Millennials Coddling and Socialism Madness
NEWSLETTER CONTENTS:
Demanding Protection From Words and Ideas
Part I: Three Bad Ideas
Part II: Bad Ideas in Action
Part III: How Did We Get Here?
Part IV: Wising Up
The Importance of the University to a Functioning Democracy
Older Progressives Value Freedom of Speech
Social justice activism has reached unprecedented levels of prominence in U.S. public consciousness in the last several years and some prior to the last decade. Movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, intersectional feminism, transgender rights, indigenous sovereignty, have touched the American consciousness, and liberal buzzwords like “diversity,” “social justice,” “oppression” and “intersectionality” fill the airwaves, saturate the media, and overwhelm the dialogue on college campuses.
Per Francis Lee, “the popular discourse of justice is largely shaped by reactionary think-pieces, inflamed social media posts, romanticized narratives of movement histories, and prescriptive checklists. All of this belies a lack of foundational understanding of the value of relationships, and how to preserve them when conflict inevitably arises. We’ve found ourselves stuck cycling in between blame, fear, and shame. It is a stale, stunted plane from which to operate.”
Today, in the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health. Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.
Consider this incomplete list of microaggressions, a term used for brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative prejudicial slights and insults toward any group, particularly culturally marginalized groups.
• Anti-LGBT rhetoric
• Bias
• Bullying
• Call-out culture
• Covert racism
• Chauvinism
• Etiquette
• Hostile attribution bias
• Intercultural communication
• Intersectionality
• Ideas of reference and delusions of reference
• LGBTQ stereotypes
• Micro-inequity
• Occupational sexism
• Rankism
• Safe-space
• Stereotype threat
• Trigger warning
• Victim mentality
• White privilege
Demanding Protection From Words and Ideas
Most of the content in this chapter, much of it word for word due to its unique perspective and rationale, is borrowed from the 2018 Sean Stevens book summary of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting up a Generation for Failure, co-authored by Dr. Greg Lukianoff and Dr. Jonathan Haidt.
The spark for the book came with the realization emerging over the past decade that historically, “students had consistently opposed administrative calls for campus censorship, yet recently Lukianoff was encountering more demands for campus censorship, from the students.”
Lukianoff’s biggest concern was that the rationale for justifying increased campus censorship was becoming medicalized, with students claiming that encountering certain kinds of content impaired their ability to function.
Stated simply, Lukianoff’s hypothesis was: “Many university students are learning to think in distorted ways, and this increases their likelihood of becoming fragile, anxious, and easily hurt.”
As explained and summarized by Stevens: In The Coddling of the American Mind, Lukianoff and Haidt contend that the emergence of a culture of “safetyism” has produced institutional practices that overreach in their goals of protecting children from harm.
This, they argue, is a “problem of progress”—an unfortunate side-effect of what are otherwise positive social changes: In American society, the level of comfort and physical safety of most, if not all, people has increased exponentially, when compared to even the recent past. Yet, these advances have also produced institutional practices that, in our contemporary milieu, undermine our ability to solve important social problems.”
Part I of The Coddling of the American Mind devotes an individual chapter to each of three Great Untruths. Key concepts of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) are also introduced. Part II provides evidence of the consequences of believing in the three Great Untruths, by reviewing a variety of events that have occurred on college campuses and within the academy in recent years. Part III offers six explanatory threads for how the culture of safetyism emerged and documents some of the consequences for broader society that may be arising as a result. Part IV offers suggestions for preventing the spread of the three Great Untruths and combatting their existing prevalence.
A summary of each part is as follows:
Part I: Three Bad Ideas
In Part I Lukianoff and Haidt begin by identifying three Great Untruths that have spread widely in recent years, and become particularly prevalent among current college students born 1995 or later:
1. The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
2. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
3. The Untruth of Us versus Them: Life is a battle between good and evil people.
They also delineate the criteria that must be met for something to be classified as a Great Untruth as can be found in modern progressivism:
1. It contradicts ancient wisdom – ideas that are found widely in the wisdom literatures of many cultures.
2. It contradicts modern psychological research on well-being.
3. It harms the individuals and communities who embrace it.
Lukianoff and Haidt begin by arguing that children are “antifragile”—a term popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to describe things that have the capacity to not merely endure stress, but to actually flourish and grow as a result of it. They operationalize this concept as follows:
In Life, We Will Face Completely Unexpected Events
If we have limited, or no, prior exposure to unexpected events, we will likely find navigating them difficult. Systems that are antifragile (like our brain and its cognitive processes) need to encounter unexpected events so that they learn, adapt, and grow, making it more likely uncertainty is successfully navigated.
A system that does not encounter unexpected events, on the other hand, can become rigid, weak, and inefficient, because nothing challenges the system to respond vigorously. Thus, parents and teachers should help children learn and grow from facing risks and stressors, not limit their exposure to them.'
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