That's a NYT headline, and of course, I suspect it of being intended to provoke the kind of sarcasm I put up there in the post title.
The person the students "object to" is Jonathan Haidt, who's been selected as the speaker at their graduation. As the NYT puts it: "the choice reflects a dismissal of their values at a moment they should cherish." He's getting the platform of their graduation ceremony.
In his breakout book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” he and his co-author, Greg Lukianoff, argued that schools cultivated a mentality of fragility, making personal safety paramount, while de-emphasizing problem-solving skills. Students, they concluded, were insulated from encountering uncomfortable situations and upsetting ideas, leaving them ill-prepared to handle difficulty as adults....
“Many students have reported feelings of disappointment, disgust, unenthusiasm, defeat, and embarrassment,” the letter went on, expressing regret that their celebratory moment had instead “become another instance of being misunderstood.”
The students' letter noted that a recent NYU graduating class got Taylor Swift as their speaker. Another got Sonia Sotomayor. Haidt is a professor at N.Y.U. Maybe the students wanted more of an exciting personality, but certainly not a scold! You can understand the disappointment, disgust, unenthusiasm, defeat, and embarrassment. You're asking your family to come to this big event for you, one where students 4 years ahead of you got Taylor Swift, and you have to tell them it's a business school professor who writes about how Americans are too fragile these days. Yeah, I see how "embarrassment" got on that list of feelings.
They were loudly chanting her name, and she instructed them to shout out their own name, the idea being, I think, to unleash a hilarious, heartwarming cacophony:
This might be the most awkward moment ever, the second-hand embarassment is real pic.twitter.com/ObaMKPR9c3
But she got silence. She still pretended she'd received the desired response, and declared the conclusion to be derived from the demonstration that hadn't happened: "It's about all of us."
Apparently, individualism is not in vogue... or not something her people feel good about expressing loud and proud.
If I followed the method of the elite media and the Democratic Party, I would call it fascistic. The crowd showed that it only wanted to be unified behind the identity of the adored leader.
"... this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT. I thought the idea was brilliant because I had just begun to see these new ways of thinking among some students at NYU. I volunteered to help Greg write it up, and in August 2015 our essay appeared in The Atlantic with the title: 'The Coddling of the American Mind.' Greg did not like that title; his original suggestion was 'Arguing Towards Misery: How Campuses Teach Cognitive Distortions.' He wanted to put the reverse CBT hypothesis in the title. After our essay came out, things on campus got much worse...."
Let me add the radical feminist hypothesis: The subordination of women is the age-old way of the world, and we ought to suspect that any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of subordination.
"... about the George Floyd unrest last week. Bennet, the brother of 2020 White House candidate Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., had apologized late last week after previously defending the piece, titled, 'Send in the Troops.' Cotton, R-Ark., called for the government to deploy troops as a last resort to help quell riots and looting that emerged amid the anger over Floyd's death in Minneapolis police custody last month. The publication sparked a revolt among Times journalists, with some saying it endangered black employees. Some staff members called out sick Thursday in protest, and the Times later announced that a review found the piece did not meet its standards.... 'Last week we saw a significant breakdown in our editing processes, not the first we've experienced in recent years,' [Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger wrote]. 'James and I agreed that it would take a new team to lead the department through a period of considerable change.'"
The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes [and] the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same. The Old Guard lives by a set of principles we can broadly call civil libertarianism. They assumed they shared that worldview with the young people they hired who called themselves liberals and progressives. But it was an incorrect assumption. The New Guard has a different worldview, one articulated best by @JonHaidt and @glukianoff. They call it "safetyism," in which the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech.
It's interesting that people who made safety so overwhelmingly important would accept rioting and vehemently oppose government's protecting citizens from the forces of chaos.
"The virus is another reminder that hardship is woven into the warp and woof existence. Training a young person is training her or him to master hardship, to endure suffering and, by building something new from the wreckage, redeem it."
That reminded me of a discussion here on the blog on April 5th. Excerpt:
Is there much of a chance that after this thing is over, we'll be more serious, more aware of what really matters in life...?... We were just talking yesterday about whether the Coronavirus Era will spell the end of "wokeism." I said, I thought wokeism would survive, but maybe snowflakeism would succumb.
Is "snowflakeism" the same as "safetyism"?
Here's how Brooks introduced his term:
Over the past decades, a tide of “safetyism” has crept over American society. As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt put it in their book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” this is the mentality that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. The goal is to eliminate any stress or hardship a child might encounter, so he or she won’t be wounded by it.
I've read that book, and I have it in searchable form. I can see that "safetyism" is used prominently, but do Lukianoff and Haidt ever say "snowflakeism"? No, they only use the word "snowflake" once, in their summing up paragraph at the very end:
As far as we can tell from private conversations, most university presidents reject the culture of safetyism.... From our conversations with students, we believe that most high school and college students despise call-out culture and would prefer to be at a school that had little of it. Most students are not fragile, they are not “snowflakes,” and they are not afraid of ideas. So if a small group of universities is able to develop a different sort of academic culture—one that finds ways to make students from all identity groups feel welcome without using the divisive methods that seem to be backfiring on so many campuses—we think that market forces will take care of the rest.... Entire towns and school districts will organize themselves to enable and encourage more free-range parenting. They will do this not primarily to help their students get into college but to reverse the epidemic of depression, anxiety, self-injury, and suicide that is afflicting our children. There will be a growing recognition across the country that safetyism is dangerous and that it is stunting our children’s development.
"... the defiantly raw and noisy follow-up to Nevermind, their much slicker breakthrough album... And if you really want to feel old, think about this: In Utero is an older album today than the Beatles' White Album was on the day In Utero was released!"
Writes my son John on Facebook, with audio and commentary on various album cuts. [ADDED: Also presented in blog form, here, where it's easier to read and enjoy.] Example:
“Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” is one of my favorite Nirvana songs, with manically oscillating guitar noise over relentlessly thumping drums. Most of the song is not quite “radio friendly,” but it gets most melodic in the bridge, with Kurt Cobain offering uncharacteristically straightforward advice: “Hate, hate your enemies/Save, save your friends/Find, find your place/Speak, speak the truth.”
As I wrote in the comments over there:
“Hate, hate your enemies/Save, save your friends...” made me think of a book I just read, which identified that sort of thinking as one of the "three great untruths" that are ruining the American mind...
The book is "The Coddling of the American Mind," which identifies "The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life Is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People." From Chapter 3 of the book:
The bottom line is that the human mind is prepared for tribalism. Human evolution is not just the story of individuals competing with other individuals within each group; it’s also the story of groups competing with other groups—sometimes violently. We are all descended from people who belonged to groups that were consistently better at winning that competition. Tribalism is our evolutionary endowment for banding together to prepare for intergroup conflict. When the “tribe switch” is activated, we bind ourselves more tightly to the group, we embrace and defend the group’s moral matrix, and we stop thinking for ourselves. A basic principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds and blinds,” which is a useful trick for a group gearing up for a battle between “us” and “them.” In tribal mode, we seem to go blind to arguments and information that challenge our team’s narrative. Merging with the group in this way is deeply pleasurable—as you can see from the pseudotribal as you can see from the pseudotribal antics that accompany college football games.
But being prepared for tribalism doesn’t mean we have to live in tribal ways....
It's not easy to forget that Kurt Cobain committed suicide, but, reading those lyrics, I feel that it's worth reminding you that he shot himself to death less than a year after writing that. It's hard to know, reading lyrics, whether the writer is speaking in his own voice or inhabiting a persona whose views he hates. Lyrics Genius, annotating those lyrics, says:
Kurt Cobain was not about forgiving one’s enemies. In his personal journal, he wrote:
John Lennon has been my idol all my life but he’s dead wrong about revolution… find a representative of gluttony or oppression and blow the motherfuckers [sic] head off."
And then he blew his own head off, and somebody else blew out John Lennon's heart.
I'm reading that factoid in "The Coddling of the American Mind" by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. "Why is there a little demographic island of Democrats among white Americans born in the early 1950s?" I'm on that island, so I'm interested in the answer, which — as I listened to the audiobook — I assumed was Vietnam.
Haidt and Lukianoff cite "the period of emotionally intense national political events" around 1965-1972 when we "islanders" were in our politically impressionable years, ages 14 to 24.
For Americans born in the early 1950s, all you have to do to evoke visceral flashbacks to 1968 is say things like: MLK, RFK, Black Panthers, Tet offensive, My Lai, Chicago Democratic National Convention, Richard Nixon. If those words don’t flood you with feelings, then do an internet search for “Chuck Braverman 1968.” The five-minute video montage will leave you speechless. Just imagine what it must have been like to be a young adult developing a political identity, perhaps newly arrived on a college campus, as momentous moral struggles, tragedies, and victories happened all around you.
I don't have to imagine, but here's the video montage:
The authors proceed to assert that "the years from 2012 through 2018 seem like the closest we’ve come to the intensity of the stretch from 1968 to 1972" and that "[t]oday’s college students have lived through extraordinary times, and, as a result, many of them have developed an extraordinary passion for social justice." There's a long list of "extraordinary things" — Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Donald Trump, Caitlin Jenner, school shootings. But I don't think these can compare with the Vietnam War with the draft, the assassinations, the riots, the Manson murders, the hippie movement, and Nixon.
"... to enhance their internal cohesion and their shared sense of moral order. Durkheim described human beings as 'homo duplex,' or 'two-level man.' We are very good at being individuals pursuing our everyday goals (which Durkheim called the level of the 'profane,' or ordinary). But we also have the capacity to transition, temporarily, to a higher collective plane, which Durkheim called the level of the 'sacred.' He said that we have access to a set of emotions that we experience only when we are part of a collective—feelings like 'collective effervescence,' which Durkheim described as social 'electricity' generated when a group gathers and achieves a state of union. (You’ve probably felt this while doing things like playing a team sport or singing in a choir, or during religious worship.) People can move back and forth between these two levels throughout a single day, and it is the function of religious rituals to pull people up to the higher collective level, bind them to the group, and then return them to daily life with their group identity and loyalty strengthened. Rituals in which people sing or dance together or chant in unison are particularly powerful. A Durkheimian approach is particularly helpful when applied to sudden outbreaks of moralistic violence that are mystifying to outsiders...."
I wanted to blog this passage because of the prompt, "You’ve probably felt this while doing things like playing a team sport or singing in a choir, or during religious worship." Tell me how you relate to that. I'll tell you how I do.
I've been in some situations where I have seen it happening to other people, and my own reaction was markedly to separate from the group and become especially aware of my individuality. I never feel pulled into the collective. It has the opposite effect on me. I don't know why I'm immune, but I may have been inoculated by Frank Zappa.
It was Friday, February 2, 1969, at the Fillmore East, and in the middle of the show Zappa — I believe he was wearing red velvet/satin pants — divided up the audience into parts — maybe 4 sections — each assigned to sing out when pointed at. I didn't sing when pointed at, but I was interested in the sound he got flowing through the big audience as he escalated to more and more elaborate pointing patterns. He kept going until the crowd — struggling to respond to his showy conducting — could not keep up and it became cacophony. At that point, as I remember it, Zappa gave the crowd a gesture — perhaps a contemptuous 2-handed get-outta-here — and said something to the effect of, You people were idiots to have followed me in the first place. But I had not followed him, and so my resistance to the ecstasy of crowd merger — which I'd worried was stand-offish and putting me at risk of a joyless future — was vindicated.
That was a rather innocuous occasion. (And — I had to look this up — the words "innocuous" and "inoculate" do not have a shared etymology. The "oc" in "inoculate" goes back to the Latin word for eye — "oculus" — which also came to mean bud. The idea of grafting a bud into a plant got transferred into the medical context we think of today, which I was using metaphorically, above. The extra "n" in "innocuous" should get you to see — with your oculus — that it's not "oc" but "noc." That word comes from "nocere," the Latin meaning to hurt, which is also the source of "noxious.")
So... that Frank Zappa routine was a rather innocuous display, but it worked — as he intended? — to inoculate at least some of us... at least me... from susceptibility to collective effervescence.
When else have I seen that kind of crowd merger and felt stronger in my sense of individuation? First, I remember another concert — Pantera, in 1996. I attended this concert here in Madison only because in those days I had the privilege of driving 15-year-old boys to concerts. I enjoyed it, but in a distanced way, and there were times when the lead singer was exhorting a crowd and the crowd was responding en masse in a way that made me contemplate what it would be like to be in the midst of a 1930s Nazi rally. And, most notably, I remember the Wisconsin protests of 2011, as they gained momentum day by day, with endless hours of drumming and chanting. The protesters would stay for long hours in the state capitol building — many of them overnight — and I would observe for a while then go home but come back another day. So the changes in the atmosphere were very striking to me. Whatever serious ideas and beliefs individual protesters may have had, their collective mind was courting madness.
IN THE COMMENTS: Lots of great stuff, but I wanted to highlight this video recommended byDust Bunny Queen ("One of the best recent examples of this spontaneous collective effervescence is the Green Day concert in Hyde Park, England in 2017. Green Day was late and to keep the crowd entertained the song by Queen Bohemian Rhapsody was played on loud speakers. The crowd spontaneously started to sing all the words, perform to the song, singing, dancing, jumping. Bohemian Rhapsody by by 65,000+ singers"):
That was great. I got chills watching/listening here at my little desk.
"... which they’re claiming to save from 'The New Intolerance of Campus Activism,' as Friedersdorf’s headline writer put it sloppily. (He probably meant to write 'in,' not 'of' — a Freudian slip, perhaps.) But the freedoms of speech that conservative pundits are touting so passionately against 'liberal' totalitarianism on campus mean little if moneyed interests have the megaphones and the scapegoats, while most ordinary citizens have laryngitis from straining to be heard."
I write this as a professor.... Here’s a brief and by no means exhaustive list of things I’ve carefully selected for college syllabi and deliberately taught in college courses: a pair of poems about impotence and premature ejaculation; a satire about slaughtering human infants and feeding them to the poor; a poem that uses the c-word twice in a mere 33 lines, and describes King Charles II in coitus with his mistress with the phrase “his dull, graceless bollocks hang an arse”; a novel in which a wealthy man gets his maid to marry him by kidnapping her and continually cornering her with unwanted sexual advances; a graphic history of the torture methods and other cruelties done to African slaves leading up to the Haitian Revolution; a poem written in the voice of a male domestic servant and attempted rapist contacting his victim from prison....
"One of the great truths taught by Buddhism (and Stoicism, Hinduism, and many other traditions) is that you can never achieve happiness by making the world conform to your desires. But you can master your desires and habits of thought. This, of course, is the goal of cognitive behavioral therapy. With this in mind, here are some steps that might help reverse the tide of bad thinking on campus."
The most interesting paragraph to me in an article in The Atlantic that's getting a lot of attention, "The Coddling of the American Mind" (subtitle: "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."), by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.
If you've already been reading and thinking about this article, I wonder if you noticed the Buddhism-Stoicism-Hinduism angle and the "cognitive behavioral therapy." This isn't the usual stuff of American free speech and political debate. It's strangely aligned with the "coddling" that's supposed to be bad, because it circles around inner peace, not getting shaken up and challenged and activated.
But that idealized university no longer exists. It was wiped out in the 1990s by administrators, diversity hustlers and liability-management professionals, who were often abetted by professors committed to political agendas.
"What's disappointing and rightfully scorned," Mr. Lukianoff says, "is that in some cases the very professors who were benefiting from the free-speech movement turned around to advocate speech codes and speech zones in the 1980s and '90s."
Today, university bureaucrats suppress debate with anti-harassment policies that function as de facto speech codes....
At Western Michigan University, it is considered harassment to hold a "condescending sex-based attitude." That just about sums up the line "I think of all Harvard men as sissies" (from F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920 novel "This Side of Paradise"), a quote that was banned at Yale when students put it on a T-shirt.
More examples like that at the link — which goes to the Wall Street Journal — and in Lukianoff's book "Unlearning Liberty." There's video too at the link, displayed with this unintended freeze-frame humor:
I'm at this debate, which I mentioned the other day, between Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and UW polisci prof Howard Schweber, here at the University of Wisconsin Law School. I'll just jot down some notes as the spirit moves me.
1. Lukianoff. He's going to talk fast. Keep up. Some people think PC is a relic of the 80s, but really universities do repress what makes them uncomfortable. Not so much political speech, but speech that offends liberal values about diversity. He reels out a lot of examples of campus speech codes and the way they've been applied. PC is alive and well, and it harms the "atmosphere for debate."
2. Schweber. Is there a right to be offensive at the university? You wouldn't get away with this sort of thing in the workplace. (For example, posting a flyer saying overweight women should take the stairs for your convenience.) Academic freedom doesn't mean you have a right to be obnoxious, only that you can choose your viewpoint. The real threat comes from the right, suppressing speech because of ideology.
3. Schweber makes the distinction between crude drunken "conduct" and real academic freedom, which is justified by the positive goal of enabling people to oppose "the current regime."
4. Though Lukianoff -- lucky enough? -- said he was going to talk fast and did, but Schweber talked much faster.
5. The first question from the audience is about Kevin Barrett teaching the 9/11 conspiracy theory in his class here on Islam. Schweber says it's an easy case because he was teaching an unpopular idea critical of the government. The important line is between "Fuck you" and "Fuck the draft."
6. Lukianoff says the UW got everything wrong on Barrett. They objected to his speaking on his ideas outside of the classroom, and inside the classroom, they felt unable to dictate the scope of what subjects can be covered in the class. By allowing him to teach what didn't belong in a course on Islam, they got him the attention of mainstream media, and then they tried to stop him from taking advantage of these opportunities to promote his ideas outside of the classroom. That's exactly backwards.
7. Schweber agrees.
8. Alan Weisbard has the next question. "We're living in a time of blogs... AutoAdmit... Googling." People are afraid of being identified in public speech. His question is about preserving the right to anonymous speech.
9. I realize what bothers me so much about what Schweber is saying. He doesn't value the form of expression, only the content. He thinks what people have to say can be reframed in more polite terms. But I think the form matters, that there is value in the very sound of disrespect, mockery, contempt, and offensiveness.
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