#440： The 3 Great Untruths That Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
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Summary
Greg Lukianoff is the President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, a book that argues that a culture of safetyism is ruining the process of maturation.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. If you haven't been
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living under a rock, you've likely seen headlines about the tumultuous atmosphere on many college
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campuses in the United States, which primarily centers around what is and isn't okay to say or
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express. The interesting thing is not too long ago, it was the students who were protesting against
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the administration for placing controls on free speech. But a few years ago, my guests noticed that
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things had gotten flipped. The students had started protesting that administrators weren't
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doing enough to limit speech. What's going on here? Well, my guest explores the answer to that
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question in a book he co-authored with Jonathan Haidt entitled The Coddling of the American Mind,
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How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. His name is Greg Lukianoff,
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and he's the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Today on the show,
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Greg tries to explain what's going on in college campuses with the trigger warnings, microaggression,
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protests, and sometimes violent clashes between social justice warriors and far-right provocators.
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He argues that there are three great untruths that have become woven into childhood and education
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that are leading the rising generation astray. Greg gets into where these untruths come from and how
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they're creating a culture of safetyism that's not only affecting intellectual discourse, but the
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normal process of maturation. If you're looking for some thoughtful, non-polemical insights about
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some of the craziness you see going on at college campuses, this episode's for you. After the show's
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over, check out the show notes at aom.is slash coddling, C-O-D-D-L-I-N-G. Greg joins me now via clearcast.io.
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All right, Greg Lukianoff, welcome to the show.
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So you co-authored a book with Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist or professor. Is that what you
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A professor of ethics, actually, at a business at NYU Stern Business School.
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Okay. But he delves into psychology and you guys don't.
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Oh, yeah. No, he's a PhD in psychology. He's a famous psychologist.
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Right. But you guys came out with a book, The Coddling of the American Mind, How Good
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Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. What was the impetus behind this
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book? Because this started originally as an Atlantic article.
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And it got a lot of, you know, it got passed around a lot. What was the impetus behind the
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Well, that's really, frankly, kind of a long story. But it starts with me working on college
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campuses as a defender of First Amendment and freedom of speech going back to shortly after
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I got out of law school in 2001. And for almost my entire career, the most pro-free speech
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constituency on campus were the students themselves. They seemed to be more or less telling administrators,
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even professors, you know, lighten up kind of like that you're not in constant threat.
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That you should be able to tolerate, you know, jokes that might be racy, et cetera, et cetera.
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And it was sometime around 2013 and 2014, we noticed a real marked change. And the students
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were suddenly the ones who were pushing the most forcefully for speech codes and for disinvitations
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and for trigger warnings and, you know, like new speech codes in the form of sort of like
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microaggression programs. And that was a real shift. And it seemed to happen.
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Almost overnight in 2013. And this led me back to something that I'd been thinking about for years,
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which I've had issues with depression and anxiety pretty much my whole life. And the thing that
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really saved me was something called cognitive behavioral therapy. And it's basically like
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applied stoicism. You look at the really exaggerated voices in your head that tell you,
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oh my God, I'm going to die in a situation where it's just a bad date, you know,
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and you get in the habit of actually answering back with that's irrational. We would basically
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naming these things as cognitive distortions and moving on. And I'd been making the argument for
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a while that it seems like we were teaching in generation, the habits of anxious and depressed
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people. Good thing the students aren't listening. But then sometime around 2013 and 2014, we started
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seeing this kind of exaggerated sense of danger, this overgeneralization labeling, all these things
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that are called cognitive distortions in cognitive therapy, being mouthed by students as if they were
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positive, not negative intellectual habits. So that led me to talk to John Haidt, who I already knew
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because we have a weird position in the culture war, given the books we write. He really liked the idea
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of writing an article about how you could sort of shine a light on what's going on on campuses
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using CBT as sort of a lens. And it was a very popular article. It was the second most read cover
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story in the history of the Atlantic at the time. We were, you know, really pleasantly surprised by
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it. And kind of, you know, we're like, Oh, that's good. Our job is done. Let's go back to our regular
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day jobs. But all the problems we talked about in that 2015 article just seemed to get worse over the
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years. And we after a little while, we decided that we're going to need to write a book about it.
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Right. So I mean, I think everyone has heard of, you know, the microaggressions and the trigger
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warnings. We actually had Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning on the podcast. Oh, yeah, yeah.
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A while back ago, discussing their theory about this rise of victimhood culture.
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But besides that, I mean, what are some of the examples? I mean, because you guys point out a
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lot of examples of these kind of cognitive distortions that are going on on campus, like
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in there. I mean, it's it's kind of scary. I mean, you think it's like this is like the onion,
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like, is this really happening? So what are some like, I mean, I guess we can talk about the extreme
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examples, because they're funny, but like on maybe some like not so extreme ones, but are still
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troubling. Well, one thing I always like to caveat is to say that I see these these things as
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problems of progress. I wrote a short book called Freedom from Speech back in 2014.
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And I talk about these kind of problems as problems that get bad partially because other
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things are getting better, like obesity, you know, like is a problem caused by having too
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much access to calories. And I think some of the anxiety that we're seeing is having too
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much, you know, time to sort of fixate on, in some cases, smaller problems. But also it's
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made worse by the fact that we can increasingly live in communities that that are more politically
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homogeneous than they used to be. We can, you know, be on cyber communities that are
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exclusively people who already 100% agree with us. And all of these things that if you looked at
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them from the point of, say, like 1974, you'd be like, wow, that actually sounds like a pretty cool
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future. They have real downsides and they can make people more partisan. They make can make people
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more polarized. They can make people more anxious. Gotcha. But yeah, some of these, I mean, some of the
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things people have probably seen in their Facebook feed showing a protest at college where there's like
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the heckler's veto where, you know, speakers who were invited get booed out and taunted. I think
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there's one really bad one where some lady got her hair pulled and she had a concussion. I mean,
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some really like some pretty scary stuff. The book, you know, definitely, I think the mood of the book
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changes very much depending on what part you're in. We tried to open it with sort of like a light
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opening to not make the book feel quite so heavy and to give people a little sense of distance from some
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of the problems we're talking about. But as you get towards the middle of the book, we cover in
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some, in a great amount of detail, some of these really kind of scary cases that have happened on
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different college campuses. We went into depth, for example, in the Milo riots. When Milo Yiannopoulos
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tried to speak at Berkeley, there were riots at UC Berkeley. And I don't really care what people
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think of, think of Milo, but watching the videos and getting testimonies from people who are actually
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there. And by the way, our chief researcher, Pamela Paretsky, did some real original reporting on this.
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It was amazing the stuff that she uncovered. It was way worse than I understood from just hearing about
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it secondhand. And those riots, they were very lucky that people didn't get killed. One of the people
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who was there, a lot of people were there not even because they liked Milo. They were just bystanders
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were assaulted, including someone, a young woman smashed in the face with a metal flagpole. Her
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husband right on the top of the head with the same pole, big pool of blood. They're really lucky nobody
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got killed during these things. And this was in response to something that they just as easily could
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have had a protest or even, you know, more radically, simply chosen not to attack.
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Right. Well, I think this is an important point you make that this is something that's happened
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relatively recently. So it's 2013. You really start seeing students being the ones like we want
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control on speech. Right. And I think that's a, and I thought that was an important point you make
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because I oftentimes when people see this stuff happening, they always like, oh, it's those
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millennials, those millennials in their, you know, avocado toast. Uh, they're saying, but like you point
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that this comes up. Well, you point this, this actually isn't the millennials. This is the generation
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after them. Right. Exactly. And to be fair to, you know, particularly the older listeners,
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this comes in waves. So certainly when you, when you think about the last moments and sort of
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protest violence on campus and student led violence on campus, that was the sixties and seventies. And it
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was much more severe than it is now. I mean, there were literally thousands of bombings across the
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country, mostly against property, thankfully enough, but you know, like it was really nuts. Some of the
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protests in the, in the end of the sixties and early seventies. And then of course, in the late eighties
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and early nineties, a lot of the, the sort of what would be later dubbed sort of like the political
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correctness movement and was really strong. But for most of my career, for most of the time,
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and most of my career has been dealing with millennial students. I think millennials get
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kind of a bad rap, but when it came to the main complaint that people had about them on campus was
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more apathy as opposed to activism in the name of, of censoring speech. But sometime around 2013,
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2014, something, it was almost like a switch was turned and things got a lot worse. And by 2015,
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while we, while we were happy to see a lot more, and this is after the article came out, almost like
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just a couple of months after the article came out, we saw nationwide protests on college campuses,
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which of course, you know, as a first amendment person, we were like, great, this is great.
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We're overcoming apathy. But the problem was that some of these protests and some of these
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protesters were also at the same time using their freedom of speech to demand new speech codes, to
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demand that professors be fired for their freedom of speech and for administrators. And as we talk
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about in the book in some, at some length, an administrator who really was trying to send a
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nice sort of well-meaning email, but didn't phrase it perfectly, you know, ends up getting chased out
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of a job. And so that puts, you know, those, the first amendment people like me in somewhat of a
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funny position because while we, sure, you have a freedom of speech right to oppose freedom of
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speech, we still think you're wrong. You have the right to say that, but we're definitely going to,
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going to disagree. And this, this really became much more intense around 2013 and 2014 and has kept
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on, kept on going since. And really, if you think about what the, what the book is all about is,
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is trying to get to the bottom of what changed, what, what was different about the class that started
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entering around 2013, 2014. Right. So this is this iGen. So I think,
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Twenge, which is a sociologist, she, you know, wrote that, came with the idea that these are
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iGeners. These are people who were born when the internet already existed. So they have not
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experienced the world without the internet. So there's that factor, but you...
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Well, really one of the major distinctions, because some millennials pretty much are that way too.
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Right. You know, at least they can't remember a time, but the, the big difference that Twenge points
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to is the fact that they all had the first generation that having a smartphone is really common.
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And the first generation, which being on social media started at a very early age.
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And Twenge notes the really dramatic rise in depression and anxiety and suicide, which has
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just happened in the past few years. There's graphs in the book that are really dramatic
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discontinuities of rates of suicide and anxiety and depression and self-reported mental illness.
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On campus. And she notes all of that, which would, you know, one of the reasons why we
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felt like we really needed to write the book was finding all that stuff out. But she puts most of
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the cause on social media. And our point is essentially, yeah, it seems like from the data,
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you can't really question social media plays a role, but it doesn't have enough explanatory power.
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Okay. Well, let's go into what you guys, what you all think is behind all this. So you say there's
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three untruths that have, that this generation, this, this generation of young people that it's
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taken hold of them. The first one is that what doesn't kill me makes me weaker. All right. So
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that's a playoff of Nietzsche, which he said, doesn't kill me, makes me stronger. So what is this
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idea? How did we go from what doesn't kill me makes me stronger to what doesn't kill me makes me
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weaker? You know, I see that as largely a problem of progress too. And the way we sort of encapsulate
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that idea is also by a term that also Pamela Bretzky coined when we were talking about trying
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to figure out what to give us a name that we call safetyism, that essentially safety is all well and
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good. And definitely, you know, we've made huge strides in childhood safety, for example, by being
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focused on real physical safety. But safetyism is when you treat it almost like a safe, when you treat
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safety itself almost like a sacred value. And where that gets even worse is if when you start
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watering down what safety means, not just to mean physical safety, but to mean, you know, a state of
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being emotionally unperturbed, essentially. And unfortunately on campuses in the past 10 years,
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we've seen a lot more acceptance of people using the words safe that I feel, I feel or don't feel safe
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to simply mean I feel somewhat uncomfortable. And we point out that this is, this is playing,
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to forgive a pun for the name of my organization, which is FIRE, but this is playing with FIRE as
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fun because it creates a situation where you are sort of conflating a real danger with simple
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emotional discomfort. But that's a kind of predictable outcome if you let the concept creep
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all the way into, you know, am I in physical danger to am I uncomfortable?
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Right. So yeah, this concept creep, that was interesting too. Besides safety, moving from just
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being physically safe to emotionally safe, there's other places concept creep has crept in, right?
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So the idea of violence, right? Violence used to be like, okay, it's just physical. Someone punches
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you, that's violence. But now speech, speech is violent.
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Yeah. The whole, we've seen my whole career, there's always been someone trying to say,
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you know, speech is violence. And that's been an argument that people have returned to over and over
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again. And, but the thing that's funny to me is not the novelty of the idea that speech is violence,
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is that the people who act like this is a new concept don't seem to get that for most of human
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history, speech was treated as violence. And what I mean by that is most of human history, you'd get
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your, you'd get beheaded, you'd get burned at the stake, you'd get, you'd be forced to drink hemlock,
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you'd be crucified, for saying things that were, that went against sort of public morality against,
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that were considered blasphemous, which was generally just sort of the norms of the community.
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Censorship and believing that words are also just another form of violence is the norm in human
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history. And so when people point out that the distinction between speech and violence is just
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an invention, I'm like, well, it is an invention, but it's one of the best inventions civilization has
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cooked up. Because once you'd accept that basically you're, you're essentially allowed to have any
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opinion you want, and I'm not going to kill you or arrest you for what your, what your opinion is
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and, and draw a bright line distinction between speech and violence, you actually create a wonderful
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opportunity for a pluralistic society that's peaceful and rational and figures things out. And
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there have been, you know, even pretty well-educated advocates now in the past couple of years
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advocating for this. We must understand hurtful or hateful speech is also being a form of violence
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who don't get that they're really channeling this ancient, ancient urge to censor those who we don't
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really like. Yeah. I never thought about that. That's an interesting point. And I think it makes
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sense because, you know, going back to that whole idea of trigger warnings, microaggressions, you know,
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those guys talked about how we've gone through sort of three phases of morality. First, it was honor
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culture and right, right. And an honor culture, like words are violence, right? If someone says
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something about you that offends you or hurts your reputation, like you could, if you wanted,
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kill them, right? That was acceptable. And then we moved to a dignity culture.
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And that was that. So cultures of honor, you know, they play well in movies, you know, but you don't
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particularly want to live in a time when dueling is kind of expected. And so I'm definitely a lot of,
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you know, first amendment people are cultures of dignity people, which essentially the idea of culture of
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dignity, you know, to really boil it down is essentially that we're kind of on our own.
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It's up for us to, we can't resort to violence in dealing with each other. We have to figure out
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ways to cooperate, collaborate, or choose not to do any of those above. Violence is not the,
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not an option, but generally you try to handle things one-on-one and you appeal to power and
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authority minimally. The difference that we talk about in the book that Bradley and Campbell talk about
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is when you get to moral dependency, or essentially you're, you see authorities role as an
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intermediary between you and practically everybody else to resolve all conflicts that come up.
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And there's a lot of things to be really worried about when you create a culture of moral dependency,
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because that's really how you end up with a, with a desire for a strong man or a dictator or all
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these other anti-democratic approaches to problem solving.
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And so, yeah. And also you point out in this whole section, this idea that that which doesn't
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kill me makes me weaker. That idea actually, I mean, they think they're making themselves safer
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by having safe spaces, by limiting microaggressions, et cetera. But like in the end, you just make
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Yeah. It's interesting. A lot of people don't know the self-fulfilling prophecy is actually a term
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that even psychologists use to talk about, you know, problems you can create by believing you have a
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problem. And that's something that I really want to emphasize is, you know, like sometimes when
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people say that we're creating all this anxiety and depression that people are, you know, this is
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just, you know, quote unquote, just in people's heads. But if you're told your whole life that you,
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you're not competent, that you need an authority for you to take care of you, that by the way,
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if you hear something that's really offensive, you're going to be injured forever. And if, and if you
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experience trauma, you will never really recover from that, which I think is a message we're
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essentially telling to some students without, hopefully, hopefully without meaning to, it's
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incredibly disempowering for one, but it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You end up having
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people who believe at their core that, that essentially they're much more fragile than we
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have any actual reason to believe that they are. But it's only, it's sufficient that you believe that.
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And it's only sufficient that you believe that to actually become someone who is, is, is in effect
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All right. We'll, we'll talk about later on, like what, what's going on there, why kids these
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days think they're vulnerable and fragile, but let's get to the next untruth. The other one is
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the untruth of always trusting your feelings. How has that led us astray?
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That's one of the ones that, that sounds the most appealing to the, to, you know, for people who
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like movies or whoever romantic streak is what's, what's wrong with always trusting your feelings.
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But when you think about it a little bit more, you think about all the sort of either anxious or
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angry impulses that you have. Some of them, you know, there's a great social psychologist,
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Susan David, who came up with a great way to think of this. Emotions are information.
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They're not directions. So just immediately doing whatever your feelings tell you is a formula for
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not a great life and just being sort of dragged by your teeth through life.
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But it's also a formula for, you know, anxiety and depression as well. So, you know, when we talk
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about this, this is really where we get most back to these, to the theories we had in the Atlantic
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article, where we talk about cognitive behavioral therapy and why you shouldn't engage in emotional
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reasoning. And this is something that, that is just a fact, but nonetheless, people find sometimes
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jarring when you, when you practice CBT is just remembering sometimes when you think you're in
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danger, you're not. Sometimes when you feel like you're, you're, you're under threat, you're not.
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Sometimes when you're, when you think someone's out to get you, they're not. And part of the,
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you know, great philosophic tradition, one of the great sort of therapeutic traditions is being able
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to talk back to these feelings, to interact with them and question yourselves, you know, is this
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rational? Does this make any sense? But if you look at some of the ways we argue both now on and off
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campus, it's all emotional reasoning. It's basically saying the most important thing is that I feel
00:21:25.600
this and therefore it's true. And meanwhile, you know, it sounds cold hearted, but I end up having to say
00:21:30.620
a lot, you know, being offended is an emotional state. It is a statement of an emotional state.
00:21:35.280
It's not an argument of itself. Right. So some of these like distortions you talk about,
00:21:39.720
because we've had psychology specialize in CBT on, we've talked about some of the distortions,
00:21:43.240
like catastrophizing. Sure. Is one, I mean, how has that manifest itself with these,
00:21:47.680
these college kids on campuses? Well, catastrophizing is one of those ones that I first pinpointed on
00:21:52.800
campus over and over again, coming from administrators before I felt like students were really catching on to
00:21:57.760
this. But these are, you see these insane arguments sometimes made by campus administrators.
00:22:03.040
I remember one case in which an administrator was trying to argue with a straight face against
00:22:07.360
being allowed to carry protest signs on campus because they could be used as, as like axes and
00:22:13.880
weapons, you know, for example. And it's like, in what world are students going around using their
00:22:21.660
signs like battle axes, you know, climbing up people's heads? This is catastrophizing.
00:22:26.420
And sometimes it's done disingenuously to sort of get your way. But we had another case where,
00:22:31.400
definitely look in the book for this one, but a professor posted a picture of his daughter
00:22:36.720
wearing a t-shirt with a quote from Game of Thrones, which is something like, I will take what
00:22:41.560
is mine with fire and blood. And they suspended the professor because a administrator at that college
00:22:47.640
argued that that was essentially a threat because the fire in the quote on the t-shirt could mean the
00:22:54.240
fire lit of AK-47s. That's actually what the administrator referred to as opposed to, you know,
00:23:00.100
as opposed to the fire of the dragons, you know, in Game of Thrones. So catastrophizing is really easy
00:23:06.800
to see that essentially, you know, it's the sky is falling kind of mentality that makes small hills
00:23:12.620
Right. And there's also black and white thinking.
00:23:15.040
That's mine. What I mean by mine, I mean, when I talk about going through cognitive behavioral
00:23:21.180
therapy myself, my wife thinks it's very funny that like, you know, I have a tendency to see
00:23:27.900
things as either all or nothing, zero, you know, binary, zero or one. And that's something that I
00:23:32.840
really have to, you know, convince myself out of. Like it's either all good or all bad. Not that I
00:23:37.360
actually intellectually believe that, but it's the cognitive distortion that I'm kind of the most prone
00:23:41.680
to either this night's going to be great or it's going to be a failure. Honestly, most nights are
00:23:47.620
Right. Right. And, but like you see this manifest on campus where people are like this person,
00:23:51.620
like if this person comes and speaks, like people are going to die.
00:23:56.180
Sure. Well, you know, like that's kind of catastrophizing in black and white.
00:24:00.140
Yeah. Well, and that's something that when you see people arguing for against commencement speakers,
00:24:05.520
for example, you know, they will sometimes make very legitimate arguments about why they don't like
00:24:10.480
a particular particular speaker, but they, you know, they make it sound like people will lose
00:24:15.920
their humanity if, you know, Bill Maher shows up on campus to tell some jokes. And I find this
00:24:21.320
particularly inappropriate when people talk about commencement speakers, because, you know,
00:24:25.200
let's take someone who you can understand why people find her controversial. Condoleezza Rice,
00:24:30.540
the Iraq war, very controversial. I understand and defend people's right to protest her. But at the same
00:24:36.440
time, you know, not being able to realize that someone who grew up in, you know, Jim Crow,
00:24:41.960
Alabama, who became the provost of Stanford could have something interesting to say at a commencement
00:24:48.940
speech. You know, I'd be interested to hear what she has to say, but both due to polarization and
00:24:54.700
also due to this kind of binary thinking, it's like either you're good or evil. And if you're in my evil
00:24:59.260
camp, of course, nothing good could come from listening to you.
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00:27:05.760
Right. I mean, something, yeah, it's funny, like, you know, understanding how to talk back to your
00:27:10.560
emotions, that's part of becoming like resilient, mentally healthy. Like one thing I've done with my son,
00:27:17.680
you know, because kids, like their prefrontal cortex is still developing. So they do a lot of
00:27:21.400
emotional thinking. So I always tell my son, like, look, you got a dog brain, and you got a human
00:27:25.980
brain. Like your human brain is still weak. And so whenever you feel upset, like that's your dog
00:27:31.040
brain, and you got to tell your human brain to like, hey, everything's okay.
00:27:35.040
Right. Yeah. Learning how to talk back to your own ideas and your own emotions is, I think,
00:27:40.600
crucial part of maturation and also of mental health. But the reason why I'm such an advocate of
00:27:45.140
CBT, even beyond the realm of therapy, is because if you look at the list of cognitive distortions,
00:27:50.280
they're also just good rules to live by when it comes to arguing with everyone else. You know,
00:27:55.940
should you be overgeneralizing? Should you be labeling? Should you be catastrophizing? If you
00:28:00.800
want to have like a serious discussion about stuff, and the answer is no. And if we actually,
00:28:05.720
if we as a nation decided to look at the list of cognitive distortions and say to ourselves,
00:28:10.340
you know what, I'm probably going to stop myself before I make this overgeneralization,
00:28:14.300
we, I think we'd be living in a much saner society at the moment.
00:28:18.640
The next untruth is the untruth of us versus them. How is this playing? I mean, I think we all know
00:28:23.480
how this is playing out because we see it in our social media feeds.
00:28:26.180
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So the first, in a lot of ways, the book itself is sort of an extension
00:28:31.780
and going much deeper into some of the ideas we talked about in the 2015 article.
00:28:36.100
But one of the ones that makes it really different is the third great untruth,
00:28:40.120
us versus them. Because the, the, one of the aspects we added to it and went very deeply into
00:28:45.300
in the book was how much polarization makes things so much worse that essentially we have
00:28:50.800
kind of given into our tribal instincts. And like, as I said earlier, since we live increasingly
00:28:56.260
in communities that don't have as much viewpoint diversity, people get much more tribal and,
00:29:01.220
and it creates a very sort of black and white good versus evil. Once again, also binary thinking
00:29:05.620
approach. And what we've seen happen just in the past year or two is that the, you, you've seen
00:29:12.500
this kind of play out on campuses over the years, you know, particularly if you look at, you know,
00:29:16.720
like I said, disinvitation lists or what professors can get in trouble for, but you also have sort of
00:29:21.180
like the sort of alt-right echo chamber. And it was almost like there was a collision between the
00:29:25.800
two just in the past, past two years. And it's unsurprisingly, it's pretty ugly.
00:29:30.680
Right. I mean, you talk about the alt-right and, you know, a lot of, when people see this stuff
00:29:34.340
on campus is usually people who would, they would describe as SJWs, social justice warriors.
00:29:39.980
But what's interesting, like you kind of talk about the book, these two groups, the SJWs and
00:29:44.260
the alt-right, they're sort of like the two sides of the same coin, right? Like, you know,
00:29:48.840
the alt-right also takes parts in these like mental distortions where it's all or nothing or
00:29:53.780
everything's, everything's terrible. And so these two things collide and it's just like, it's
00:29:58.620
bad. I don't know. It's just craziness happens.
00:30:00.660
Yeah. The most recent trend, and we have almost a whole chapter about this,
00:30:04.340
in the book that's about polarization, but is of more left-leaning professors saying
00:30:09.120
something on Twitter or Facebook or going on Fox News and getting death threats in some
00:30:15.220
cases, getting fired in others. And the most recent case is a professor, Jim Livingston at
00:30:21.140
Rutgers, who was visiting Harlem. Like a lot of New Yorkers complained about gentrification
00:30:27.080
and complained about some white teenagers he thought were acting like jerks. So he did a little
00:30:31.100
bit of an angry rant. And this is a white guy in Harlem arguing about gentrification in
00:30:35.880
Harlem. And he was found guilty by Rutgers of racial harassment against whites for his
00:30:42.020
privately complaining about gentrification in Harlem. And the, we want people to understand
00:30:48.980
that what's happening now is kind of like this next level where it was bad enough when you could
00:30:54.320
get in trouble for what you said in class when it was just students coming from one side of the
00:30:58.200
spectrum. And certainly we wanted to end that. But now it seems like you're running a gauntlet
00:31:02.740
between these two different extremes. And if the social justice-minded students hear you,
00:31:08.180
you're in trouble. And if this gets out into the conservative blogosphere, you're in trouble. So
00:31:13.700
what exactly are we allowed to say on campus now?
00:31:16.380
Right. Well, it's not even on campus sometimes. It's just something you said privately.
00:31:20.440
Oh, right. Yeah. Well, and that's something that in my short book, Freedom from Speech,
00:31:23.400
which I wrote back in 2014, I was already getting concerned about, even though it's not a First
00:31:29.360
Amendment issue, there is something kind of troubling about people getting fired for something
00:31:34.700
they wrote on Facebook or some nominally private activity or joke getting revealed. And we also,
00:31:44.040
I'm an executive producer of a movie called Can We Take a Joke?, which is comedians talking about how
00:31:49.720
the call-out culture we see on the internet makes comedy difficult. And there's just countless
00:31:54.760
examples of people losing jobs or getting in trouble for things that they thought were funny
00:31:59.740
at the time. Well, let's talk about it. Besides making comedy harder, this whole call-out culture
00:32:05.700
that happens on campuses, it makes thinking about really hard issues much more difficult because you
00:32:11.560
have to be careful that you don't do the wrong study or say the wrong... Oh, yeah.
00:32:16.160
But that gets in the way of advancements in learning about different ideas.
00:32:21.760
Yeah. One of the reasons why the book got a little bit delayed when we released it
00:32:26.480
is because we kept on getting additional examples of horror stories added and more and more added each
00:32:33.620
day. And the chapter on professors really changed as we were writing the book, partially because we saw
00:32:40.980
some really horrible stories about the treatment of different professors for publishing articles that
00:32:46.920
were controversial. And my guess is probably would have been barely controversial maybe five or ten
00:32:52.920
years ago. But for example, we talk about the case of Rebecca Tuvel, a well-respected, well-meaning
00:32:58.540
philosophy professor. And she wrote an article talking about if we accept the idea of transsexuality,
00:33:06.160
what does that mean for someone who thinks of themselves as transracial, who actually has an
00:33:10.400
identity that's... What does that mean? Can these two ideas be rectified? And it was a thoughtful
00:33:15.720
article on a provocative topic. And she was treated very much like a heretic. It's a really kind of
00:33:21.600
depressing story because she even relates, or at least I don't know if she related it, but we find out
00:33:26.800
that some of the people who signed letters condemning her and demanding that the publication withdraw her
00:33:32.720
article, which I think they actually did, would write her privately and say, listen, I'm so sorry
00:33:38.800
this is happening to you. And it's like, that's awful. And right around the same time, there was
00:33:43.280
a professor who wrote a... And you can understand why this would be controversial, but he wrote a
00:33:48.000
defense of colonialism, partially as a provocative on purpose. So with the idea that kind of like,
00:33:54.840
this is a really unpopular argument. Let's do what professors do best. Let's actually make an
00:33:59.060
argument for the indefensible as far as academia is concerned. And the professor withdrew the article
00:34:06.440
and the journal talked about just getting death threats for an academic article published on an
00:34:11.600
academic topic, which one of the things we've been talking about is that retraction has become the
00:34:16.840
new rebuttal. There's other ways other than death threats and demanding that that article not be
00:34:21.520
published that you can deal with arguments you dislike. But in a situation of moral dependency,
00:34:25.680
the argument is the person in charge has to put an end to this.
00:34:30.340
Right. I mean, you think like, that's the whole point of like science, of research is you might have
00:34:36.080
to test controversial ideas and you expect other people to rebut you and say why you're wrong and
00:34:40.380
not just shut it down. And then also, you know, I mean, I think it's weird too, because like when I
00:34:44.800
went to college, like I went to college expecting I'd have my viewpoints challenged. It sounds like
00:34:50.480
young people, like they're, that's not their, that's not what they're, that they don't go to
00:34:55.100
college with it. They want to go to college to have their ideas reinforced or kept safe.
00:35:00.680
Well, you know, I'm sure there are plenty of young people who go, who would like to have
00:35:05.260
in some of their beliefs challenged. But as, you know, Nassim Taleb has even pointed out
00:35:09.220
mathematically, it only takes a relatively vocal minority of students who feel very strongly about
00:35:14.240
a minority of people in any situation to sort of shift over the people who, you know,
00:35:19.120
don't feel that strongly one way or another over to their side. And we don't really know if this
00:35:25.420
is a problem of a, you know, a vocal minority, illiberal group of people, or if it's more
00:35:32.580
widespread. But we do know that it just isn't in some cases to really create a intolerant atmosphere.
00:35:42.600
Right. So let's talk about how we got here. So what, what we talked about smartphones as one of
00:35:48.760
the things that, that access to smartphones, one of the big differences between say millennials and
00:35:53.220
this iGen, what else has changed? Like what else was different about iGen and the way they were
00:35:58.120
raised that would give them, you know, these cognitive distortions like that life is either
00:36:02.000
black or white, you know, thinking that the worst things could possibly happen to you if you don't
00:36:09.320
Yeah, that's actually, you know, what the real heart of the book is trying to figure out these other
00:36:13.720
explanatory threads, because we definitely think social media plays a role. We think it plays a
00:36:18.840
role in the increase in anxiety and depression for younger people and for, you know, across the
00:36:24.180
country in general. But we also talk about, as we've already mentioned, polarization. And it is worse
00:36:29.600
than it was. It's not just in people's heads that polarization has gotten worse within the past
00:36:34.840
several decades. It shows up very strongly in the data. There were scholars who were looking at the
00:36:40.360
data, you know, and I think they still sometimes interpret this way, who were trying to say there's
00:36:45.060
nothing really to see here, because when it came to voting issues, Americans were not quite as
00:36:50.420
polarized as people thought, that actually there was a surprising amount of agreement on any number
00:36:55.660
of voting issues. But really, if you want to check out what polarization means, you have to look at how
00:37:02.700
intensely they hold those views and how much they dislike people who disagree with them. That's what
00:37:07.720
polarization really is. It's not about the issues per se. It's about how much you dislike the heretic.
00:37:14.220
And some of the interesting studies show that, you know, whereas once upon a time, people would be
00:37:19.160
the most hostile to their children dating someone of a different race or religion, now they're the
00:37:24.840
most hostile to the idea of someone dating someone from the other party. This is, you know,
00:37:28.980
Cass Sunstein dubbed this partyism. The polarization really has gotten worse. So that's one thread.
00:37:34.140
Paranoid parenting, we have a whole chapter on that. And, you know, it's kind of like it sounds.
00:37:39.560
And we're mostly talking about the parents of the kind of kids who go to college and particularly
00:37:45.700
elite colleges. But the intensification of helicopter parenting over the past couple decades is something
00:37:53.740
that we hear from practically every expert we talk to. We have a great interview with Julie
00:37:58.040
Lithgow Hames in the book. She wrote a book called How to Raise an Adult. And she comes at it from being
00:38:04.440
the dean of freshmen at Stanford and watching this kind of rapid progression from students very rarely
00:38:10.700
showing up with their parents to almost all of them showing up on the first day with their parents.
00:38:15.820
And that their parents continuing to have sort of a daily decision-making power in those students'
00:38:22.500
lives, which is really not good if you think about what you're trying to develop for students,
00:38:27.540
which is a sense of independence, a sense of locus of control, of being able to have autonomy over
00:38:33.700
their own lives, which also goes a long way to explain, you know, some of the anxiety and depression
00:38:38.580
and catastrophizing. That essentially, if you're not used to handling things on your own, everything
00:38:43.400
looks like a catastrophe. One of the most interesting explanatory threads we talk about in it is the
00:38:49.340
decline of free play. We have a whole chapter on the importance of play in which children direct
00:38:55.440
themselves and with minimal, if not no adult involvement. Stuff that all of us kind of took
00:39:02.400
for granted growing up. But it actually turns out that if you deprive kids of unstructured free play
00:39:08.800
time, it can harm everything from their psychological outlook to their creativity. And in researching this
00:39:15.580
book and some of the people we talked to, that was the finding that kind of screamed the most at me
00:39:20.760
because I read, you know, a lot of books about this. And Erica Christakis' book, The Importance of
00:39:25.380
Being Little, really hits you over the head with this. And I'm like, wow, so if we know that free
00:39:29.540
time and free play is so essential to developing strong, independent, resilient kids, why the hell
00:39:34.960
are we telling people, telling children, you know, what to do from 6 a.m. to the time they go to bed until
00:39:39.720
they get into Harvard? You know, it seems to be like the research and the practice are completely at
00:39:44.500
odds with each other. And it turns out they pretty much are. Yeah, we've had Lenore Skenazy on the
00:39:49.140
podcast talk about her free range kid stuff. And she highlights the same research. Kids are
00:39:54.500
playing this. I think it's kind of weird because, you know, iGen, I imagine these kids are the kids
00:40:00.020
of like Gen X parents primarily. And these are like the latchkey kids in the 70s when like crime was high
00:40:06.480
and they were out like on their BMX bikes, you know, playing with rusty nails. I don't know.
00:40:12.260
But like for some reason, I guess they're like, I don't want my kids to have that childhood. So
00:40:16.700
I'm going to just take care of them extra. Well, I tried to, you know, figure this out myself
00:40:22.280
because, you know, I started working in a restaurant when I was 11. I have all sorts of like childhood
00:40:26.820
neglect kind of horror stories, but some of them are, you know, happy, funny stories as far as I'm
00:40:30.940
concerned. But in researching and trying to be sort of compassionate, understanding where it was
00:40:35.620
coming from, I realized that, you know, those of us who were around before 1993, we were around
00:40:43.220
during a time where it was a pretty safe bet that murder, the murder rate was going to go up almost
00:40:47.100
every year. Things were getting worse. And it did in terms of murder rate pretty consistently from
00:40:52.900
about the late 1950s to about 1992, 93, depending on what city you're in. And so there were reasons
00:41:00.500
for why in the upbringing of these kids that their parents, you know, could actually, having not
00:41:06.940
adjusted their model to a much safer reality we live in now, could be understandably more paranoid.
00:41:13.400
But so there's some glimmer of sort of the way you were brought up could actually have some
00:41:18.420
influence on why parents would actually be more paranoid. But the things that really kick this stuff
00:41:22.920
into high gear is social pressure. That once it becomes kind of a value, once you have safety of
00:41:28.640
some sort of in place, you're suddenly the bad mom or dad, if you don't act like you're completely
00:41:34.380
obsessed with safety, and it kind of spirals out of control. But the scariest stuff of all is the
00:41:39.080
fact that, you know, people sometimes get arrested for letting their kids play in the in the playground
00:41:45.900
while they're at work, for example, for letting their kids walk home. Lenore actually also appears
00:41:51.000
quite a bit in the book, we did some great interviews with her, and she's a friend of ours as well.
00:41:54.980
And the, if you've reached the stage where people are actually getting arrested for doing stuff that
00:42:00.820
we took for granted, any kid should be allowed to do when we were kids, you have to start there,
00:42:07.700
and then make sure people aren't getting arrested for it. But then also empower students, empower
00:42:13.680
parents to realize there are other parents who think like you and, you know, former free range kids
00:42:18.260
association and make sure your kids can go out and play.
00:42:22.260
So let's recap. So this, this lack of unstructured play, the helicopter parenting, I mean, it sounds
00:42:27.360
like what that does is it doesn't allow kids to develop that human brain, their prefrontal cortex,
00:42:33.140
right? So they don't, they don't have to make choices that manage where they have to manage risk
00:42:38.260
on their own. They basically rely on their parents for that. And that's where we bring in the whole
00:42:43.480
locus of control idea that essentially the research is pretty strong on this and it makes perfect sense
00:42:48.120
that if you feel like you have no control over your own life, that's a formula for anxiety and
00:42:54.160
depression. And it even turns out that giving, you know, people in elderly homes and facilities,
00:43:00.120
even giving relatively small choices over regarding their daily lives and, you know, the art that's in the
00:43:05.800
room and that kind of stuff really improves people's sense of happiness and well-being.
00:43:09.720
So obviously if you make, you know, a 22 year old feel like that they can't have much control over
00:43:15.740
their own life or for that matter, even a 14 year old, you're really undermining their ability to feel
00:43:22.560
Right. I think it was interesting. So I think, uh, you know, iGen and one issue that's been really big for
00:43:32.220
Which makes sense. Like school shootings are terrible, but I remember after the one in, was it Parkland?
00:43:37.420
Like there was a kid in high school, you know, he's probably 16 and he was like, we're children.
00:43:42.840
Like we shouldn't have to deal with that. And I remember like he heard that. I was like, man,
00:43:45.920
when I was 16, I never would have been like, I'm a kid. Take care of me. I'm like, I'm, I'm 16. I can
00:43:51.640
drive. I got a job. Like I never would have thought of myself as a kid. I think it's, I mean,
00:43:56.840
it's a kind of an interesting shift in mindset maybe between generations.
00:44:00.880
It is a, it is a flipping mindset. And I have seen a lot more of students kind of thinking
00:44:05.300
themselves in a, in a younger way than we would have when we were 15 or 16. But it also does come
00:44:09.700
to the fact that, you know, when people ask, you know, more or less is all of this sort of
00:44:14.460
political outrage all in their heads. It's like, well, actually, you know, of course, when I was a
00:44:19.960
kid, we weren't seeing, you know, semi-regular videos of unarmed, you know, black people being
00:44:25.900
shot by police, you know, or, or, or choked or, or whatever. So partially due to social media,
00:44:31.820
we're a lot more aware of some of the stuff that's out there and school shootings, you know,
00:44:35.680
are terrifying that as far as just even no matter how much you tell people about stats,
00:44:41.020
you know, since I grew up in near Newtown, Connecticut, it doesn't change the fact that
00:44:45.440
you still as a, and I'm a, I'm a recent parent myself that you're like, wow, that was school.
00:44:50.520
Someone came and attacked little kids, you know, with, with, with guns is something that really
00:44:55.260
can kind of mess with your head. So we do try to do as much as we can to nod at, yeah, yeah.
00:44:59.880
We're not saying that everything's peachy and people should just get over it. But what we are
00:45:04.740
saying is no one is helped by some of these intellectually unhealthy habits that we, we've
00:45:11.140
developed. If you really want to address some of these problems, you're not going to be able to do
00:45:15.260
it if you're in a, in a constant state of panic. So what can, what can we do to mitigate this? And
00:45:20.920
it was like, what can colleges do? Do they, because this is hard for colleges because there's a lot of,
00:45:25.460
there's PR they have to handle, there's lawsuits. So like, what can they do about this?
00:45:32.240
And that's one of the factors that we have in there. There, there's completely non-ideological
00:45:35.860
factors, like whether or not they're feared of lawsuits or federal, federal regulations.
00:45:40.380
I am proud of the fact that we do have a section at the end when we talk about solutions. But one
00:45:44.860
thing I really wanted to stress of that in the solution section is we want people to read the book
00:45:48.800
and they want them to come, them to come to us with more solutions because we think that there are ways,
00:45:53.680
surprisingly, deceptively easy ways we can help at least ameliorate some of these problems,
00:45:58.860
you know? But when it comes to campuses, you know, there's a lot of throwing up people's hands
00:46:04.460
about, oh, you know, we've got this intolerance of students on campus and we've got this completely
00:46:09.380
unpleasable contingent off campus and it's all just, it's all just rotten. And, you know,
00:46:14.600
the instructions for university presidents might, are there easy to say, they might be hard to follow is,
00:46:19.200
you know, don't fire a professor in the face of an outrage mob. Get used to doing that. Because
00:46:25.140
the first time you break that rule, the next group that comes to you is going to be like,
00:46:29.300
but you fired this guy. Why won't you fire the next one? So really planting your feet firmly on
00:46:34.180
that. Adopt something like the Chicago Statement on Academic Freedom, you know, is a good way to start,
00:46:39.140
which you can find out more about in the book. And when people really lament about like the lack of
00:46:44.540
respect for free speech and academic freedom on campus, I'm like, so why don't we teach people
00:46:49.540
about that? Because if you look at the orientations at universities, we could find only one or maybe
00:46:56.760
two schools that spent some serious time talking about freedom of speech, academic freedom,
00:47:02.080
free inquiry, all of these, where frankly, although we may take them for granted, are actually pretty
00:47:07.100
sophisticated and in some ways counterintuitive concepts that someone needs to directly explain to
00:47:12.760
you. And if they don't actually get them, you can't complain if you've never actually explained
00:47:17.180
it to them. So like the easiest, you know, start way to start is actually start teaching some of
00:47:22.140
this stuff. Right. And I imagine it also, you know, professors have to kind of band together instead
00:47:28.060
of doing the whole call out thing. Or if they see a professor getting called out, like, don't just be
00:47:32.340
silent, try to defend them. Oh, yeah. And as far as something that has just been a huge disappointment
00:47:37.240
for me working on campus is, you know, in some cases, we're talking about tenured professors here,
00:47:43.460
and, you know, one of their colleagues might get in trouble for something that they, you know,
00:47:47.460
said in class or said outside of class, or a student, for that matter, might get in trouble.
00:47:53.060
And it's really rare that a tenured professor comes forward and say, enough is enough, no way,
00:47:58.500
my student should not be expelled for that. And you're barely, there's barely a more secure job
00:48:03.840
that exists in the country than a tenured professor. And it's, that's why it's so disappointing that
00:48:09.300
it can be so rare for tenured professors to take a stand in the name of free speech and academic
00:48:13.480
freedom, which is ironic, of course, because the justification for tenure was to defend academic
00:48:18.900
freedom. Now, there are notable exceptions. Of course, Alan Kors at Penn, who was one of the
00:48:24.700
founders of FIRE, you know, was always standing up for both the rights of professors, but also
00:48:29.160
importantly, the rights of students as well. And I think that groups like Heterodox Academy that
00:48:34.300
John Hyde helped start, my co-author, play an important role. FIRE has been engaging with
00:48:40.120
professors. More often, we actually have a annual conference with professors. And yeah, having each
00:48:44.920
other's back a little better can make a big difference.
00:48:49.780
Oh, yeah. There's an awful lot that parents can do.
00:49:00.260
So, in terms of what parents can do is, to me, the finding, the repeated findings that
00:49:07.200
free time and free play are really healthy for the development of kids should be greeted as not just
00:49:12.980
good news, but a good message for the lives and happiness of parents themselves. You know,
00:49:18.100
that essentially, in some ways, as we find time and time again, in some cases, doing less is actually
00:49:23.780
doing better. Not scheduling any minute of your kid's day. Making them achieving a sense of
00:49:29.880
independence is important. There's a great book called Actung Baby, which is about how Germans raise
00:49:34.980
their kids. And despite our stereotypes of Germany as a very authoritarian country, partially because,
00:49:42.880
actually largely because of its authoritarian past, the ethos in German parenting, at least as
00:49:48.320
described in this book, is that you really want to have independent, resilient kids, you know, who
00:49:54.300
are able to kind of take care of themselves, because they see that as a sort of a penance for
00:49:58.980
their Nazi past, but also a bulwark against authoritarianism of the future. And I think they have it
00:50:03.860
exactly right. This is a good way to defend your student's sense of resilience. And it's also,
00:50:08.260
not coincidentally, a way to help defend a free society. But probably the recommendation that we
00:50:15.240
came to just very naturally by the end of it was a cultural expectation of a gap year. And we don't
00:50:20.980
want this to be mandated or anything like that. But I do think that nothing can quite help students feel
00:50:27.600
like they have that locus of control, like they have that independence, like they have that judgment,
00:50:31.880
like having a year when you're not actually in school, where you're working a job, maybe in some
00:50:37.300
other part of the country, maybe in some other part of the world, but working a real job for a little
00:50:42.180
bit or having some kind of real life experience before you actually go into college. I think
00:50:49.540
Well, as I was reading this, I was thinking like, what do you do like when you encounter
00:50:54.640
one of these, you know, like, again, like, I think the point to make these people often like they're in
00:50:59.780
the minority, right? But because of social media, it can seem like everyone is like this. Everyone's
00:51:04.300
crazy. But what do you do when you encounter like a zealous ideologue online, or maybe in your own
00:51:10.240
family, maybe you've got a cousin or a nephew that, you know, they kind of taking part in this
00:51:16.320
distorted thinking? Should you even engage? Do you engage with them? Do you like, do you CBT on
00:51:21.360
them? Like, I think it's like, like, what do we do now with these people? Like when they, with this
00:51:25.580
conversation that's going on, it just seems crazy.
00:51:27.940
Honestly, it's always a, it always depends. The, it depends on how far gone someone is,
00:51:34.300
if they're actually willing to talk to you at all. But, you know, becoming a good listener as,
00:51:38.540
as lame as that may seem is pretty, it's a pretty good place to start. And, uh, you know, I
00:51:43.120
have a peculiar position in the culture war between sides that really hate each other.
00:51:48.600
And I've gotten used to being able to sometimes just turn off my opinions and try to come,
00:51:54.020
try to figure out where people are really coming from. And what's funny is when you look at sort
00:51:57.820
of, you know, people who might be more progressive on campus, they get why they should do that. If
00:52:02.720
they're in like a foreign country, but both my parents, my dad grew up in Yugoslavia and I used
00:52:06.960
to kind of piss off people at Stanford by explaining it this way. Listen, I, I know if I was explaining
00:52:12.780
like the culture that Serbs or Croatians have about different things, you would try to be
00:52:17.180
understanding and figure out where they were coming from. Why can't you try to do that for
00:52:20.620
people from Kansas? Why can't you try to do that for, you know, our Americans who come from
00:52:25.340
backgrounds that are different than yours. And so I think that we do that some of the people who
00:52:31.220
are the most zealous and the, and the most sort of morally absolutist do have some intellectual
00:52:35.920
habits that, that value things like empathy, just getting them to actually try to show that
00:52:41.680
for the Republican they disagree with honestly, and not just dismiss them as, as a stereotypical
00:52:49.020
monster. Well, Greg, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:52:53.260
Well, we have a website called thecoddling.com. We actually intentionally named it that way
00:52:58.660
to sound like a horror movie. Partially to kind of make a little bit of light of it. I think people
00:53:03.520
get really hung up on the title and it's an opportunity for us to say, you know, the coddling is
00:53:08.680
coming for your children. Like the blob is coming, but really what we're saying is something much
00:53:13.020
more nuanced than that. Well, Greg, thanks so much for coming on. It's been a great conversation.
00:53:16.600
My guest today was Greg Luhianoff. He's the co-author of the book, The Coddling of the American
00:53:20.200
Mind. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can also find more information
00:53:23.980
about the book at thecoddling.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash coddling.
00:53:28.900
We can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:53:43.680
Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,
00:53:48.100
make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. And if you enjoy
00:53:51.500
the show, you've gotten something out of it, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us
00:53:54.360
review on iTunes or Stitcher. Helps us out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please
00:53:58.100
consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of
00:54:01.180
it. As always, thank you for your continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay