The Ben Shapiro Show - Jonathan Haidt | The Ben Shapiro Sunday Special Ep. 22

00:00:00.000 If we want to be a light to the world, if we think that democracy and liberty are important virtues, we need to get our own house in order.

00:00:14.000 Well, here we are on the Sunday special with Professor Jonathan Haidt of NYU.

00:00:18.000 We're going to get to all of my questions about his brand new book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which he's written along with Greg Lukianoff over at FIRE.

00:00:24.000 We'll get to all that stuff, plus The Righteous Mind, all sorts of great stuff.

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00:01:29.000 Professor Haidt, thanks so much for stopping by.

00:01:30.000 This is really a pleasure.

00:01:32.000 So I want to start off by asking you sort of some off-the-beaten-track questions about your background.

00:01:37.000 I like to find out where people are coming from before we delve into their ideas.

00:01:41.000 So what exactly is your—you've become very politicized.

00:01:44.000 A lot of folks in politics are very interested in what you have to say.

00:01:47.000 Your books were first recommended to me by a high-ranking Republican official.

00:01:51.000 What is your political background?

00:01:52.000 Where do you stand politically, and how did you get there?

00:01:54.000 Well, I'm a totally stereotypical northeast Jewish liberal, you know, academic type.

00:02:00.000 That's my background.

00:02:02.000 I grew up hating, well, Richard Nixon when I was a little kid because I knew you were supposed to hate Nixon, and then Reagan.

00:02:09.000 I began studying cultural psychology in graduate school looking at how nations vary in their moral

00:02:15.000 In their moral worldviews.

00:02:17.000 And then as the, when the Democrats lost in 2000, and then again in 2004, I began, I was very upset, and I said, I can't stand it that the Democrats don't know how to talk about morality, and I can help them.

00:02:31.000 And so I started converting my research over, my research from how countries vary, to how left and right vary.

00:02:38.000 Because by then, left and right in this country were becoming like different countries with 0.93

00:02:42.000 Different U.S.

00:02:43.000 history and even different constitutions.

00:02:47.000 And so I committed to understanding conservatives so that I could help explain conservative morality.

00:02:52.000 And in the course of reading conservative and libertarian philosophy and ideas, I realized, oh my God, you actually have to look at problems from different perspectives to understand them.

00:03:02.000 Over time, I kind of stepped out.

00:03:04.000 We can talk about the Republican Party later.

00:03:07.000 I have very little good to say about the Republican Party.

00:03:11.000 I no longer identify as being on any team.

00:03:13.000 I study moral psychology, I'm a social scientist, and I think as a social psychologist, if you're doing social science, it's really helpful to not be on a team, to have the independence to just try to study problems.

00:03:24.000 So that's my background.

00:03:25.000 So as a precursor to discussing some of the issues you discussed in The Coddling of the American Mind, I think it's almost necessary to talk about your earlier book, The Righteous Mind.

00:03:32.000 Because that sort of provides the intellectual framework for what you talk about in the new book.

00:03:36.000 So I wanted to ask you some questions about where that... So to fill in folks who may not have read the book, you make an argument that there are a bunch of different moral axes along which people work.

00:03:44.000 That people don't just work along the idea of good and bad, that this breaks down into a number of different categories, and that left and right see these categories differently.

00:03:51.000 So what exactly are those moral axes, and how do they play into politics?

00:03:55.000 So from studying morality across cultures and reading the Old Testament and the Koran and reading ethnographies from non-Western societies, it was really clear that everywhere you look, people understand harm and pain and suffering, that's a moral issue, and reciprocity and fairness, that's a moral issue everywhere.

00:04:14.000 But when you go to other issues like respect for authority, what's very common, but some places are really egalitarian, and sort of in-group loyalty, that's very common, but some places it's less important.

00:04:26.000 And then that's four axes or dimensions.

00:04:28.000 And then the fifth one is sanctity or purity, the idea that the body is a temple, it must be protected from degradation.

00:04:36.000 So the kosher laws in Judaism are

00:04:39.000 It's

00:04:59.000 It's as though they have five or more different moral taste buds, and different religions, different political philosophies build a structure on some of those.

00:05:11.000 What I found empirically from doing research, survey work, and other kinds of work, is that people on the left in America, and in general in other countries too, they build their morality mostly on issues of care, harm, protection of the vulnerable, and then fairness, but fairness as a quality.

00:05:26.000 Whereas social conservatives, they have those, but they see fairness more as proportionality.

00:05:31.000 Do the crime, do the time, that sort of thing.

00:05:34.000 And then they also care a lot more about group loyalty, respect for authority, and a sense of sanctity or purity.

00:05:39.000 And if you have that vocabulary, those five moral foundations, you can understand why left and right can't understand each other on most cultural war issues.

00:05:47.000 And so what that sort of implies, and it's underscored by the other point that you make in The Righteous Mind, which is that people are largely driven by intuition rather than how we like to think of ourselves as reasonable creatures.

00:05:57.000 If that's the case, can there ever really be any sort of conciliation in terms of politics, or is all of this sort of chimerical, like there's no way to come to any sort of even conversation?

00:06:05.000 Right.

00:06:06.000 So, philosophically and psychologically, I'm an intuitionist.

00:06:10.000 That means I think intuition is where the action is.

00:06:13.000 Our moral intuitions come first, and they drive our reasoning afterwards.

00:06:17.000 That might make it seem as though we therefore can't agree because we're all just driven by gut feelings, but it's more complicated than that because our intuitions come first, but they are educable.

00:06:27.000 They are changeable.

00:06:28.000 We can't change each other's intuitions just by throwing reasons.

00:06:31.000 You know, if left and right are talking to each other, well, you know, don't you care about, you know, respect for your parents?

00:06:36.000 You can't just throw things at each other.

00:06:38.000 But in relationships,

00:06:41.000 We come to listen to somebody.

00:06:44.000 We talk with someone.

00:06:45.000 Our minds can meld.

00:06:46.000 This is an amazing ability that humans have that no other animal has.

00:06:50.000 We can meld our minds if we're open to that, and then we can actually hear each other.

00:06:55.000 And that's what happened to me when I set out to understand conservative thought.

00:06:58.000 I actually met a few conservatives.

00:07:00.000 I mean, there were not many in my world, but I talked to some people, and they were very decent people.

00:07:05.000 So, through relationships, with the right kind of relationships, we actually can open our minds and hearts.

00:07:11.000 A great novel can do that.

00:07:12.000 A great ethnography can do that.

00:07:14.000 And one of the tragedies of our national life is that while we used to be fairly mixed politically, and we were more separated racially and in other ways,

00:07:22.000 We've gotten more mixed along a lot of axes, but we're getting more and more separate politically.

00:07:26.000 We live in more and more purified filter bubbles.

00:07:29.000 And that makes it harder to empathize, it exacerbates our political divide, and it damages our democracy.

00:07:35.000 So that brings us to the new book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which really talks about the ramifications of exactly this sort of divide.

00:07:41.000 And in The Coddling of the American Mind, you talk about what you consider three big problems in American society today.

00:07:47.000 If you want to just illuminate those, that would be fantastic.

00:07:50.000 So the book is based around three great untruths.

00:07:53.000 My first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, was actually about ten insights that you find in ancient cultures all over the world, psychological insights.

00:08:01.000 And so one of them is, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

00:08:05.000 That was Nietzsche's formulation.

00:08:08.000 But you find the exact same idea in Mencius in ancient China, you find it all over the world, that kids need challenge, human beings need challenge, obstacles, failure, setback, in order to grow.

00:08:19.000 So that's a basic truth.

00:08:21.000 That's a psychological truth.

00:08:22.000 But what we're finding on campus, what we're finding in the lives of American kids, is an increasing presence of the idea that what doesn't kill you makes you weaker.

00:08:33.000 That is, in fact, oh my god, just recently there was an article making the rounds.

00:08:38.000 Kids are mobilizing in high school.

00:08:41.000 to end the practice of regular public speaking.

00:08:47.000 Some kids have anxiety around public speaking.

00:08:49.000 That's very common.

00:08:50.000 One of the lines in this Atlantic article quoted a high school kid saying, nobody should be forced to do something that they're not comfortable doing.

00:08:58.000 Wow!

00:09:00.000 Wow!

00:09:00.000 Can you imagine raising kids with that dictum?

00:09:03.000 How would they come out?

00:09:05.000 If this is true that we need challenges, setbacks, even fear, we have to be afraid and overcome it and realize, oh, I can do that.

00:09:14.000 And if we give in to this idea that no one should be forced to do anything they're uncomfortable doing, we are setting up the next generation for failure.

00:09:22.000 And that's exactly our subtitle, how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure.

00:09:29.000 More briefly, the second great untruth is always trust your feelings.

00:09:32.000 And the third is life is a battle between good people and evil people.

00:09:38.000 And our contention in the book is that if we can successfully teach the young generation all three of these great untruths, they're almost guaranteed to fail.

00:09:46.000 Well, let's talk about that last one, because that last one seems to me the most dangerous one of all.

00:09:51.000 The attempts to favor feelings, I think, have a long subjective history, and in some ways may tie into the intuitionism that you talked about earlier.

00:10:00.000 I mean, David Hume suggesting that basically we are creatures of passion, and then the reason sort of rides on top, pretending.

00:10:05.000 But, with all that said, when it comes to the question of people seeing each other as good and evil, do you think that's springing more from one side of the aisle than another?

00:10:15.000 How do you see that chain of causality moving?

00:10:17.000 Well, let's hold off on the question of who's to blame or who is more guilty of this.

00:10:23.000 Let's just start with the basic psychology here, which is that human beings evolved for tribalism.

00:10:28.000 This is actually our great secret.

00:10:32.000 Chimpanzees hunt and they have troops and they control territory. 0.98

00:10:36.000 So they're able to do this.

00:10:37.000 They're able to have battles between groups.

00:10:40.000 But humans are the masters of this.

00:10:42.000 And while that might sound bad, actually it enables us to cooperate.

00:10:46.000 It enables us

00:10:48.000 We're good.

00:10:55.000 But modern liberal democracies are brilliant at turning that down to allow people to live more peacefully.

00:11:02.000 Humans go very quickly to tribalism, but we can also tone it down.

00:11:05.000 We're very good at trade.

00:11:06.000 We're curious about other groups as well.

00:11:08.000 And so a good modern society is one that finds ways to turn that down, allow people to live near others who are different from them, with no hostility, no violence.

00:11:16.000 And we did a pretty good job of that in the 20th century.

00:11:19.000 And there was a huge wave towards democracy.

00:11:21.000 So we've made a lot of progress in the last few centuries overcoming tribalism.

00:11:25.000 And the problem is that it's so easy to turn it back on.

00:11:30.000 And a lot of what's happening in our politics between left and right, that's been accelerating since the 1990s.

00:11:35.000 Cross-partisan hatred keeps going up and up since the 1980s or 90s.

00:11:39.000 And unfortunately now, with certain forms of identity politics, we're finding these tensions between groups in the United States.

00:11:46.000 And I just read, there's a new book out called The Tribes, something like that, in Britain.

00:11:50.000 Very much the same process is happening in the UK.

00:11:53.000 So this I find very alarming, that our society, our politics, social media, are turning up our tribalism.

00:12:00.000 So where do you think that increased tribalism is coming from?

00:12:02.000 Because my theory would be that based on sort of Robert Putnam's beliefs in diversity, of ethnicity being less beneficial than, for example, solidarity with regard to opinion, meaning that diversity is great so long as we all share a common goal.

00:12:18.000 But if we don't share a common goal, then everything fractures pretty quickly.

00:12:21.000 That's right.

00:12:39.000 And what that's done is it's thrust people back into the tribalism that you're talking about.

00:12:45.000 What would you attribute the rise in tribalism to?

00:12:47.000 Yeah.

00:12:48.000 So the way that I think about what's happened to our country is that in a large secular society, there are a lot of forces blowing us apart and there are a lot pulling us together.

00:12:58.000 And if you go back to the mid to late 20th century, everything was lined up to pull us together.

00:13:03.000 We'd had extraordinarily high rates of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century.

00:13:09.000 That's when my grandparents came over from Russia and Poland.

00:13:13.000 There was a big wave of anti-immigrant backlash.

00:13:16.000 And in the 20s, the gates were shut.

00:13:18.000 Immigration went way down.

00:13:19.000 And as you say, immigration has many good effects and many bad effects. 0.99

00:13:23.000 You have to look at it honestly and try to maximize the good.

00:13:26.000 So we had, by the 70s and 80s, we had very low rates of foreign-born.

00:13:30.000 There was a dominant culture.

00:13:32.000 It was the WASP culture. 1.00

00:13:34.000 David Brooks has written brilliantly about how the WASPs set up a meritocracy within which Jews and Asians and other groups were able to succeed.

00:13:41.000 We had a common enemy still in the Soviet Union.

00:13:44.000 We had a functioning political culture in Washington where there's a lot of bipartisanship.

00:13:48.000 Oh, and the media system.

00:13:49.000 There were three networks, and so there was a more

00:13:52.000 Thank you.

00:14:09.000 Obviously there's plenty of anti-Americanism too, but there's a lot of admiration for us.

00:14:13.000 And then, one by one, the centrifugal forces pulling us together began to weaken.

00:14:19.000 The media environment obviously reversed, beginning with cable TV all the way through to social media.

00:14:23.000 Now it's fractionating us.

00:14:25.000 Obviously immigration greatly increased beginning in the 60s, and again, many good things.

00:14:30.000 The economists are clear immigration is good economically, but as you say,

00:14:35.000 The issues of social trust and cohesion, Robert Putnam's work and others, suggest that that drops.

00:14:42.000 Trust in others drops.

00:14:43.000 And to have a functioning democracy, it really helps to have cross-group trust, to not be suspicious of each other.

00:14:50.000 So in so many ways, things have kind of turned around and we have to do some serious thinking.

00:14:55.000 What is it going to take to restore the social supports for an effective democracy?

00:15:00.000 I mean, I do wonder if

00:15:01.000 One of the things that it's going to take is something that's completely unpalatable to one side of the political aisle, at least, and that is a return to social institutions that people don't like very much, particularly on the left.

00:15:10.000 So I want to ask you about that in just one second.

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00:16:27.000 So.

00:16:27.000 My God, I thought I spoke quickly.

00:16:29.000 You were amazing.

00:16:30.000 Oh, thank you.

00:16:30.000 Yeah.

00:16:31.000 If my career falls through, I'll be the guy at the end of the commercials who issues all of the legal warnings.

00:16:36.000 So if we're talking about the sort of forces that need to come back together, it seems like there are certain forces that it's almost impossible to bring back together.

00:16:44.000 And the ones that most need to be brought back together are the ones that may be least palatable.

00:16:48.000 What I mean by that, to clarify, is that social fabric for 200 years and for hundreds of years throughout Western civilization was basically based in church.

00:16:56.000 You found your community in the church, in the synagogue, you had a common Judeo-Christian heritage, and with the rise of secularism, which has come along with a lot of economic benefits for sure,

00:17:06.000 I don't know.

00:17:19.000 And it seems like that hole is being filled by political tribalism.

00:17:23.000 I'm going to fill those values with whatever I think my tribe is, and it seems to me particularly, now to get to the left-right issue, and obviously I'm on the right, and I have plenty of criticisms for the right, but my main criticism of the left these days is that the left has fallen into a sort of tribalism that refuses to even acknowledge that another tribe exists, or that there are other people who perceive problems differently.

00:17:44.000 To go back to your discussion of the various values in Righteous Mind, you suggest that basically the political left bases itself on a couple of values, fairness and harm.

00:17:53.000 Well, if those are the values you base yourself upon, then by necessity you have to be implying, even to yourself, that the other side is for unfairness and for harm.

00:18:02.000 That in order for, that there cannot be any bridging of the gap because the only values that matter are harm, perceived as anything bad that happens, anything I disagree with,

00:18:12.000 Results in a certain number of people getting hurt and fairness in that a person who disagrees with me is in favor of the Reinstitution of a patriarchy or a hierarchical system and you're spotting that evil everywhere you look

00:18:24.000 How can that possibly be bridged without folks on the left actually acknowledging that there are other sets of values that come into play and that those ones actually drive people and may not be in fact bad?

00:18:34.000 So I think what you're pointing to is an asymmetry in mutual understanding.

00:18:37.000 And I have evidence that that's true.

00:18:40.000 So I run a research site at YourMorals.org.

00:18:44.000 And we've had about a half million people go there and take our surveys.

00:18:47.000 And in one experiment, we had people take our basic instrument, the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, which it gives you a score on these five foundations.

00:18:55.000 And we had one-third of the people just filled it out for themselves.

00:18:59.000 One-third were told, please fill this out as the typical liberal or progressive would.

00:19:03.000 One-third were told, fill it out as a typical conservative would.

00:19:06.000 What we found is that moderates are able to correctly predict how everybody would fill it out.

00:19:11.000 Conservatives were almost as good as moderates.

00:19:14.000 And it was people on the left, especially the far left, were very inaccurate.

00:19:18.000 And it's for precisely the reason that you say, that because they couldn't see these questions about loyalty and fairness and sanctity, they couldn't see those as moral virtues.

00:19:27.000 So on the questions about harm and fairness, they said, well, conservatives don't care about cruelty to animals and children.

00:19:32.000 So I do think, and this was my case too, you know, I was very well educated in the United States, which means I learned nothing about conservatism.

00:19:39.000 I learned very little about a large portion of political philosophy.

00:19:44.000 And so it's impossible to grow up in this country without knowing what the left believes through the media, through newspapers, through movies.

00:19:53.000 But I do agree that the left

00:19:56.000 often fails to understand the right.

00:19:57.000 And this is why we perennially have these issues on the left where, my God, how could they have voted for me?

00:20:04.000 I don't know anybody who voted that way.

00:20:05.000 What were they thinking?

00:20:07.000 And so political surprises tend to be where the left is surprised, as happened in Brexit.

00:20:13.000 I think they have a harder time understanding conservatives than vice versa.

00:20:16.000 I personally think that every high school civics class, not that they teach them much anymore, but high school civics class should include the best of progressive thinking, the best of conservative thinking, possibly libertarian too.

00:20:31.000 We shouldn't encounter

00:20:34.000 Political diversity through the lens of the worst, because social media guarantees, if you're on one side, you are force-fed constant stories of the outrages by the most outrageous, horrible people on the other side.

00:20:45.000 And if that's your view of who they are, of course you don't trust them.

00:20:48.000 Of course you don't want your legislators to compromise.

00:20:51.000 So I think we need to understand, we are coming apart in this country.

00:20:54.000 We are facing the actual danger of the dissolution of the country over the next 10, 20 years.

00:21:00.000 I'm not saying it's likely to happen.

00:21:01.000 I think it's not likely to happen, but it is possible in ways that none of us thought were coming or possible five or ten years ago.

00:21:09.000 So I think we need to take this seriously, start educating beginning in high school for more political tolerance, respect, and mutual understanding.

00:21:16.000 So when it comes to the sort of pessimism that you're expressing about the nature of the country, with which I fully agree, there are a bunch of people

00:21:21.000 We're good to go.

00:21:47.000 All right, great question.

00:21:48.000 Let's take the first one.

00:21:49.000 So, Steve Pinker, I think, is brilliant.

00:21:51.000 I think he, in the big picture, I'm pretty confident he's right.

00:21:55.000 That if we were just to check in at hundred-year intervals, each hundred years things would be much better than the hundred years before.

00:22:01.000 Now, of course, at some point we might see the smoking wreckage of a global nuclear war, but odds are he's right in the long run.

00:22:09.000 But as he grants, and as Robert Wright granted in his book Non-Zero years ago, you can have some big setbacks.

00:22:14.000 It's only in the big picture that you see the march of progress.

00:22:18.000 But along the way, you can have some pretty bad stuff happening.

00:22:21.000 And I think where we are now, some of our problem is caused by social media.

00:22:27.000 Of course, these problems of polarization were getting worse before social media, but social media is really messing things up all around the world.

00:22:35.000 Odds are we'll learn how to deal with it, as we've learned how to deal with junk food.

00:22:38.000 It took decades before we could learn how to live with the constant presence of junk food.

00:22:43.000 I heard that for the first time last year, the obesity rate in America actually went down a tiny bit.

00:22:48.000 So maybe we've learned how to coexist, and maybe that will happen with social media.

00:22:53.000 But a lot of bad stuff can happen along the way.

00:22:56.000 In terms of what's going on on campus, there's been a really productive debate, it was an excellent debate, started by a political scientist in Canada, Jeff Sachs, who pointed out that if you look at the general social survey, attitudes about free speech, it's not changing.

00:23:09.000 In fact, if anything, younger people are more tolerant.

00:23:12.000 And so that pushed me and Greg and others to refine our claims.

00:23:16.000 And that's the way it's supposed to work.

00:23:17.000 And what we found as we dug into the data is, yes, this national survey data shows no drop, but that's because it's focused on millennials.

00:23:26.000 And this book, our book, The Coddling of the American Mind, is not about millennials.

00:23:29.000 The millennials are fine on free speech.

00:23:31.000 It's the generation after the millennials. 0.72

00:23:33.000 It's the kids born in 1995 and after.

00:23:36.000 They were raised very differently.

00:23:37.000 We'll come back to that, because that's a major topic to talk about.

00:23:40.000 So if you just look at iGen, or Gen Z,

00:23:43.000 And, you grant the point that the skeptics made, that there are 4,500 colleges in this country, or institutions of higher ed of some sort.

00:23:51.000 Are all of them up in arms over conservative speakers?

00:23:54.000 No, most of them are not.

00:23:55.000 Most of them don't have, you know, they're commuter schools, they don't bring in lecturers, they don't have riots.

00:24:01.000 So, if you look at nationally representative data, on most campuses, nothing is happening.

00:24:06.000 If you go home to a family, if you have a job off campus, you're not going to develop this arcane morality that we'll talk about, this safetyism morality.

00:24:14.000 However, if you look at especially in the Northeast and the West Coast, if you look at the elite schools, there as far as I can tell,

00:24:23.000 This new culture is present at almost all of the schools.

00:24:26.000 It's not in the engineering schools so much.

00:24:28.000 It's dominant in the humanities.

00:24:29.000 So it varies even within the universities.

00:24:31.000 My point is, there's a lot of diversity.

00:24:34.000 We should not have a moral panic where we say, the new generation is lost, something's eaten their brains, or colleges are going up in flames.

00:24:41.000 That's not true.

00:24:42.000 But there is a new morality that is present in parts of most, maybe all, elite schools on the coast.

00:24:47.000 That's where the shout downs and what little violence there's been, that's where it takes place.

00:24:52.000 So we have to refine the story, figure out what's happening, and I think figure out how to reverse this cultural shift because it leads to a culture that's really bad for the students themselves and their mental health, and that's really bad for a culture of free inquiry.

00:25:07.000 So how indicative are those outlier schools, statistically, of a broader trend across young folks?

00:25:14.000 That's, yeah, that's complicated to answer.

00:25:17.000 In terms of broad trends across young folks, the one, the most important one, the one that I think guarantees that we will be attending to this for many years to come, we cannot sweep this under the rug, is that rates of anxiety and depression are rising quickly for kids born after 1995.

00:25:35.000 It's rising across social classes, across races, not so much across genders, or rather I should say, things are getting worse for boys,

00:25:44.000 Substantially, but for girls, it's several times worse, several times faster, the increase. 0.97

00:25:49.000 And what's very important to understand, because there's debate around this, some people say, oh, you know, kids, they like to say they're depressed.

00:25:55.000 They're comfortable with this language.

00:25:57.000 There was an op-ed in the New York Times a couple weeks ago by a psychiatrist saying, oh, you know, it's not real.

00:26:05.000 It's just changing diagnostic categories.

00:26:07.000 No, because if you look, there are studies, we cite them in the book.

00:26:10.000 If you look at hospital admission data, this is the number of kids admitted because they cut their body with something sharp and had to be admitted to a hospital.

00:26:18.000 It shows exactly the same pattern as it does for depression and anxiety.

00:26:23.000 That is, it's way up, it's up even for the 11 to 13 year olds, and it's up especially for girls.

00:26:28.000 And then you look at the suicide data.

00:26:30.000 This is CDC data, federal data, same thing.

00:26:33.000 The boys' suicide rate for teenage boys,

00:26:36.000 From the first decade of the 21st century to the last couple years, it begins going up around 2010-2011.

00:26:40.000 It's up 25%.

00:26:41.000 25% more dead boys by their own hand over the last 10 or so years.

00:26:44.000 For girls, the increase is 70%.

00:26:44.000 7-0.

00:26:56.000 So, this is not just some isolated thing on a few college campuses.

00:27:00.000 We have a mental health crisis across social classes, across all the different divides.

00:27:06.000 On the elite college campuses, this is contributing to a culture of protectiveness.

00:27:12.000 We're vulnerable, or at least, even if I'm not vulnerable, she's vulnerable, he's vulnerable.

00:27:16.000 I am standing up for them.

00:27:18.000 We can't have Ben Shapiro talk here, for example.

00:27:20.000 And this is where the microaggression culture comes in, the idea of speech is violence, which was chanted at me when I was at Berkeley.

00:27:26.000 Which is an insane concept just on the face of it.

00:27:28.000 Especially at Berkeley.

00:27:29.000 Yeah, it's pretty wild over there.

00:27:31.000 But what was really wild about that one is the radical shift.

00:27:34.000 Because I'd spoken there the previous year with no violence whatsoever.

00:27:36.000 The next year I required 500 police officers.

00:27:39.000 For protection, for some odd reason.

00:27:40.000 But what exactly, does this trend hold true across parenting styles, across cultures?

00:27:47.000 Or is it just a subsection that we're really talking about?

00:27:50.000 Yeah.

00:27:51.000 So this is all so new that I can't give you a solid answer.

00:27:54.000 We don't have data on this.

00:27:57.000 We do have a section in the book.

00:27:59.000 We did spend some time researching social class differences, because we know there's a huge amount of research on social class differences in parenting.

00:28:06.000 And we read two really good books.

00:28:07.000 Annette Leroux has a book called Unequal Childhoods, and Robert Putnam has a book called Our Kids.

00:28:13.000 And they both come to the same conclusion, which is that differences by race in parenting are actually fairly small once you control for class.

00:28:20.000 So upper middle class black parents are more similar to upper middle class white parents than they are to working class of either sex.

00:28:26.000 And so working-class parents do give their kids less supervision, which is good. 0.99

00:28:31.000 Part of the problem is, in the 90s, we took away most of kids' unsupervised time.

00:28:36.000 By the 80s or 90s, we stopped letting kids out to play without supervision, fearing that we thought they'd be abducted or something like that.

00:28:44.000 So the working class is not as overprotective.

00:28:46.000 Now working class kids have a lot of other problems.

00:28:48.000 They face a lot more trauma, a lot more threat, like real trauma, like physical trauma, relational trauma.

00:28:54.000 But in this country right now, at elite schools, there was some research came out last year, at many of our top schools, there are more kids who are children of the top 1%

00:29:05.000 income than the bottom 60%.

00:29:08.000 So our elite schools are populated overwhelmingly by the top few percent of the income distribution, and that's part of it.

00:29:15.000 Rich kids have a lot more time to do symbolic politics.

00:29:18.000 Working class kids, they have to pay their tuition. 1.00

00:29:22.000 They have a lot of other obligations.

00:29:24.000 So the culture of safetyism seems to be especially intense in upper middle class, upper class, elite coastal

00:29:32.000 Yeah, when it comes to the identity politics that's cropped up so recently, and you sort of classify as a subset of emotional tribal-driven politics, where is the identity politics issue coming from?

00:29:44.000 Does it have deep roots or shallow roots?

00:29:46.000 And is it really just a new form of the kind of tribalism you've been talking about?

00:29:51.000 So let me make a point here, which I hope will be helpful to your audience.

00:29:56.000 In this country, we're in the middle of a long-running culture war in which terms become, they get tagged and they get used either as attacks or defenses.

00:30:06.000 And identity politics and social justice are two of those terms.

00:30:10.000 And I work on a college campus.

00:30:14.000 Greg and I work on college campuses.

00:30:16.000 We really want to solve the problem.

00:30:17.000 We don't want to score points.

00:30:18.000 We don't want to bash people.

00:30:19.000 We really want to solve the problem.

00:30:22.000 My view from writing The Righteous Mind is that whenever you have a political movement, there's always something that they're right about.

00:30:29.000 There's always something that is good or true about it.

00:30:31.000 And so what we did with identity politics, you know, because I came in very suspicious of it, thinking, you know, this is probably a bad thing.

00:30:38.000 But as we read about it, we realized, okay, you know what?

00:30:42.000 You have to have identity politics.

00:30:44.000 If people can organize because they're wine growers in California, they can form a group to advocate for the rights of wine growers in California.

00:30:52.000 And chess players can, I mean, you can have, politics should be responsive to every possible interest group.

00:30:59.000 Why can't gay people or LGBTQ, why can't African American, of course, every group can organize.

00:31:05.000 So you can't say identity politics is bad.

00:31:08.000 What you need to do is say, okay, in the current American,

00:31:13.000 Context.

00:31:14.000 How are you pursuing the aims of your group?

00:31:16.000 And this, I think, is a distinction that I found just clarified things right away.

00:31:20.000 You can either pursue it using a common humanity approach, which is exactly what Martin Luther King, Pauli Murray, a lot of the early civil rights activists did.

00:31:30.000 Common humanity.

00:31:31.000 You start by saying, listen, my brothers and sisters.

00:31:34.000 Or you use this soaring American language, as he did in his I Have a Dream speech.

00:31:41.000 You first establish, we, we Americans, we human beings, they used a lot of religious language, Christian language, but obviously Judeo-Christian language.

00:31:51.000 You start that way, and now right away, you're already halfway down the road to success, because now you're talking to people as members of a common group, and you can say, some of our brothers and sisters are being denied access to dignity, to jobs.

00:32:04.000 So that worked, even if, of course, there was resistance at the time.

00:32:07.000 It calls on our better angels, it establishes a connection, and in the long run, it works.

00:32:13.000 That, we think, is great.

00:32:15.000 What's new, or at least what's newly intense on college campuses in the last just a few years,

00:32:22.000 is what we call the common enemy form of identity politics.

00:32:26.000 It's based on the idea, the Bedouin proverb, me against my brother, me and my brother against our cousin, me and my brother and cousin against the stranger.

00:32:35.000 And if you unite everybody on campus against the enemy, and the enemy is on campus too,

00:32:42.000 Because the enemy is straight white males. 0.90

00:32:45.000 So what's new is the idea of intersectionality, which as we say in the book, intersectionality is not a bad idea.

00:32:51.000 The idea that identities interact, that being a black woman is not just the sum of the two, but there are special obstacles that black women face.

00:33:00.000 That's a fine idea.

00:33:01.000 That's right and true. 0.75

00:33:03.000 But the way that it gets implemented on campus is to train students to see, look around, oh, you know, oh, female, white, and to see, okay, female is oppressed, male is oppressor, white is oppressor, black is oppressed.

00:33:19.000 To see people in binary dimensions, to imagine trying to create a diverse environment on a college campus.

00:33:29.000 You're trying to create diversity.

00:33:30.000 And at the same time, you're telling people to judge others through this simple, binary, bipolar dimension, good, bad, good, bad, to make moral judgments of people.

00:33:40.000 So intersectionality, as it's practiced on many campuses, amounts to trying to unite a coalition of victim groups against the evil straight white males.

00:33:49.000 And this is a recipe for, in addition to misdiagnosing the nature of not just American society, but especially college campuses,

00:33:58.000 Isn't there a deeper critique of identity politics even than that?

00:34:01.000 Because you're taking identity politics at sort of its most favorable level.

00:34:16.000 That's right.

00:34:32.000 Should we be fighting harder against identity politics than even you're saying? 0.77

00:34:35.000 In other words, let's not group ourselves as blacks or Jews or gays.

00:34:39.000 Let's group ourselves as a group of individuals who all agree on these common principles of how the society ought to be governed and how we ought to be left alone.

00:34:46.000 Yes, I certainly agree with you.

00:34:48.000 I don't know.

00:35:04.000 We're good to go.

00:35:22.000 is that over the last few years, a lot of people who are not straight white males have been told, you need to identify this way.

00:35:30.000 And they're saying like, no, I don't.

00:35:32.000 How dare you tell me?

00:35:33.000 How dare you tell me how I should feel?

00:35:35.000 And at first, it was maybe hard for them to say that.

00:35:39.000 But in the last year, a lot are saying it.

00:35:41.000 And so there's all these great books out now, Francis Fukuyama,

00:35:44.000 Has a new book just came out about identity and dignity.

00:35:47.000 Anthony Appiah has been writing beautifully about this.

00:35:51.000 Amy Chua, political tribes.

00:35:54.000 So we're finding, and there's a lot more.

00:35:56.000 So I think this is very encouraging.

00:35:58.000 America is a diverse country.

00:36:00.000 There are a lot of intellectuals in every different possible identity category.

00:36:03.000 And a lot of them are rejecting this binary or in or out kind of identity.

00:36:08.000 Politically, doesn't this tend toward libertarianism just naturally?

00:36:10.000 Because what you're really talking about on a political level is we all have an agreement about the basic things that we should all do together and then everybody should basically be left alone to identify how they please.

00:36:20.000 How does this play out politically in terms of, you know, if you were to take it to straight party politics?

00:36:24.000 So, you know, as I hear you talk, what I'm thinking is that's really the definition of liberal.

00:36:29.000 And what I mean is the word liberal, its origins are you believe in liberty.

00:36:34.000 Its origins are originally, you know, like the liberal arts are the skills needed to be a free person in an open society.

00:36:41.000 And so that's when we talk about liberal arts schools, we talk about the liberal tradition.

00:36:45.000 That's what it means.

00:36:46.000 And so in that sense, I'm a liberal.

00:36:49.000 Now, I stopped using the word as the left began to kind of split between what I like to think of as there's the liberal left and then there's the illiberal left.

00:36:57.000 Most professors, in my opinion, are liberal left.

00:37:00.000 They are uncomfortable with many forms of identity politics.

00:37:03.000 But it's the illiberal left that has had the loudest voice.

00:37:08.000 It's often dangerous, as you found, as many people have found.

00:37:11.000 It's dangerous to stand up against them.

00:37:13.000 Dangerous.

00:37:13.000 I shouldn't.

00:37:14.000 Here I go.

00:37:14.000 I shouldn't talk about Dean.

00:37:16.000 You'll get a lot of blowback and a lot of hatred, is what I should say.

00:37:19.000 At times, dangerous.

00:37:20.000 From time to time, I've had to wear a bulletproof vest.

00:37:22.000 It is occasionally dangerous.

00:37:24.000 But you're right.

00:37:25.000 I've said many times, I speak on dozens of campuses, it's really only a couple of years that are a serious problem.

00:37:32.000 This is one of the things we most need in this polarized time.

00:37:36.000 Just that little bit of nuance that you just added, that goes so far.

00:37:40.000 Whenever we're having these conflicts, these talks, just to acknowledge anything about the other side, and then you can make your critique.

00:37:47.000 Listeners everywhere, this is the way to be more effective.

00:37:50.000 If you don't believe me, read Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

00:37:53.000 This is the number one technique.

00:37:55.000 So, but your question was, does that mean we should be libertarian?

00:37:58.000 And I guess I would say it ought to mean that we should be liberal in the traditional sense.

00:38:02.000 Unfortunately, the libertarians are sort of left as the guardians of the liberal tradition.

00:38:08.000 So, what do you think has been the response to all of your research, which has been a lot friendlier to the right than a lot of other things that have been said in sociology departments around the country?

00:38:17.000 How have people reacted in the academy to you?

00:38:19.000 Because we've seen cases.

00:38:20.000 You know, ranging from Evergreen State College to Northwestern, to Yale with the Christakis's, where people are legitimately run out of jobs. 1.00

00:38:27.000 You call them witch hunts in the book.

00:38:29.000 What's been the reaction to your work?

00:38:31.000 Have you gotten any of that sort of blowback?

00:38:32.000 No, I have not.

00:38:33.000 Nothing bad has happened to me.

00:38:34.000 You know, other than, you know, I occasionally get horribly nasty tweets.

00:38:37.000 And I got an email the other day, which was from an anonymous server, and it was just a string of obscenities, which I can't even say on camera.

00:38:44.000 Welcome to Twitter, yeah.

00:38:46.000 So other than things like that from strangers,

00:38:48.000 Nothing bad has happened to me, and I think this is actually very important to point out.

00:38:52.000 So when I started critiquing the left, from the left, you know, there were some people who were suspicious of me, but a lot of people realized, you know, the left, we do have problems, we do need this critique.

00:39:03.000 And because I would do it in sort of a gentle way, and because I clearly was not on the right, so I think I moved up to sort of the edge of what was possible, nothing bad ever happened to me.

00:39:12.000 Then when I stepped out and I started saying, I'm not on the left anymore.

00:39:15.000 I'm just, I'm nothing.

00:39:15.000 I'm not on a team.

00:39:19.000 Again, I thought there'd be blowback.

00:39:22.000 And some people were suspicious.

00:39:23.000 Some people didn't like me, but nothing bad happened to me.

00:39:26.000 And then when Greg and I wrote our Atlantic article critiquing this new culture on campus, and it is a critique of a certain kind of identity politics.

00:39:34.000 You know, my wife said, John, are we going to have to, like, hide our address?

00:39:36.000 Like, are people going to stalk us?

00:39:38.000 Nothing bad happened to us, because by 2015, people all over the place were beginning to realize something weird is happening.

00:39:46.000 We're puzzled.

00:39:47.000 And if you come out with an explanation of like, here's what we think is happening, people are really curious.

00:39:52.000 And now with this book, again, I was actually kind of afraid, like, you know, what's gonna happen to me?

00:39:57.000 I have tenure, I'm not gonna lose my job, but what's gonna happen to me socially?

00:40:00.000 And the reception has been overwhelmingly positive, because again, people realize

00:40:05.000 Something is messed up.

00:40:06.000 The mental health crisis is real.

00:40:09.000 Something's going on.

00:40:13.000 My advice to people is if you speak up in this polarized climate, a lot of us are afraid to speak up, but if you can do it in a respectful way with just a little bit of nuance, the blowback is often much less than you would expect.

00:40:26.000 So you teased much earlier in the show that you have a lot of critiques of the Republican Party.

00:40:30.000 Because I, of course, am a conservative, that means we spent most of this program critiquing leftists on campus and some of the kind of rising leftist ideas of identity politics, intersectionality, microaggressions and such.

00:40:40.000 So what are your main critiques of the right?

00:40:42.000 How could the right be doing a better job and what exactly is the right doing deeply wrong right now?

00:40:47.000 You know, so what really attracted me to conservatism was reading the philosophy.

00:40:51.000 So, you know, one of my gateway drugs was Thomas Sowell.

00:40:54.000 I read Conflict of Visions, and boy, that book, when I assigned it to my classes at UVA, you know, that really opened people's eyes.

00:41:00.000 And he talks about, do you have the constrained view of human nature, which is where you think people, if you take off the constraints, they're going to do selfish, greedy, sexual, aggressive things, and we need religion, family, law.

00:41:14.000 Versus the unconstrained vision, which goes back to Rousseau, or it's the John Lennon song, Imagine.

00:41:19.000 Just knock down all the walls!

00:41:20.000 Remove religion and country! 1.00

00:41:21.000 Everything will be great!

00:41:22.000 You know, when I look at it that way as a social scientist, I have to say, the conservatives are right about human nature.

00:41:30.000 That is the correct view of human nature.

00:41:32.000 And that goes back to our earlier part of our conversation about how we need structures, we need constraints in order to flourish.

00:41:37.000 So, I'm very attracted to a lot of conservative philosophy.

00:41:41.000 And that goes all the way up

00:41:43.000 You know, from Burke all the way through Sowell, Hayek and others, conservative libertarian.

00:41:50.000 So I'm attracted to a lot of the philosophy.

00:41:53.000 And of course, I disliked Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party back then when I was a partisan Democrat.

00:41:58.000 But I can see the wisdom of fomenting dynamism.

00:42:04.000 I can see the wisdom of a lot of what the Republican Party was doing then.

00:42:07.000 And George H.W.

00:42:08.000 Bush was a very, very decent man.

00:42:10.000 Um, but I look at the Republican Party, well, since Newt Gingrich, I think, converted to a much more confrontational party, which again, I can't criticize that.

00:42:20.000 The Democrats didn't treat the Republicans well when they were in the majority.

00:42:22.000 But I think Newt Gingrich and Fox News created an environment in which, in which the Republicans were more incentivized to sort of go rogue, to develop an, to

00:42:32.000 Thank you.

00:42:42.000 The worst critique of the Republican Party, or a common critique, is all they seem to really care about is lowering taxes on the rich.

00:42:50.000 That seems to be their top priority, and that's been true for a while.

00:42:53.000 And so a party that is just focused on its relationship with its donor class, and then its ability to do things... Well, don't get me started on Trump, but the things that Trump is doing to destroy our alliances, to disrespect our allies while sucking up to dictators, and the fact that the Republican Party has not repudiated him,

00:43:12.000 So I think that Trump clearly is not a conservative.

00:43:15.000 He is appealing much more to authoritarian tendencies.

00:43:18.000 I can't see any lineage from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump.

00:43:24.000 There is no way to get from here to there.

00:43:27.000 So the fact that the Republican Party has lost its conservative soul, I think, and is following Donald Trump,

00:43:34.000 Is I think a mark of damnation that it will wear for many decades.

00:43:39.000 We quote research in the book on how however the political world looks between the ages of 14 and 24 sticks.

00:43:47.000 And so I think the Republican Party is signing I can't say it's death warrant but I think it's going to lose a generation.

00:43:57.000 I mean, I tend to agree with that assessment, which is one of my great fears about President Trump before he was President Trump, was that I listed several fears about President Trump that I had, and my chief one, which I think is still on the table, is the toxification of conservatism thanks to all of this.

00:44:11.000 With that said, is there any way to put the political genie back in the bottle?

00:44:14.000 Because it seems like political leaders of both sides have a real interest in revving up the culture wars, and I think that when it comes to Republican legislative priorities, it has less to do

00:44:22.000 With the stuff they'd like to do, and the stuff that they can actually do without blowback.

00:44:26.000 So tax cuts are popular because who exactly is going to whine about them?

00:44:29.000 Everyone at least got a check, right?

00:44:31.000 And when it comes to the left.

00:44:33.000 But the debt and the deficit, which Republicans were the watchdogs of, and for the last 20 years, they've been the bad guys.

00:44:38.000 Well, I totally agree with that.

00:44:40.000 But the point is that there's the stuff that people can get done in Congress, and then there's the stuff that people can jabber about in Congress.

00:44:45.000 And by looking to our politicians as our moral leaders, by looking to our politicians as our philosophical leaders, what we've actually done

00:44:50.000 We're good to go.

00:45:07.000 Completely partisan.

00:45:07.000 I mean, he has no bipartisan legislation throughout any of his tenure.

00:45:11.000 And yet he is seen by the left as some sort of great bipartisan unifier.

00:45:17.000 And the right responds by saying, okay, fine, we'll just put somebody up there who doesn't pretend to be bipartisan.

00:45:20.000 We'll just go out there and he'll do whatever he wants.

00:45:23.000 Is there any way to put this genie back in the bottle?

00:45:24.000 Because there is money to be made and votes to be gained in the sort of tribalism that both of us are sort of railing against here.

00:45:31.000 Well first I have to defend Obama.

00:45:33.000 He came out, so if you go back to the first election, the economic crisis threatened us with ruin.

00:45:39.000 Nobody knew it was going to happen.

00:45:40.000 It was a really scary time ten years ago.

00:45:43.000 And Obama did the right thing, which is to say

00:45:46.000 We're going to do this bipartisan.

00:45:48.000 This is not a partisan thing.

00:45:49.000 We're going to do this bipartisan.

00:45:51.000 And we have to do this together.

00:45:53.000 And he, and going back to his 2004 speech, I believe that Obama really does, he does actually understand conservatives better than most.

00:46:01.000 He lived in Indonesia.

00:46:02.000 He's traveled a lot.

00:46:04.000 I think Obama, I like him philosophically and he started the right way.

00:46:10.000 The Republicans, however, there was a particular retreat they had early in Obama's, in the first couple months of his term, somewhere in Maryland, I can't remember where it was, and they did a calculation and they said,

00:46:21.000 Should we work with them and try to make them successful?

00:46:23.000 Or should we try to make them fail?

00:46:24.000 Which will work better for us?

00:46:26.000 And they correctly calculated that the second course was best for them, and that was Obama's fault.

00:46:32.000 Because Obama was very bad at negotiating.

00:46:35.000 Obama should have said... Again, this is my political analysis, which is not worth much.

00:46:41.000 Obama should have said, back channel.

00:46:43.000 We're going to do this bipartisan.

00:46:44.000 You have three months to join me on it. 0.73

00:46:46.000 If you don't join me on it, I'm going to break your knees.

00:46:48.000 I'm going to blame it all on you, and we're going to do it my way.

00:46:50.000 But because Obama didn't play hardball, and he did this internationally too, because he didn't know how to negotiate and have a tough side, the Republicans correctly calculated that they could make him fail.

00:47:01.000 And it worked.

00:47:02.000 They came sweeping into power two years later.

00:47:04.000 So you can't fault Obama.

00:47:08.000 And then also on the health insurance, yeah, it was, he got no Republican votes, but he tried and tried and tried to take a Republican idea from Mitt Romney for how to do health reform.

00:47:17.000 So Obama tried, and it was this hyper-partisan Republican party that I think drove him ultimately to have to just do it in a partisan way.

00:47:25.000 Obviously I would disagree with that political analysis almost in full, but I do think that election 2012 was basically

00:47:31.000 In my view, sort of the breaking of the country.

00:47:32.000 Because by election 2012, there was a belief on the right that Mitt Romney was a decent guy who was pretty moderate in a lot of his politics, the only Republican who had ever provided Obamacare for a state.

00:47:43.000 And then he was torn apart and savaged as a bad guy in exactly the same way the left savages Donald Trump, except that Mitt Romney is not Donald Trump.

00:47:49.000 And so we've now been locked into this mutual rock-em-sock-em robots combat where it's a lot easier to punch the other guy than to have a conversation.

00:47:57.000 So how do we get beyond all this?

00:47:58.000 Because obviously you propose a lot of solutions in Coddling of the American Mind.

00:48:01.000 You talk about solutions a lot.

00:48:02.000 How do we get beyond all of this, even based on the original premise of Righteous Mind, which is that we are mostly intuitional.

00:48:08.000 If we're mostly intuitional, the lizard brain is extraordinarily strong with us.

00:48:12.000 How do we get past that and exercise reason, or does reason exist?

00:48:16.000 What facility do we use to move beyond this?

00:48:19.000 It's very difficult to just decide to change.

00:48:22.000 The forces, the historical trends that got us into this rising polarization are complicated.

00:48:26.000 There are a lot of them.

00:48:28.000 There's no one thing we can turn around and change.

00:48:31.000 I think the most basic thing we need to do is we need to have some major reforms of our political institutions to encourage more moderation, compromise, and cooperation in Congress and at other levels of government.

00:48:43.000 What I'm hoping would happen

00:48:44.000 This is an idea from Norm Ornstein, who wrote the book It's Even Worse Than It Looks at Political Scientists, is at some point, the next president, somebody will say, OK, we're in big trouble here.

00:48:57.000 Everybody hates Congress.

00:48:59.000 Congress doesn't want to be hated.

00:49:01.000 Let's have a panel recommend a sweeping set of changes.

00:49:08.000 To make the legislative process more effective.

00:49:11.000 We can't be shutting out the minor party entirely.

00:49:15.000 We can't be having, well, the filibuster is going away for a lot of reasons.

00:49:20.000 So we have to have reform to the way Congress works, the way elections are run.

00:49:23.000 The closed party primary really incentivizes extremists to run, because that's how you win the nomination.

00:49:31.000 So some states are experimenting with open primaries, or with top two primaries, as you have here in California.

00:49:37.000 So I think we need a whole package of political reforms for Congress.

00:49:41.000 The issue of the media and social media reforms, they are much harder.

00:49:45.000 There, I don't really know.

00:49:46.000 There are tweaks that Facebook and Twitter can do to their algorithms, YouTube videos, but all I can think of is tweaks.

00:49:52.000 It's very hard to change the media environment.

00:49:56.000 Education, we've already talked about.

00:49:57.000 We need to be educating kids for democracy.

00:50:00.000 We're not doing that.

00:50:02.000 One of the suggestions we make in the book is that however bad things are, the young generation, which has had very little time to work out problems, they've been given very little freedom and independence, when the current generation, iGen or Gen Z, when they reach the age of political power, things might get a lot worse because they haven't worked out the skills of compromise, dispute resolution on their own.

00:50:26.000 So, I think we're in big trouble and we're going to have to take a comprehensive look at how we raise children, how we educate them in high school and college, how our political institutions work.

00:50:35.000 I've done what I can, Greg and I have done what we can in our book.

00:50:38.000 This is going to take a collaboration among political scientists and historians to really focus, as we're focusing on other threats to the country, to really focus on the threats to our democracy without blaming one side or the other, saying the system is messed up.

00:50:52.000 If we want to be a light to the world, if we think that democracy and liberty are important virtues, we need to get our own house in order.

00:50:59.000 And this is, I think, where a really deep solution is going to require a rebuilding of a social fabric that has almost nothing to do with politics.

00:51:08.000 And when we watch the social fabric torn apart on everything from sneakers to football, it seems very difficult to put all of that back together.

00:51:16.000 It seems to me that bipartisan legislation is not going to make everybody feel better about everything.

00:51:20.000 It seems like whatever legislative remedies are sought to various problems, just because you got a Democrat and a Republican shaking hands doesn't heal the problem.

00:51:28.000 What we have here is that neighbors don't trust each other.

00:51:31.000 Neighbors don't see each other in any social setting.

00:51:33.000 If the only thing that we have in common is government, we have nothing in common.

00:51:36.000 That's right.

00:51:37.000 So how do we rebuild?

00:51:39.000 Let's spend some time on individual parenting.

00:51:41.000 You're a parent, obviously.

00:51:42.000 You have a 12-year-old and an 8-year-old.

00:51:43.000 I'm a parent with two kids under five.

00:51:44.000 What's the best way to educate your kids to be part of that social fabric, to rebuild democracy from the ground up in every generation?

00:51:51.000 So we have a whole chapter on play, and why play is so important for the development of any human being, and why play basically lets you practice the skills of democracy.

00:52:01.000 When Alexis de Tocqueville traveled in America in 1831, he was so impressed.

00:52:06.000 He said, you know, in France, if some great thing needs to be done, it's going to be done by the monarch.

00:52:13.000 And in England, it's going to be done by the aristocrats.

00:52:15.000 But in America, if they need to build a bridge or start a hospital, they get a bunch of people together, they form an association.

00:52:22.000 Americans have a genius for the art of association, he said.

00:52:26.000 I think so.

00:52:42.000 All the parents are overprotective, including us.

00:52:44.000 When we try to send our kids out, like we send them out to go do an errand, go across the street, my son would say, but daddy, everybody looks at me funny because there are no other kids out there.

00:52:53.000 So it's a social coordination problem.

00:52:55.000 I'm hopeful that Americans will realize we have a mental health catastrophe.

00:52:59.000 We've got to do something.

00:53:00.000 Forget politics.

00:53:01.000 We've got to do something for the well-being of our kids.

00:53:04.000 So I urge every viewer, every listener, go to letgrow.org.

00:53:10.000 It's an organization started by Lenore Skenazy, who wrote the book Free Range Kids.

00:53:14.000 I'm on the board.

00:53:15.000 And it has all kinds of suggestions for how you can make your neighborhood and your elementary school and all your schools, how you can make them better able to support free-range child rearing, kids having a few hours a day in which there's not an adult watching them, how you can get administrators to back off and give them more room.

00:53:36.000 So we have a lot of ideas there for how you can address the problems from childhood up through high school.

00:53:43.000 Next, we have to look at all of our institutions, all the places that we congregate.

00:53:47.000 And so, let's talk about religious congregations, workplaces, universities.

00:53:54.000 Beginning a year or two ago, I started getting calls or hearing from CEOs saying, we're being torn apart, battles over bathrooms, battles over this.

00:54:02.000 A lot of the identity politics issues, which again, have to be solved.

00:54:05.000 But if you do it in a common enemy way, it's impossible to solve.

00:54:10.000 So leaders of almost any organization are facing these problems.

00:54:14.000 My rabbi, I go to Central Synagogue in Manhattan.

00:54:17.000 My rabbi, when a rabbi speaks, says anything about Israel, 1.00

00:54:20.000 We've created a program

00:54:39.000 Runs on any app, it's free, any platform, it's free, in which it walks you through some basic moral psychology.

00:54:45.000 In a sense, it kind of walks you through the righteous mind and some other social psychology about why viewpoint diversity is good for you.

00:54:51.000 It makes you smarter.

00:54:52.000 It makes you better able to deal with people.

00:54:54.000 Why it's so hard to do that.

00:54:56.000 How do you talk to people?

00:54:58.000 How do you talk to people who differ?

00:54:59.000 And our belief, our hope, and we have some evidence, is that if any group takes this training, it only takes about an hour and a half, if any group does this training,

00:55:10.000 Whenever problems come up, they'll be better skilled.

00:55:12.000 They'll have a common vocabulary.

00:55:14.000 They'll be able to resolve it.

00:55:15.000 So I think we need to see this as a national crisis, rising polarization, which is making all of our institutions less functional.

00:55:23.000 My fear is that if the Nike gambit pays off for Nike, more companies will do that.

00:55:29.000 We'll have red and blue restaurants, red and blue dentists.

00:55:32.000 Everything will be politics all the time.

00:55:34.000 My God, what a nightmare that will be.

00:55:36.000 So we all have to take responsibility for this, and it starts with us as individuals, and then steps right away from us as individuals into every organization or institution that we're part of.

00:55:46.000 We can all be part of the solution at that more local level.

00:55:50.000 I do have one final question, and that final question will be, what is best case scenario for the country in 20 years?

00:55:55.000 What's worst case scenario for the country in 20 years?

00:55:58.000 But if you want to hear the answer,

00:56:00.000 Oh, Ben, thanks so much for having me on.

00:56:22.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay.

00:56:25.000 Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.

00:56:27.000 Associate Producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens.

00:56:29.000 Edited by Alex Zingaro.

00:56:31.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Caromina.

00:56:33.000 Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Alvera.

00:56:34.000 And title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.

00:56:36.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

00:56:40.000 Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.

The Ben Shapiro Show - October 07, 2018

Jonathan Haidt | The Ben Shapiro Sunday Special Ep. 22

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