A review of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, Penguin Press (September 4, 2018), 352 pages.In recent years behaviours on university campuses have created widespread unease. Safe spaces, trigger warnings, and speech codes. Demands for speakers to be disinvited. Words construed as violence and liberalism described as 'white supremacy'. Students walking on eggshells, too scared to speak their minds. Controversial speakers violently rebuked - from conservative provocateurs such as Milo Yiannopoulos to serious sociologists such as Charles Murray, to left-leaning academics such as Bret Weinstein.
Historically, campus censorship was enacted by zealous university administrators. Students were radicals who pushed the boundaries of acceptability, like during the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. Today, however, students work in tandem with administrators to make their campus 'safe' from threatening ideas.
Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff's new book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, persuasively unpacks the causes of the current predicament on campus - which they link to wider parenting, cultural and political trends. Haidt is a social psychology professor at New York University and founder of Heterodox Academy. Lukianoff is a constitutional lawyer and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. In 2015, they wrote The Atlantic cover story of the same name.
Comment: One of the most destructive elements of this rise in radical 'safetyism' is the erasing of the line between subjective vs objective harm. We are seeing throughout Western higher education systems more things being redefined as objective harm, no matter how inconsequential. This is a very dangerous precedent as those calling for further and further 'safeties' will be the ones to set laws and policies in the future. The ultimate end of this path is a totalitarian state full of weak and helpless people, enslaved by their fear and willing to submit all their freedoms to the "nanny state" in the name of protection.