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Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind: A better review than mine: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/20/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind-review?CMP=share_btn_tw pointing out that if you wonder why students on US campuses seem so fragile and stressed, exploding levels of debt and economic insecurity might have a role to play. This was a book I argued with a lot as I read, mostly because I would agree with a lot of the argument if the examples were different. E.g., when the authors argue for the importance of presuming good faith on the part of people with whom you disagree, I think about the white fragility that can’t understand Black Lives Matter as anything but an attack—a real physical threat, somehow—on the security of white lives. A book written around examples like that, instead of a book written in the belief that “microaggressions” aren’t a real thing, would have been very interesting.
Well, technically, the authors think that some “microaggressions” do represent real and troubling fear and hostility, but they don’t like the use of a word that incorporates the word “aggression” because a lot of the identified behaviors aren’t physically aggressive and none of them are intentional. The authors believe that calling a statement or behavior “aggressive” is wrong where there is no intentional discrimination. This claim strikes me as a tad ironic given the constant reassurances of anti-racist activists that identifying specific racist acts isn’t an accusation of irredeemable, intentional evil on the part of most actors but rather a way of talking about how structures and unconscious assumptions structure behavior in ways that can do harm without deliberate intent. What happened to presuming good faith?
One could defend the general argument while recognizing that the authors aren’t immune from the very cognitive failure they decry of thinking that their opponents are just unreasonable, senseless, bad. But I’m not sure that defense works. Consider one story the authors tell about why we shouldn’t be so quick to take offense at allegedly racist behaviors: Haidt has a colleague, an African American woman, whose white husband was in a very bad accident. While the ER doctors and nurses were working to save his life, she was present to provide important background information, but the doctors and nurses kept talking over her and asking why she was in the room; they didn’t seem to get that she was his wife. According to the authors, she was getting mad at that racist bullshit, but realized that she should take a deep breath and presume good faith; once she changed her attitude, the doctors and nurses started being nicer to her. When her husband was out of immediate danger, she spoke to hospital administrators about the treatment she’d received. Thus, the authors conclude, if marginalized people presume good faith, they will get good faith in return. I would have loved to hear about this incident in her own words, but that last reported fact is really key to my understanding of the story as they tell it: she didn’t presume good faith. She presumed unconscious racism rather than intentional discrimination, which is a very different thing, and she chose a tactic—one that I expect had a real emotional cost—in the moment, while not neglecting to address the problem in a more explicit way later. This incident didn’t prove that the authors were correct that the nurses and doctors were racial innocents; it proved that challenging racism is complex and difficult and that the burden is still on the people who suffer from it to do so.
The authors are very committed to the idea that “that which does not kill us makes us stronger,” which I agree is sometimes true, and that students need to be able to suffer through the discomfort of ideas with which they disagree, and I also agree that some 18-year-olds have done some dumb shit, both in the name of equality and its opposite. But (1) I condemn the adults who are deliberately provoking this reaction, like Milo the racist and his ilk, far more, and (2) I’m not sure that events at a few campuses are where we should be looking for the sources of troubling suppression of free speech. As another article I read recently pointed out, American conservatism is incredibly out of step with center-right parties around the world, and trying to import that extremism to college campuses is predictably going to cause problems.
The authors spend a short chapter on the antics (and threats) of right-wing trolls, but don’t go back to that problem when they argue that all views should be open for debate on campuses. The problem with that, which they simply don’t address, is the problem of tolerance: “debate” is useless and often counterproductive when racists etc. are not speaking in good faith but merely speaking to provoke and anger, when they see their targets as subhuman. John Stuart Mill’s argument for freedom of speech works if (and often only if) people are listening and thinking in good faith. The authors would impose no limits on who should be allowed to speak at college events, while also urging colleges to favor “ideological diversity” among faculty (identity politics much?) that, they assure us, would have some limits. But what limits? I’m guessing they think actual Nazis need not apply, but why isn’t Holocaust denial, or whether certain groups should be rounded up into concentration camps, up for debate like everything else? If it’s because those beliefs are by consensus (whose?) so clearly beyond the boundaries of what might be true, then we do have to start figuring out where those boundaries are, rather than just pretending that neutrality means that every opinion is as good as every other.
The book also would have been much stronger if it had been more balanced, instead of pseudo-balanced, with a lot of “to be sure, there are racists out there” that pivots right back to “identity politics that focus on one group is a bad thing”—they don’t say so outright, but their logic is that a movement founded on the idea that “Black Lives Matter” is bad because it doesn’t draw a big enough circle. It would have been more in the spirit of serious, good-faith argumentation that they purport to support to discuss why activists chose that name, and why “All Lives Matter” is a response from people who deny that police brutality against African-Americans is a real problem. Relatedly, it’s a bit ironic to celebrate MLK Jr. as a better alternative to today’s identity politics, given how controversial/hated among whites he was; he only became a uniter in collective American memory after he was assassinated. (They love Amy Chua and Amy Wax’s defenses of American meritocracy, of course.)
I was particularly irritated when they talked about the rise in hate crimes in the US after Trump’s election, then concluded the discussion by saying that claims about the rise of hate crimes have “some truth.” My dudes, on your own evidence, such claims have all the truth. What’s the not-true part? They don’t say. I think they might respond that to just say hate crimes are rising would be “catastrophizing”—something that isn’t healthy when an individual does it about her own situation (e.g., “everyone hates me”) but is a different thing when you talk about how many hate crimes there are, or how many kids have been made orphans by this administration, or how the EPA is being destroyed because science isn’t on the side of conservatism. I’m actually in complete agreement with the authors on the importance of evidence in public policy debates, rather than truthiness/feeling true, but they undermine their case by condemning reliance on emotions or “emotional reasoning” full stop. When I hear that, I hear dudes trying to argue women out of not being attracted to them, or out of calling them “creepy” because it can’t be rebutted with logic, or out of listening to their gut feelings about whether going off with a guy would be a bad idea. I just read about Senator Grassley saying that we couldn’t believe Dr. Ford because all she had was an emotional accusation, which wasn’t evidence of anything, and I am not persuaded by arguments that emotion is the opposite of reason or truth. Emotion won’t tell you whether the planet is warming; it will tell you that what happened to you was was wrong. And sure, sometimes (like when a guy cuts me off in traffic) it is healthier to get over myself, to let that emotion go (and to remind myself that by inattention I have done such things myself), but their arguments lack necessary nuance. Which isn’t perhaps surprising since it’s a book about how if we could just get individual psychology right we wouldn’t have to worry about structural inequality or discrimination, so the emotion thing is part of that overgeneralization.
Well, technically, the authors think that some “microaggressions” do represent real and troubling fear and hostility, but they don’t like the use of a word that incorporates the word “aggression” because a lot of the identified behaviors aren’t physically aggressive and none of them are intentional. The authors believe that calling a statement or behavior “aggressive” is wrong where there is no intentional discrimination. This claim strikes me as a tad ironic given the constant reassurances of anti-racist activists that identifying specific racist acts isn’t an accusation of irredeemable, intentional evil on the part of most actors but rather a way of talking about how structures and unconscious assumptions structure behavior in ways that can do harm without deliberate intent. What happened to presuming good faith?
One could defend the general argument while recognizing that the authors aren’t immune from the very cognitive failure they decry of thinking that their opponents are just unreasonable, senseless, bad. But I’m not sure that defense works. Consider one story the authors tell about why we shouldn’t be so quick to take offense at allegedly racist behaviors: Haidt has a colleague, an African American woman, whose white husband was in a very bad accident. While the ER doctors and nurses were working to save his life, she was present to provide important background information, but the doctors and nurses kept talking over her and asking why she was in the room; they didn’t seem to get that she was his wife. According to the authors, she was getting mad at that racist bullshit, but realized that she should take a deep breath and presume good faith; once she changed her attitude, the doctors and nurses started being nicer to her. When her husband was out of immediate danger, she spoke to hospital administrators about the treatment she’d received. Thus, the authors conclude, if marginalized people presume good faith, they will get good faith in return. I would have loved to hear about this incident in her own words, but that last reported fact is really key to my understanding of the story as they tell it: she didn’t presume good faith. She presumed unconscious racism rather than intentional discrimination, which is a very different thing, and she chose a tactic—one that I expect had a real emotional cost—in the moment, while not neglecting to address the problem in a more explicit way later. This incident didn’t prove that the authors were correct that the nurses and doctors were racial innocents; it proved that challenging racism is complex and difficult and that the burden is still on the people who suffer from it to do so.
The authors are very committed to the idea that “that which does not kill us makes us stronger,” which I agree is sometimes true, and that students need to be able to suffer through the discomfort of ideas with which they disagree, and I also agree that some 18-year-olds have done some dumb shit, both in the name of equality and its opposite. But (1) I condemn the adults who are deliberately provoking this reaction, like Milo the racist and his ilk, far more, and (2) I’m not sure that events at a few campuses are where we should be looking for the sources of troubling suppression of free speech. As another article I read recently pointed out, American conservatism is incredibly out of step with center-right parties around the world, and trying to import that extremism to college campuses is predictably going to cause problems.
The authors spend a short chapter on the antics (and threats) of right-wing trolls, but don’t go back to that problem when they argue that all views should be open for debate on campuses. The problem with that, which they simply don’t address, is the problem of tolerance: “debate” is useless and often counterproductive when racists etc. are not speaking in good faith but merely speaking to provoke and anger, when they see their targets as subhuman. John Stuart Mill’s argument for freedom of speech works if (and often only if) people are listening and thinking in good faith. The authors would impose no limits on who should be allowed to speak at college events, while also urging colleges to favor “ideological diversity” among faculty (identity politics much?) that, they assure us, would have some limits. But what limits? I’m guessing they think actual Nazis need not apply, but why isn’t Holocaust denial, or whether certain groups should be rounded up into concentration camps, up for debate like everything else? If it’s because those beliefs are by consensus (whose?) so clearly beyond the boundaries of what might be true, then we do have to start figuring out where those boundaries are, rather than just pretending that neutrality means that every opinion is as good as every other.
The book also would have been much stronger if it had been more balanced, instead of pseudo-balanced, with a lot of “to be sure, there are racists out there” that pivots right back to “identity politics that focus on one group is a bad thing”—they don’t say so outright, but their logic is that a movement founded on the idea that “Black Lives Matter” is bad because it doesn’t draw a big enough circle. It would have been more in the spirit of serious, good-faith argumentation that they purport to support to discuss why activists chose that name, and why “All Lives Matter” is a response from people who deny that police brutality against African-Americans is a real problem. Relatedly, it’s a bit ironic to celebrate MLK Jr. as a better alternative to today’s identity politics, given how controversial/hated among whites he was; he only became a uniter in collective American memory after he was assassinated. (They love Amy Chua and Amy Wax’s defenses of American meritocracy, of course.)
I was particularly irritated when they talked about the rise in hate crimes in the US after Trump’s election, then concluded the discussion by saying that claims about the rise of hate crimes have “some truth.” My dudes, on your own evidence, such claims have all the truth. What’s the not-true part? They don’t say. I think they might respond that to just say hate crimes are rising would be “catastrophizing”—something that isn’t healthy when an individual does it about her own situation (e.g., “everyone hates me”) but is a different thing when you talk about how many hate crimes there are, or how many kids have been made orphans by this administration, or how the EPA is being destroyed because science isn’t on the side of conservatism. I’m actually in complete agreement with the authors on the importance of evidence in public policy debates, rather than truthiness/feeling true, but they undermine their case by condemning reliance on emotions or “emotional reasoning” full stop. When I hear that, I hear dudes trying to argue women out of not being attracted to them, or out of calling them “creepy” because it can’t be rebutted with logic, or out of listening to their gut feelings about whether going off with a guy would be a bad idea. I just read about Senator Grassley saying that we couldn’t believe Dr. Ford because all she had was an emotional accusation, which wasn’t evidence of anything, and I am not persuaded by arguments that emotion is the opposite of reason or truth. Emotion won’t tell you whether the planet is warming; it will tell you that what happened to you was was wrong. And sure, sometimes (like when a guy cuts me off in traffic) it is healthier to get over myself, to let that emotion go (and to remind myself that by inattention I have done such things myself), but their arguments lack necessary nuance. Which isn’t perhaps surprising since it’s a book about how if we could just get individual psychology right we wouldn’t have to worry about structural inequality or discrimination, so the emotion thing is part of that overgeneralization.
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The whole thing made me so furious.
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I have subscribed to the Wall Street Journal again, trying to avoid an epistemic bubble, but it's indeed exhausting and I can't force myself to read a lot of the opinion pieces.