Jonathan Haidt joins me to discuss his new book, The Coddling of the American Mind, and to talk about the recent moral panics among young adults about free speech on campus and the role of intentions in morality, and the economy of prestige in so-called call-out culture. We also talk about how we should define bigotry, systemic racism, the paradox of progress, and how we coddle our kids more and more because we want life to be as safe and as easy as possible for them. And we talk about why this is a problem, and why it should be a problem for all of us, not just for young adults. This episode is sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, who are the ones who make this podcast possible. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore, without your support, you are not getting the full benefits of the podcast. If you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming a subscriber. You'll get access to the full archive of episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, including the podcast's most popular episodes, as well as access to our newest episodes, and much more. Thanks for listening to the podcast! Sam Harris and Jonathon Hays to make sense of it all. Jonothan McElowt and Greg Lukianoff To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to bit.ly/OurAdvertisers. To buy tickets to our upcoming events, go here and support the podcast by becoming a patron of Making Sense: bit.fm/OurMakesensecords or to get 10% off your tickets only get 20% off the first week of the show starting on the next week, starting at $99/month, starting on $49/month! Subscribe to our second week only get 5% off our ad-free version of the making sense podcast starts on Nov. 21st, only 3 months only get 15% off for the VIP discount, only 2 months get free of the ad-only course, and 5% discount, shipping free on the second week, shipping worldwide, and they'll get the discount gets free on all other places get full access to all the best deals, two months get the best of that offer, discount offers, and a limited discount, and more!
00:11:13.760This is another good thing from Sachs' challenge is we had to refine our argument and say it's not due to a big change in the average student.
00:11:21.760It's due to a big change in the dynamics so that now the sort of a subset of students who are very angry and who buy into some views that we can debate, but, you know, I think are bad ideas.
00:11:34.380A subset of students who buy into certain ideas now is allowed to ride roughshod over everyone else and people are afraid to stand up to them.
00:11:42.440Yeah, I mean, the dynamics are interesting because I think our intuitions about just how many people in a group are required to kind of nullify the intentions and the aspirations of the whole group are pretty bad.
00:11:57.760I mean, it doesn't take 50 percent of a group to turn the tide against the rest.
00:12:04.320And with social media, so a lot of our conversation, like a lot of many conversations, will probably be about social media and what happens.
00:12:13.440How does the system change when you have various things and forces in balance and then you suddenly increase connectivity by a factor of 100?
00:12:23.360And so an essential term here is call-out culture.
00:12:26.800This is what the students themselves call it.
00:12:28.520Anytime you're in a culture in which you can be, you know, behaving as you've always behaved and suddenly someone will pick on one word, one thing you said, and there could be no end of trouble for you.
00:12:38.860There could be shame, humiliation, mobbing.
00:12:41.140When you are in such an environment, even if it's only one or two percent of your fellow students who would do that to you, it'll likely have an effect on your behavior.
00:12:50.020Just to be clear, this is not just a problem on college campuses.
00:12:53.220We're seeing this because, first of all, people graduate from college and they enter the workforce from these colleges at a very high level.
00:13:01.200So we see this sort of thing now at companies like Google.
00:13:04.700Among software engineers, we see it at the New York Times in what was happening to Barry Weiss.
00:13:10.520I don't know if you recall when the Slack channel for the New York Times was published and Barry had said something about,
00:13:16.920she had made a joke about immigrants, so they get the job done, quoting Hamilton.
00:13:22.300This was during the Olympics and she named an Asian-American figure skater, I believe, who, in fact, was not an immigrant, but she was merely the daughter of immigrants.
00:13:32.080So it was marginalizing to say they get the job done.
00:13:53.960As soon as they go out into the real world, they'll have to drop this stuff.
00:13:57.240You know, once they are hired in a corporation, the corporation is not going to stand for, you know, for this way of behaving and this very confrontational way of addressing hurt feelings.
00:14:08.760But it turns out, yes, as you say, it became especially clear in 2017 with the Google memo and with a variety of other ways that these norms have spread out into some parts of the corporate world, primarily those that hire, I think, creatives from the elite universities.
00:14:24.200That's where this culture is most intense.
00:14:26.920So, you know, if you were to look at a mining company based in Colorado, I bet you'd see no trace of it.
00:14:32.380But yes, from what I hear at top media companies, at the New York Times, at the Atlantic, there's a big generational divide.
00:14:38.920And this is very important for people to understand.
00:14:40.520Whether you're on the left or the right, if you're over 30 or 35, you believe in free speech.
00:14:47.140And a lot of people on the left in journalism are looking at these new norms and saying, wait a sec, what is this?
00:14:54.020So this is not it's not, you know, while there is a left right aspect to it, unfortunately, it's more of a generational divide.
00:15:01.820There's a set of new understandings among young people.
00:15:04.180And we should go into why that is, because when every, you know, part of my whole approach to morality is that we all live in a moral world.
00:15:13.480We all live in a moral world, a moral matrix.
00:15:16.320And it's not things don't happen because they're evil people out there pushing the evil ideas.
00:15:20.600They happen because there are good people pushing their ideas about virtue or goodness that end up producing some bad effects.
00:15:28.260And I think that's what's happening here.
00:15:29.740So we just we should just be very clear. This isn't about bashing young people or Gen X or iGen.
00:15:34.860This is about understanding how a new morality emerged, which prioritizes inclusion and diversity, which are good, good things, of course.
00:15:43.280But it prioritizes them in a way that I think sets us up for unending conflict in all of our institutions.
00:15:50.860Well, I want to get into the root cause of this problem and talk about your three great untruths, which I think was a great way to structure your analysis here.
00:16:00.240But before we broaden the focus, I just want to give an example of the kind of thing that has happened on some of these college campuses that has motivated you to pay attention to this problem.
00:16:11.400Because I've had a lot of attention to it, but the details of some of these cases were still blurry to me.
00:16:18.720And it is just amazing to consider what has been happening.
00:16:22.880So I think let's just talk about the Dean Spellman case at Claremont McKenna College.
00:16:28.100Yeah, that's a really, really clear one.
00:16:48.140And she writes an essay in some, I think it's a campus publication.
00:16:51.100She writes an essay talking about how marginalized she feels.
00:16:54.980And, you know, she makes some points about what it's like to be seen as an affirmative action, admit, to be on a campus where all the people like you or most of the people like you are the gardeners rather than the professional staff.
00:17:06.380So, you know, it's a perfectly reasonable essay for a student to write.
00:17:11.560And then in response to that, the Dean of Students, Mary Spellman, sends for private email, just person to person, private email.
00:17:20.540So, Olivia, we changed her name here, but Olivia, thank you for writing and sharing this article with me.
00:17:26.860We have a lot to do as a college and community.
00:17:29.260Would you be willing to talk with me sometime about these issues?
00:17:32.100They're important to me and the Dean of Students staff, and we're working on how we can better serve students, especially those who don't fit our CMC mold.
00:18:00.820The amazing thing is that it hinges on a single word, and this is way beyond a campus problem,
00:18:06.400but the dynamics of this is that it is to seize upon the worst possible interpretation of, in this case, a single word.
00:18:15.900I think with the understanding that the author of, in this case, Dean Spelman, couldn't have possibly intended those worst possible associations with that word.
00:18:32.560Now, you and I know that basic moral psychology is not, you know, if somebody bumps into you, we don't say they've done something immoral unless they meant to.
00:18:41.160If they intended to push you, it's immoral.
00:18:42.740But if they tripped or if it's an accident, then we say, no, you know, you didn't mean it.
00:18:49.040But that's the old-fashioned, otherwise known as the universal view of morality, which is that intent matters primarily for judgment, not outcome, or not impact, as they say.
00:19:00.140But the new doctrine is intent doesn't matter.
00:19:03.860And so if something makes someone feel marginalized or victimized, then they have been marginalized or victimized.
00:19:12.800And this is a really, really good way to set students up to be really hurt and angry often.
00:19:18.900And that's why the subtitle of our book is How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.
00:19:26.140So, yeah, in any normal world, even if she felt a flash of, like, this mold, what is this word?
00:19:35.280Well, it turns out it's actually a word that they use on campus a lot to talk about how there is a standard prototype, you know, waspy, jockey sort of white person.
00:19:42.920So, fine, you know, that's the prototype.
00:19:44.720And Dean Spellman is trying to help people who don't fit it.
00:19:47.520So, but yes, as you say, the goal of discourse is to find the worst possible reading so that you can call them out and then you get the prestige for identifying a racist or something like that.
00:20:01.140So I think we should linger on why intentions should matter, but let's just close Dean Spellman's case.
00:20:32.740As usually happens, there's usually a list of demands given to the president.
00:20:35.880And it almost always includes mandatory diversity training for everyone.
00:20:39.820And this is key, demands that Spellman resign.
00:20:43.360So in the new call-out culture, it's not enough to shame someone.
00:20:46.200You have to appeal to an authority to get them fired or punished or renounced.
00:20:50.620And the leadership there did what leadership at almost all universities does, which is they don't stand up for the person being attacked.
00:20:57.560They don't stand up for their faculty.
00:20:59.200They try to placate the angriest students.
00:21:01.800They do what they can to basically buy peace.
00:21:05.140And in so doing, they validate the narrative that CMC, like all schools in America, is so deeply institutionally racist that it needs radical reform.
00:21:13.740Why do you think the administrations are so craven in the face of these?
00:21:18.840What clearly, I think, would take 15 minutes to assess are moral panics.