The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction • A New York Times Notable Book • Bloomberg Best Book of 2018 • One of Bill Gates’s Top Five Books of All Time
“Their distinctive contribution to the higher-education debate is to meet safetyism on its own, psychological turf . . . Lukianoff and Haidt tell us that safetyism undermines the freedom of inquiry and speech that are indispensable to universities.” —Jonathan Marks, Commentary
“The remedies the book outlines should be considered on college campuses, among parents of current and future students, and by anyone longing for a more sane society.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising—on campus as well as nationally. How did this happen?
First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life.
Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. They examine changes on campus, including the corporatization of universities and the emergence of new ideas about identity and justice. They situate the conflicts on campus within the context of America’s rapidly rising political polarization and dysfunction.
This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines.
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Review
This audiobook is a big miss for me personally as someone from the social science field focused on intellectual ideas and experiments. This is not for the hardcore rational thinker. This is for the school teacher or parent. For me it's nearly all stuff I already know.
I do like Haidt. "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" is a smash hit in academic circles and often is one of the first books to be recommended on the topic of the political divide. Even though it's maybe missing some evidence and conclusive findings his approach to disprove the good vs. evil fallacy between progressives and conservatives is excellent. It's a book that broke new ground and showed people a new way to debate politics without the regular moral judgements. It calmed down the culture war as we had a left-winger/liberal being fair to both sides of the political spectrum.
This book on the other hand is much more simple. Too simple for most people. He presents the current academic culture war in a simplified and layman friendly way. All terms are carefully explained, all anecdotes told in ways focusing on getting the facts right without adding much flair or intellect to them. I'm already someone who knows about culture war so 40% of this book is right away repetitive explanations for me. You can find this basic culture war stuff on many free YouTube channels, forums, online discussions or articles. There is no way to avoid it online and most people in 2020 will just not need such a simplified intro to a topic they already know about. Maybe in 30-50 years the current culture war will be somewhat forgotten and need this intro for young readers. We can only hope… please. This book is a nice intro for absolute newcomers, but nothing overly interesting or engaging. It's not spicy, dramatic or engaging. It's just an intro to a topic many of us are already tired of.
Then another 15% of this book is moral advice and then parenting, teaching and dean advice. Yet again it's on a very low level. He for example talks about the effectiveness of CBT therapy in several chapters. But explaining it would probably take fewer pages than what they used in this book on just introducing it. The parenting advice about letting kids roam free is a very excellent one. But it's basic stuff and yet again lacks more scientific evidence to convince the more critical reader. The advice to universities to not limit free speech is a great one! But his claim about this stuff having some positive economic effect doesn't seem supported by any data in the book. Yet again it becomes Haidt's simple advice without anything to convince critical readers. His moral advice is hit and miss. He advises pro free speech in most settings, which is amazing. He also says that group differences are not necessarily caused by discrimination as a difference doesn't prove a specific causation by itself. Again an extremely important message. But he also very often falls into that identity politics trap he warns about in other parts of the book. Often a person he talks about is introduced with a "by the way, he is gay/black". He tries again and again to gain those woke points by talking about the negative history of the white man, women experiencing discrimination or unfair circumstances for minorities. It's clear some of it is just to gain points among young readers. But often it's stuff that just does not have much basis in any evidence. At least he never supplies it. When talking about some hypothetical white male dominance I expect a ton of evidence to back it up. Like a lot! I'd never directly claim women have low intelligence or black people are lazy without a huge amount of evidence or without being careful about how I state these things if the evidence is not 99% clear. Haidt doesn't have this problem when he talks about blank slate moral values. Those either need to be disproven, which he often does, or they are seen as accepted facts. This becomes the second biggest minus in the book besides the low intellectual nature of it. When you let your critical guard down for all blank slate values you have not actively disproven you invite fallacies into your thinking. And very often Haidt and his co-writer will either present basic moral lectures that are boring common sense or moral lectures that fail even basic philosophical arguments. It becomes a book that's full of good advice for parents and teachers, but still containing quite a few fallacies and then bad, or even nearly terrible, moral arguments.
I'm more forgiving of bad moral values and arguments in otherwise informative books. In this book it feels like nails on a chalkboard. The book is pretty much written in a way where a 13-year-old could understand everything in it. So there is no excuse for messing up even a single argument in it.
Conclusion
This book is just slow and simple. It's nice to have ideas presented in simplified ways, sure. Academic language very often ruins books and papers - we've all seen that. But you also need to understand that Haidt gets away with not being overly academic by just not including much academic research in the book. It's not really that impressive that everything here is easy to understand when much of it is just his personal opinions and advice. That's stuff teenage girls can get right too if the advice is morally simple enough. What would be impressive is a book about some big research area presented in a simple way. That is indeed hard to do.
It's not that I disagree with the book overall. It's just a fair left-wing presentation of SJWs. He's critical enough about the progressive left to make this book a rational enough intro to this moral topic. Unfortunately he himself is at times overly progressive and therefore not always scientifically minded.
I'd probably recommend it to people who want to find out what all that academic culture war is about. Outsiders looking in. SJWs would also get a lot out of this book as it's a chance to have someone very overbearing and soft-progressive describe them outside looking in. For any progressive thinker this is a very needed book.
It's also an okay guide for what not to do as a parent, teacher or educator. But it's not a great guide as such. Thomas Sowell or Charles Murray would be way better for this, but also maybe not as simple for non-academics. By the way, he includes the notorious Charles Murray university attack story in the book. And he mentions a lot of other suck anecdotes. All that stuff is really great info for readers. So you may want to read it for that alone if you are really curious about the culture war.
I really wanted to like this book. But I just feel like it should have been at most 100 pages long in the current version. There are plenty 2 hour long podcast episodes and lectures about this where you also get the personal emotional narration style with it.
This audiobook is a big miss for me personally as someone from the social science field focused on intellectual ideas and experiments. This is not for the hardcore rational thinker. This is for the school teacher or parent. For me it's nearly all stuff I already know.
I do like Haidt. "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" is a smash hit in academic circles and often is one of the first books to be recommended on the topic of the political divide. Even though it's maybe missing some evidence and conclusive findings his approach to disprove the good vs. evil fallacy between progressives and conservatives is excellent. It's a book that broke new ground and showed people a new way to debate politics without the regular moral judgements. It calmed down the culture war as we had a left-winger/liberal being fair to both sides of the political spectrum.
This book on the other hand is much more simple. Too simple for most people. He presents the current academic culture war in a simplified and layman friendly way. All terms are carefully explained, all anecdotes told in ways focusing on getting the facts right without adding much flair or intellect to them. I'm already someone who knows about culture war so 40% of this book is right away repetitive explanations for me. You can find this basic culture war stuff on many free YouTube channels, forums, online discussions or articles. There is no way to avoid it online and most people in 2020 will just not need such a simplified intro to a topic they already know about. Maybe in 30-50 years the current culture war will be somewhat forgotten and need this intro for young readers. We can only hope… please. This book is a nice intro for absolute newcomers, but nothing overly interesting or engaging. It's not spicy, dramatic or engaging. It's just an intro to a topic many of us are already tired of.
Then another 15% of this book is moral advice and then parenting, teaching and dean advice. Yet again it's on a very low level. He for example talks about the effectiveness of CBT therapy in several chapters. But explaining it would probably take fewer pages than what they used in this book on just introducing it. The parenting advice about letting kids roam free is a very excellent one. But it's basic stuff and yet again lacks more scientific evidence to convince the more critical reader. The advice to universities to not limit free speech is a great one! But his claim about this stuff having some positive economic effect doesn't seem supported by any data in the book. Yet again it becomes Haidt's simple advice without anything to convince critical readers. His moral advice is hit and miss. He advises pro free speech in most settings, which is amazing. He also says that group differences are not necessarily caused by discrimination as a difference doesn't prove a specific causation by itself. Again an extremely important message. But he also very often falls into that identity politics trap he warns about in other parts of the book. Often a person he talks about is introduced with a "by the way, he is gay/black". He tries again and again to gain those woke points by talking about the negative history of the white man, women experiencing discrimination or unfair circumstances for minorities. It's clear some of it is just to gain points among young readers. But often it's stuff that just does not have much basis in any evidence. At least he never supplies it. When talking about some hypothetical white male dominance I expect a ton of evidence to back it up. Like a lot! I'd never directly claim women have low intelligence or black people are lazy without a huge amount of evidence or without being careful about how I state these things if the evidence is not 99% clear. Haidt doesn't have this problem when he talks about blank slate moral values. Those either need to be disproven, which he often does, or they are seen as accepted facts. This becomes the second biggest minus in the book besides the low intellectual nature of it. When you let your critical guard down for all blank slate values you have not actively disproven you invite fallacies into your thinking. And very often Haidt and his co-writer will either present basic moral lectures that are boring common sense or moral lectures that fail even basic philosophical arguments. It becomes a book that's full of good advice for parents and teachers, but still containing quite a few fallacies and then bad, or even nearly terrible, moral arguments.
I'm more forgiving of bad moral values and arguments in otherwise informative books. In this book it feels like nails on a chalkboard. The book is pretty much written in a way where a 13-year-old could understand everything in it. So there is no excuse for messing up even a single argument in it.
Conclusion
This book is just slow and simple. It's nice to have ideas presented in simplified ways, sure. Academic language very often ruins books and papers - we've all seen that. But you also need to understand that Haidt gets away with not being overly academic by just not including much academic research in the book. It's not really that impressive that everything here is easy to understand when much of it is just his personal opinions and advice. That's stuff teenage girls can get right too if the advice is morally simple enough. What would be impressive is a book about some big research area presented in a simple way. That is indeed hard to do.
It's not that I disagree with the book overall. It's just a fair left-wing presentation of SJWs. He's critical enough about the progressive left to make this book a rational enough intro to this moral topic. Unfortunately he himself is at times overly progressive and therefore not always scientifically minded.
I'd probably recommend it to people who want to find out what all that academic culture war is about. Outsiders looking in. SJWs would also get a lot out of this book as it's a chance to have someone very overbearing and soft-progressive describe them outside looking in. For any progressive thinker this is a very needed book.
It's also an okay guide for what not to do as a parent, teacher or educator. But it's not a great guide as such. Thomas Sowell or Charles Murray would be way better for this, but also maybe not as simple for non-academics. By the way, he includes the notorious Charles Murray university attack story in the book. And he mentions a lot of other suck anecdotes. All that stuff is really great info for readers. So you may want to read it for that alone if you are really curious about the culture war.
I really wanted to like this book. But I just feel like it should have been at most 100 pages long in the current version. There are plenty 2 hour long podcast episodes and lectures about this where you also get the personal emotional narration style with it.
I never would have read this book on my own as I identify as deeply sensitive. It was suggested from my dad and I am glad I read it. The authors provide some sound research to support the collective increase in call out culture, anxiety, and depression. I also appreciate the solutions they shared as they are quite do-able. I think it’s important to honor our similarities and step away from our us versus them programming for increased solutions and peace.
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