Coddle U vs. Strengthen U: What a Great University Should Be
One of the things that most bothers me about the modern “victimhood culture” of microaggressions, trigger warnings, and safe spaces is how directly it flies in the face of the world’s greatest wisdom, which I reviewed in The Happiness Hypothesis. For example, chapter 7 is about the uses of adversity: “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” as Nietszche put it. Mencius explained the idea more fully in the 3rd century BCE:
When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, […and] place obstacles in the paths of his deeds, so as to stimulate his mind, harden his nature, and improve wherever he is incompetent
Nasim Taleb nailed the idea with his recent book “Anti-Fragile.” A carton of eggs is fragile, so you’d better handle it with care. But many things in our world are anti-fragile: they are systems that increase in capability, resilience, or robustness as a result of mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. The immune system is anti-fragile: If you protect your kids from dirt and germs, you’ll weaken their immune system and set them up for more autoimmune diseases. Similarly children and teenagers are anti-fragile. If you protect their feelings with trigger warnings, safe spaces, and micro-aggression training for everyone in the community, you weaken them, you make them fragile.
I was making a list in my mind of all the ways that victimhood culture violates ancient wisdom when I was invited to give a talk at the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale. In my talk, I run through three sets of ancient ideas that many modern “coddling” universities (and high schools) violate, and I imagined what a university would look like if it was built on ancient wisdom instead. I called this mythical university “Strengthen U.” In the video, I pretend to be admissions officers from the two universities, trying to recruit high school students to apply.
Here is the video (30 minutes):
Here is a link to a condensed transcript of the talk, including most of the slides.
Incidentally, I thought the Buckley program was terrific. It’s a student organization for conservatives, but in my visit I found that it has some real political diversity in it. The audience at my talk was roughly a third right of center, a third left, and a third libertarian — this is the most political diversity I have ever seen when speaking at a university. These students are engaging with arguments from all sides, and doing it civilly. They will emerge stronger and smarter. Progressive Yale students who don’t get involved with Buckley have few other chances to be exposed to conservative ideas or conservative faculty. (That’s what happened to me when I was at Yale in the 1980s.) If they go on to careers in law, politics, or business, where they must engage with conservative ideas and arguments, they will not know what to say, and will fall back on the kinds of Marcusian rhetorical devices that I describe in the video, and which you can see in action in the Twitter exchange at the bottom of this post. For more on the benefits of political diversity at universities, please see HeterodoxAcademy.org.
See http://www.theahi.org
The psychology of vindictive protectiveness has existed since the French Revolution. Its means have adapted to the cultural norms of the time and place in which it has existed, but its ends have always been the same.
Haidt’s work is the Rosetta Stone through which we can understand it.
The mindset Haidt and Lukianoff describe, of which trigger warnings, microaggressions, and cognitively distorted thinking are but symptoms, is a natural and nearly inevitable consequence of the one (or three, depending on the context in which Haidt describes it) foundation moral matrix and the epistemological hubris of human reason – the rationalist delusion – that had its birth in the enlightenment and which seems to go hand in hand with it.
When most of the evolved psychological mechanisms of social perception and understanding are unavailable to both kinds of one’s thinking – Kahneman’s Fast and Slow thinking, aka Haidt’s rider/press secretary and elephant – one is left with virtually no logical alternative but to conclude that people who think differently must be, can only be, socially, psychologically, or cognitively dysfunctional. And when one knows that people who think differently are sick in this way it’s only natural for one to feel not merely rationally justified but also morally obligated to prevent them and their ideas from participating in social discourse.
In the late eighteenth century gruesome public executions and the guillotine were cultural norms, and were the tools with which the politically incorrect were dealt with. Those tools are no longer the norms. Today the tools are things like trigger warnings, microaggressions, disinvitations, the legal system, and depriving people like bakers and photographers and internet CEOs of their livelihoods when they don’t comply with the whatever happens to be the current politically correct orthodoxy. I suppose we should consider that “progress.”
The problem is exacerbated by the intellectual stranglehold of ideological hegemony the one-foundation moral matrix enjoys in so many areas of human intellectual and moral endeavor. From the earliest moments in their lives all the way to their final days our children are immersed in the values, virtues, non-sequiturs, and cognitive distortions of the monistic moral matrix of “care” like fish in water, either unable to conceive of other ways of seeing and thinking, or repulsed by them.
Haidt himself, with his doctorate level Ivy-League education (in psychology, no less!!) admits to never having been exposed to actual conservative thought until he reached is forties, and even then only when he actively sought it out.
HeterodoxAcademy is a welcomed and encouraged step in the right direction, but if it addresses education only at the university, or even the high school, level then it is too little too late; it is closing the barn door after the horse is gone.
Only through teaching the techniques of CBT and lessons like those in The Righteous Mind in age-appropriate modules from the very earliest days of our childrens’ intellectual development will it be possible for the critical thinking of Strengthening U. to replace the rhetorical tricks and cognitive distortions that now pass as arguments in the water of the one-foundation moral hegemony our children now swim and grow up in.
the solution is fairly easy on an intellectual level, but impossible on a political level.
keep women out of college.
wow. that’s ridiculous
There is another option: Different colleges that feature different concepts. Nothing wrong with actually having both, coddle.U and strengthen.U. Would also give scientists the opportunity to observe the long term effects of different codes of behaviour and curiculae on students.
And look at his name! Patriarchal landmine is extremely patriarchal and explosive? Who would have guessed? For a more constructive, less ad hominem debate, can you defend keeping women out of college?
I can read faster than I can listen. Could you post a transcript of the talk?
Thanks
Great idea. I just posted a transcript below the video
I wrote a post on this topic too, check it out. We have to fight back, if not just for the free speech rights so that we can have a true dialogue on issues with political implications, but also because it’s harmful to those who are being encouraged into a perpetual feeling of victimhood.
http://notthatgungho.com/victim-nation/
Don’t you remember the peer pressure of your youth? These kids are simply experiencing prolonged childhood and are taking longer to become self-actualized adults. Everything in life is now later. I wasn’t a grandparent until I was 67 because I had kids later and my kids had kids later. It takes longer to grow up now than it used to. So, also think about yourselves and how mature you really are. I am still learning and growing (I hope). So keep an open mind and think more before you make up the truth.
Coddle University – Life is something that happens TO you. You are a victim and have no control over what happens to you.
Strengthen University – Life is something that happens FOR you. You are an active participant and have some control over what happens to you.
Higher education has become a racket. Student costs are obscene. College presidents allow this “social justice” movement to proceed in order to protect their share of this racket – their obscenely high salaries. Diversity deans, otherwise unemployable, are happy to just be collecting a salary despite the negative outcomes of their voodoo.
People react to market forces and here the people who have the power and duty to do the right thing are allowing their selfish interests to trump applying reason on their campus. The academy needs leaders not narcissists.
Great post. Nice tips on things that every student should know in order to be successful.