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 (Allen Lane, 2018): Reviewed by Robert M. Ellis

I picked this book up almost by accident in a newly-reopened second hand book store, though I was already an admirer of two-thirds of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind with its analysis of six foundational political values (whilst also disagreeing with its reduction of ethics to social conformity). In the three years since it was published, this book seems to have become deservedly popular, even though I was wholly unaware of it, and it is not yet significantly out of date. It shows much of the same acuity as The Righteous Mind, applying psychological insights to pressing social and political problems. However, it is much more engaged with immediate issues than that. I found it tremendously insightful in casting light on the deeper causes of the crisis of American (and hence of world) politics in recent years. What caused Trump, when nothing like Trump had happened before? This book reveals that the roots of Trump’s rise have much to do with a reaction against some tendencies that developed on the left on US campuses, and that these tendencies in their turn have their roots in other negative long-term changes in Western society.

What also makes this book well worth reading is its clarity and even-handedness. There will always be some ideologically over-committed readers for whom even-handedness can mean nothing very different from supporting their own position, but Haidt (and probably Lukianoff) are obviously well-practised in the skill of recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of all sides in relation to the psychological conditions that helped to produce them. They also have the courage to pick their way through this political mindfield without losing their balance: an example that is badly needed.

The title is slightly unfortunate. Though it is in part a prolonged protest against the culture of ‘safetyism’ that has gripped Western life, this book is not really much about ‘coddling’ in the narrower senses in which the word is often used (keeping your child in bed with a mild illness, for instance). It is much more about the effects of increased stress in making people more reactive and defensive. The balls of cotton wool on the cover also seem to me a serious design mistake, as they are both indistinct as visual objects and they interfere with the clarity of the title print. But one should not judge a book too much by its cover.

Some of the framing of the first of the four parts of this book could also be off-putting. It’s obviously intended to make the book approachable and accessible, but in the process seems to make its message cruder. The authors start off with what they call ‘three great untruths’ that have become current in the culture of US universities and beyond: firstly that what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker (the opposite of Nietzsche’s famous dictum), secondly that you should always trust your feelings, and thirdly that life is a battle between good and evil people. Of course, these are not ‘untruths’ at all, but principles that are having a seriously bad effect when people apply them. The second of these, which particularly made me cringe, is of course not just about ‘feelings’ at all, but basically about absolutizing our assumptions by taking them to be the whole story. It could just as well be about ‘reasoned’ thoughts, but ones based on narrow premises. I do think this kind of language, treating principles as ‘truths’ and reinforcing a simplistic reason-emotion distinction, is part of the problem. However, this is the habitual confused language with which many people still discuss these things. I could only sigh over it, but beyond it distinguish that Lukianoff and Haidt were basically protesting about a particular kind of absolutization of great importance today.

I found the biggest insights in parts 2 and 3 of this book, which show first the effects and then the causes of a phenomenon that I had not understood so fully before – the rise of what the authors call ‘safetyism’ on American campuses and beyond. While this has parallels to what the right has dubbed ‘cancel culture’ and ‘wokeism’, the account of these phenomena in this book is far better balanced than anything you are likely to read from the right that weaponizes these terms (and this book does not use such terms at all). ‘Safetyism’ is a new absolutizing movement, coming to the fore in many US universities between 2013 and 2017. It claims that intellectual challenge can interfere with students’ ‘safety’, because it could make them feel uncomfortable or stressed. By the conceptual creep of terms like ‘safety’ and ‘violence’, this has given license for some students to (sometimes violently) object to and block even the discussion of beliefs that they disagree with, on the grounds that even that discussion could be a threat to them. Before they have properly developed the capacity for handling disagreement in a context of wider contextual awareness, students have been in some cases pitched into a political struggle that has regressed to tribalistic warfare, where the basic conditions for deeper investigation of our assumptions have been destroyed.

The scale of this phenomenon should not be exaggerated. For instance, it has not hit all US campuses to anything like the same extent. Though we may find some of the same tendencies of thinking across the world in the spread of approaches like critical race theory, in places like the UK the impact has as yet been nowhere near so extreme. Yet the authors document a number of shocking examples, particularly including the ‘Milo Riot’ in Berkeley in Feb 2017, and the anarchic meltdown that happened at Evergreen State College in Washington State in May 2017. In these kinds of examples, students have typically reacted to things as trivial as the ambiguous wording of an email from a professor in a position of responsibility, to demonize the professor as a ‘racist’ and call for their dismissal. Shockingly, the colleges concerned have then not supported their staff, and in many cases they have been forced to resign or have even been physically attacked. The very people in US society who are probably the least racist, the most aware of injustice and its complex causes, and the best motivated to try to reduce these – the academics – are the very people who seem to have borne the brunt of this uncontrolled student reactivity. But the effects of this have also rippled far beyond campuses, creating a right wing reaction including a demonization of Antifa, Black Lives Matter and other justice movements, and feeding into the accelerating polarization of US political discourse. All this, of course, helps to explain both why Trump was elected in 2016, and why the election of 2020 was still extraordinarily close despite the huge failures of his presidency.

Lukianoff and Haidt’s account of the causes of all this (part 3), is one I found extremely illuminating. They identify six causes: the increasing general polarization of US political discourse, the rise of depression and anxiety amongst US adolescents during the 2010’s, the rise of over-protective parenting, the reduction of free play for US children, the increasing power of bureaucratic administrators rather than professors in US universities, and the prompts to social justice activism in public events from 2012 onwards. All of these causes are consistent with my own wider account of the causes of absolutization, but they provide valuable specific understanding about why it has broken out with particular strength in this context.

The authors put their finger on a key point of difference for US teenagers from the 2010’s – namely the rise of ubiquitous mobile phones and social media. This constantly focuses young people on decontextualized information, over-stimulates their social reward circuits, and thus causes constant anxiety about social marginalization and exclusion (which particularly affects girls to a greater extent). Up to about 2 hours of this per day seems to be manageable, and does have some positive effects alongside the negative ones: but many teenagers spend more like 9 hours a day on a screen. The effects of this in rewiring teenagers’ brains should not be underestimated, and one of the effects has been an epidemic of depression and anxiety. When a generation of especially anxious teenagers hit the campuses, it’s hardly surprising that they felt less able to cope with intellectual challenge or disagreement than previous generations.

Also contributing to these phenomena has been a middle class tendency to restrict children’s freedom to play, and to timetable and confine their activities excessively because of groundless fears about their safety. Without free play and the ability to take small risks, children’s psychological development is severely curtailed, as they do not learn how to manage risk or deal confidently with challenges and difficulties. This not only makes them physically, but also intellectually and politically timid. Challenges that would otherwise contribute to their development are then rejected as threats, and produce severe reactions.

This has in turn not been helped by the increasing bureaucratization and consumerization of US universities. Professors are likely to understand the complexities of the learning process, but managers are trained to treat students as consumers, and to back down when they are dissatisfied for fear of losing their custom. The legal framework encourages this by exposing universities to being sued, extending the culture of safetyism to one in which free speech and robust exploration of ideas can no longer take place.

Alongside all this, however, Lukianoff and Haidt do also make a point of showing their full recognition that there are genuine and urgent justice issues in US society about which students and others on the left are protesting. Genuine racism can be found in the police, as the recent case of Derek Chauvin revealed, and there may also be cases of it on campuses. However, these issues are not resolved, but rather exacerbated, by a refusal to allow a speech or a discussion to take place with intimidation and violence, as happened for instance in Berkeley. They are also not aided by professors teaching confused relativist ideologies that support students in the assumption that all inequality must be caused by racism, that all the problems of black people are created by ‘white privilege’, or that you are justified in reacting violently to anything that disturbs you because the doctrine you disagree with is inherently ‘violent’. The authors also show how positive discrimination approaches are extremely likely to cause conflict because they clash with most people’s psychologically deep-rooted sense of procedural justice (that a fair outcome should be proportionate to the input for an individual, not a whole group).

Perhaps surprisingly, however, the authors end on a note of hope that offers many helpful suggestions for reducing these problems, and tries to put them into a wider perspective. Their recommendations include mindfulness and CBT, raising children with a mindset that gives them a little more freedom to make their own mistakes each month, limiting adolescent screen time to 2 hours a day, and clear policies on free speech on campuses. Nevertheless, these problems should not be catastrophized, because in the wider analysis they are partly the result of rising expectations. In the longer-term, too, the worse a problem gets the stronger the incentives for addressing it. There are ways of addressing this outbreak of over-protective anxiety and its political effects, as long as wider society continues to maintain a wider perspective rather than getting caught up in it. In the 2020 US election and its aftermath we saw a severe test of US democratic institutions, but they managed to pass that test. Let us hope that universities, under similar pressure, can show their resilience.

So, I highly recommend this book, and my cautions about some aspects of its presentation are superficial. I especially recommend this book to people on the left who might be inclined to dismiss Haidt as having gone over to ‘the other side’. This book is a bracing corrective to the tribal over-identification to which we are all prone, and which politics tends to exacerbate. It is not a manifestation of the the crude and lurid right-wing attack on ‘cancel culture’, but rather a deeper investigation of the whole set of conditions that created such attacks. Though no author is perfect in their even-handedness, these do pretty well nevertheless. It has greatly improved my understanding of what all the fuss has been about on both sides.