Coddling of the American Mind
* Book: Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Penguin, 2019
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Description
From the publisher:
"Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising—on campus as well as nationally. How did this happen?
First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life.
Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. They examine changes on campus, including the corporatization of universities and the emergence of new ideas about identity and justice. They situate the conflicts on campus within the context of America’s rapidly rising political polarization and dysfunction.
This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines."
Discussion
John McWhorter:
"Here are three pieces of advice for living.
1. What doesn't kill you makes you weaker.
2. Always trust your feelings.
3. Life is a battle between good and bad people.
Do you see these three tenets as wisdom, or as something a person should be taught out of? I need not even ask.
But why, then, does enlightened America embrace the idea that where black people are concerned, living by these three tenets is cognitively healthy?
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The tenets are the heart of Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt's brilliant The Coddling of the American Mind from a few years back. They analyze these as counsel given to students, today, in general. However, this extends to black America as a whole.
Of course, the usual suspects will have a hard time recognizing themselves in these tenets when spelled out. However, they are the fish who don't know they're wet. They've never known anything but those tenets, and thus see them as a normal way of being. They don't know that these tenets are "a thing."
What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker – as in melodramatic claims of injury at seeing the N-word written "n*****" on a test, or hearing a Mandarin expression that sounds like the N-word, and calling it trauma. Or the whole idea that a black person living today is the vessel of a "trauma" inflicted on black people over multiple past generations.
Always trust your feelings – as in the watchcry that impact trumps intent, such that if a black person feels something said or done as racist, then it simply is, and no questions can be morally asked, because black people's feelings are in themselves a kind of truth (an outgrowth from the Critical Race Theory we are supposedly so remiss in discussing these days).
Life is a battle between good people and bad people – as in that America is full of "racists," such as white people menacingly united in preserving their "white" interests (á la rhetoric Robin DiAngelo is fond of), such that Ta-Nehisi Coates watched the firefighters killed on 9/11 and found himself numb to the suffering of people whose type otherwise could have been responsible for "shattering" his black body.
- * *
So, these three tenets do underlie an awful lot of thought about, and by, black people. The only question is: How does race and racism make these three tenets sensible? To wit, do race and racism teach us something we didn't know about what constitutes healthy human psychology?
Of course there are times when race and racism shed valuable new light on things.
Abolitionism called on America to honor its philosophical ideals
The Civil Rights movement later taught America that racism is more than dirty names, violence and formal segregation. I once knew a woman of literally 100, white and wealthy, who genuinely thought that race in America had not been a problem until Martin Luther King "stirred things up" – and she was a Democrat! Her view is much less likely in people of younger generations.
In my own academic world, the study of speech varieties spoken by descendants of victims of plantation slavery and colonialization, such as creole languages like Haitian, Papiamentu, and Jamaican patois, helps show that there is nothing erroneous or inadequate about nonstandard language. Creoles also reveal things about how languages emerge, change, and mix together.
But what does this teach that we didn't know?
1. What doesn't kill you makes you weaker.
2. Always trust your feelings.
3. Life is a battle between good and bad people.
What new frontiers of psychotherapy practice does this little list of homilies provide us with?
Let's face it: none."
(https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/black-fragility-as-black-strength)