cite, such “provocations” seem mainly to consist of 1.) Right-wingers daring to speak on campus; and 2.) Right-wingers pointing out that leftists are spouting bullshit. Perhaps if the products of modern safetyism were not so easily provoked, there would be no issue.

Still, notwithstanding its flaws, The Coddling of the American Mind is a worthwhile document. Recent events, especially the anarchic state of the US in the past year, have challenged some of the basic optimism of Lukianoff and Haidt’s conclusions. But the central tenet of the work, that we are teaching our children to think of themselves as fragile losers instead of resilient winners, holds true, whatever your political perspective. The idea that a free contest of ideas is the best way to resolve social ideas, and the only way to run universities, is one that free thinkers of left, centre, and right can and must embrace.

If you cannot speak, I am not free, and vice versa.