The Coddling of the American Mind: Haidt/Lukianoff

so i'm here today with author greg lucianov and jonathan hype greg is president of fire the foundation for individual rights and education and jonathan height is a an eminent social psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at new york university's stern school of business they have co-authored a new book called the coddling of the american mind which is an elaborated version of a famous atlantic monthly essay they published a while back and so today we're here to talk about their new book and about the state of the universities and i suppose society at large so thanks guys very much for joining me today so i thought maybe we'd start talking about the book so do you guys want to provide some background uh maybe you could talk about the atlantic monthly essay and what led up to the book and then we'll get into the details sure sure about that over to greg well um so it all started in 2007 when i was lucky enough to have a full-on medical level depression um really really bad i talk about it in some sort of detail in the uh in the book i realize it's actually at a level which i don't even i realize i wrote about it with details that my wife doesn't know my family doesn't um there's a weird privacy thing that sometimes happens when you're talking you know dictating into a computer that you kind of like this just between me and the computer and now i realize it's probably the most public thing i'll ever write but the thing that saved me the thing that ultimately helped me deal with my depressions in general was cognitive behavioral therapy um in a sense it's sort of like applied stoicism you just look at your own uh thoughts you talk back to the really exaggerated ones you label them as cognitive distortions these include things like generalization catastrophizing binary thinking thinking everything has to be they're all good or all bad i'm actually particularly guilty of these and amazingly if you just actually learn what these distortions are and practice every day to sort of talk back to sort of the more anxious or depressed voices in your own head it's an incredibly effective treatment for depression anxiety and it changed absolutely changed my life meanwhile as this is changing my life i i'm still work i'm still the president of fire which means i defend free speech and uh due process and academic freedom on campus and um i was what and while i was learning all of these intellectual habits all these ways to sort of talk yourself down i was looking around at what administrators were doing and asked and saying to myself wow it's actually kind of like the administrators are saying oh by the way do engage in cognitive distortions do engage in binary thinking do over-generalize and most of all catastrophize all the time and i remember thinking something with the effect of well thank goodness the students don't seem to really be buying it and that's what changed in 2013 2014 um prior to 2013 2014 since i started in 2001 the worst constituency for free speech on campus was actually administrators the best most reliable fans of free speech you could run into on campus were generally the students themselves and then sometime around 2013 2014 we saw uh you know suddenly they were demanding you know everything from trigger warnings to microaggression policies to disinvitations for even people but both on the left and the right on the spectrum and it seemed like we said it seemed to happen almost overnight and this uh and when i i went to talk to uh uh john about it uh we we'd become friends through a mutual friend and i said it's almost i talked about my whole theory that we're teaching a generation the the habits of anxious and depressed people from cognitive behavioral therapy john got really excited about the idea and asked if i wanted to write about it and i was already a fan of john's work so i was like absolutely yeah so i thought that his insight into what had changed was absolutely brilliant i had just begun to notice this in my own teaching i've been teaching since 1995 at the university of virginia originally um and it was it was seemingly overnight right around 2014 these new ideas you know students of course are political they protest they object to things but what was new greg put his finger on it what was new was the idea that these words are going to harm me not just offend me not just be unjust harm me we have to protect it was this idea that students are fragile and need protection and the protection should come from administrators from adults that's what was new and disturbing and when you guys talked in the book about concept creep you know and the and the over generalization of the idea of trauma and you know one of the things that's really struck me as interesting about the safe space movements and the microaggression policies and all of that is that it does run so contrary to what every clinician worth his or her salt knows about treating anxiety or depression and it's one of so so that's kind of a remarkable uh phenomenon in itself is that what we know clinically has been absolutely inverted by people who are hypothetically agitating on the part of students mental health and it's not as if the mental health community has stood up on mass and denounced this so and i also don't i don't understand that i also don't understand how we got here you guys talk in the book a little bit about your little bit of you hypothesize a little bit about the internet generation right and those are the kids born after 1995. you don't put the finger on the millennials but but let's talk a little bit about why you think things changed in 2013 and 2014. yeah sure let me just first say your point about um about how this is not this whole these these new ideas are not clinically supported uh something that we suggest in the book we don't know we don't know the degree to which this is going on to what extent is this a sincere desire for protection and a sincere belief that students are fragile and to what extent is it the pursuing of a of a political agenda and and making political points and using mental health as a cover i i think both are operative and so and it may depend on the context um so why do you um why do you think the first one is operative like i because this runs so contrary to everything that's known about the actual protection of mental health i'm very skeptical about attributing um positive motivation to it like it seems to me that it's fundamentally driven by resentment well it's so uh so you're absolutely right that the psychological community does not support this but yet has not stood up very vocally to condemn it so i i we are hopeful that psychologists and psychiatrists everyone we spoke to agreed that and strongly yeah that's right that exactly the worst thing to do for someone who suffers from ptsd is to sweep clean their daily life of reminders thereby denying them the chance to to deal to habituate to de-decondition the uh the power of these quote triggers in the real world yeah well it's worse in some sense too because one of the things you do when you expose people who have anxiety disorders to the things they're anxious about is not make them less anxious but make them more courageous right and that's why it generalizes because the psychoanalysts thought that exposure would just mean the fears would pop up somewhere else but they don't and it's because people learn that there's more to them than they thought and then when you protect them not only do you not expose them which is a big problem but you also teach them to generalize the idea of their weakness which is a really terrible thing to do to people so you couldn't invent a more counterproductive mental health movement and instituted on campuses if you set out to design it and that that's something that we always try to emphasize and one of the things that made it so interesting uh for for for us to look at was uh the one thing because you know there are anti-free speech movements coming from students uh in the relatively recent past the late 80s and early 90s for example um but the thing that was so striking was that they were medicalizing all of these claims and i was like you know of course i'm sitting there going like that doesn't sound right i talked to john he was like that doesn't sound right and we interviewed for the original article maybe seven different uh clinical psychologists cbt experts uh you know for example and the thing i keep on trying though i i keep on explaining it is it's as if we're turning up what could be a minor aversion into something more like a phobia because we're giving it so much more power and the worst thing of all that we're doing uh so much of our campuses we're turning into a schema we're turning the idea that i'm fragile and that i'm broken into um uh into a a a permanent sort of self-definition so that's why i do think that there's there's sort of a mixed motive thing going on here i think that we have a self-fulfilling prophecy going on to some degree because i do think that that some of this kind of hopeless ideology is actually genuinely harming students actually making them more anxious and depressed and of course it's really incompatible with how you have a free open economy you also cite statistics to that end so one of the things you guys concentrate on in the book is is statistics indicating that there has in fact been there is evidence of a decline in mental health over the last what is it about the last decade uh since around 20 uh 2009 to 2012 is when things that's the elbow that's where things begin to to arc up and then they go steadily up uh um to about 2015 2016 we don't know if they're still going up or if they're plateauing uh but this is worth going into a little bit of detail because it was just an article in the new york times um richard friedman psychiatrist wrote an article something about how oh the idea of a waving of an increase in anxiety is a myth he said he said it's just based on one or two you know there's been some a couple of self-report studies in which students say that they're more anxious and he dismissed that and said don't worry america your kids aren't becoming more anxious so we thought we we dug into this in detail we did not want to catastrophize we did not want to moment a moral panic so we didn't want to say you know oh my god the sky is falling kids are are depressed and anxious so we looked into this in great detail and we were here so we were looking for this data in our atlantic article and it wasn't there uh that is that there were anecdotes everywhere people were saying the mental health centers are swamped so there were plenty reports from mental health centers but isn't this just because kids these days are more comfortable seeking treatment that's why the mental health centers are swapped maybe there's no real increase so in our atlantic article we could not make a strong case we left it very speculative but just two years later when gene tweggy's book came out igen and she brought in data from four national uh nationally representative surveys showing that it really is an increase now again those were almost all self-report what convinced us what convinced us that it's real uh is that there was a there was a major study done published in journal of american medical association looking at hospital admission data so they broke it down by gender and you always have to look male female separate um they broke it down by sex and by age group within teenagers and for all of the age groups for of the girls teenage girls hospital admissions for self-harm for cutting yourself taking poison this is non-fatal um it's flat flat flat and then right around 2011 2012 2013 it starts going up and up and up and of course the rate is lowest for 11 to 13 year old girls they're less likely to do this but the increase was the largest and twenty says that social media all the social comparison seems to be hardest on the youngest girls so the self-harm data confirms this is behavioral data this is not self-report and then the real kicker unfortunately is suicide if you look at the suicide statistics they show the same pattern as the self-reported depression data which is um if you look at the first decade of the century so 2001 to 2010 take the average uh number of kids who killed themselves successfully commit suicide the rate for boys from that decade uh through 2015 2016 those two years of data goes up and up and up up 25 which is gigantic there's been an enormous increase in boys suicide the increase for girls is 70 7-0 so boys the rate is higher for boys because girls make many more attempts but boys methods so so the increase is actually fairly parallel but as a percentage it's much higher for girls social media at least this is twenty's argument and we think there's some some validity to it twangy's argument is that the spread of uh of iphones and social media has brought boys in to play video games they play a lot of video games but those aren't actually that harmful it's the social comparison sites it's uh um instagram and and other things where girls are comparing their lives to other girls and feeling left out that we think we don't know for sure but that we think is the most powerful reason why the girls rates have increased so much oh sorry john's been very dated too because even since 2007 if you just pick 2007 we're talking about a doubling in terms of suicide for growth yeah but but the 2007 that was the that was the lowest year okay so if you just so it's that's why it's best to not take 2007. it's best to just take the average it just bounces around there's no trend in the first decade okay so we could hypothesize perhaps that there's something approximating a positive feedback loop going on here so imagine because i'm i'm trying to figure out why things have got out of control say since 2013 it's like there's been a tipping point and so i'm going to offer a few ideas and you guys can tell me what you think okay so let's think of four or five reasons so i think there's an increase in political perceived political polarization and maybe real political polarization because the mainstream media mainstream media is dying and as it dies it gets it gets more attracted to click-bait journalism and exaggerates the degree of extremism on both sides and that's a consequence of a technological revolution that the threat that they're under from from from internet media sources so that's one the next one would be the un opposed rise of the post-modern marxist doctrines that characterize disciplines particularly like women's studies now you guys talked about um a woman who generated um intersectionality theory kimberly crenshaw and i've been looking into kate millet who established patriarchy theory or one of the people who established it and she was a radical lesbian for political reasons and had an alcoholic and abusive father so i think that's quite interesting and i think that these theories fransha and and and millet's theories were basically ignored by serious scholars in the in the act academic world but they've spread and have had a disproportionate effect on the universities and they're combined with a kind of marxist viewpoint that divides the world into victimizer and victim and then maybe we have the what you just added go ahead you've already given us two big theories let's talk about that but it's on the political polarization absolutely we have a whole chapter on that the way to think about this is universities are complicated institutions nested within a broader society and they're changing and the broader society is changing and so we document how the rise in political polarization and here the thing to focus on is not polarization of attitudes about abortion or things like that it's how much do you hate the other side that has been going up steadily since the 1990s and so if you have a left-right battle it's getting more and more intense at the same time as the professoria is going from leaning left to being much further on the left so we document this in the book that the overall left right ratio for a variety of reasons went from uh two to one overall including everybody two to one in the early nineties to five to one left right ratio by 2010 so if you have a more politically purified institution at a time when the electromagnetic forces of cross-partisan hatred are ginning up then yes you have a more politicized institution so there's a lot going on there it's not unique to the left it just so happens that universities have been polarizing left other institutions polarized right if you believe in diversity if you believe that diversity makes people think better because it challenges thoughts then a loss of political diversity is harmful and it's a contributor and it's not just the uh echo chambers that we create on the internet although although social media does sort of pat you on the back for having the stick of an echo chamber as possible i'm definitely you know a big proponent of sort of the big sort hypothesis um and certainly lived this experience that um we increasingly live in in more politically homogeneous communities now big sword of course talks about us living in more politically homogenous counties but charles murray and others have done research about how we actually live in even more politically homogeneous city blocks that actually we are sort of self-sorting tyler cowan talks about this too and of course if you have sort of a social circle where you practically never run into anybody who disagrees with you the all the different sort of like uh tribalism experiments they've done polarization experiments they've done over the years um shows that you tend to sort of spiral off into the distance so that's one of the reasons why i think of this is what we call in the book a problem of progress that if you think about the idea that we can live in communities that reflect our values going back you know ronald hart was saying it's the 1970s that sounds lovely that sounds great great i could live in communities reflect my values but if you've ever lived in a community that reflects just one political point of view and virtually none of the other it does have a tendency to become a virtue signaling contest more than an actual place where you discuss ideas okay so now let's move on to the postmodernism so i think you and i both agree that that post-modernism marxism uh that these are lenses that tend to amplify conflict these are somehow involved i think you and i may disagree a bit on the dynamics here at the extent of it so i'll just lay out the way that i think about it these ideas this way of looking at things even these ideas of of trigger warnings matrices of oppression those ideas existed in feminist circles going all the way back to the 90s as a professor at nyu and previously at uva i have not seen that post-modernism or marxism are in any way spreading across the disciplines they've always been there in a few disciplines there's a lot of of marxist analysis and sociology i have not noticed that spreading at all among the professoria or across disciplines i think what has happened is that social media the internet especially social media has knocked down the compartments a good society needs a lot of compartments needs a lot of walls where different norms and different practices flourish that you can do different jobs i think social media is knocked down the walls so that certain ideas that maybe some students get from their gender studies or anthropology or sociology classes those ideas can spread among the students and they're often not even really the accurate ideas it's a sort of a bastardized version uh modified in ways that i don't really even understand that can spread around this is how you can get bad psychological ideas bad political ideas um spreading around among the students that's what's been most striking to us is that this is really the change is really student-led it's a generational thing um you can blame faculty in certain departments for you can certainly disagree with their ideas but it's not that there's this conspiracy that's as far as we can tell a conspiracy among the professors to take over maybe you'll disagree with that we see it or i see it as more student-led well i did want to have one point here though and it's something i talk a lot about john and i talk a lot about but it didn't actually quite make it into the book um and what we've dubbed it is the perfect rhetorical fortress and what we mean by that is if you look at the ways like i went to stanford for law school i worked for the aclu of northern california and i saw this sort of happening even in the early 90s that one of the things that some of these post-modernist theories particularly privileged theory allow is a a way a matter of arguing in which you never ever have to get to the substance of the argument so in even in the late 90s those rhetorical fortress had a lot of levels of protection you you didn't have to listen to anybody if they were conservative who was almost taken for granted which i'm now deeply ashamed of um you didn't have to uh and now if you add to it you don't have to listen to anybody if they have privilege and by the way what hundred percent of people actually do um that means you can choose to listen to whomever the hell you want because it's only optional you have an option of you either dismiss marx uh as being a white pillage male or you can listen to them but any time you run into someone who disagrees with you you have several sort of tools at your disposal um that's very important about various issues the major magic was that we're white males defending our privilege almost nobody engaged with the substance of the argument yes well um if all arguments boil down to the power claims of competing identity groups then there is no such thing as substance and i think that actually fits quite nicely with certain strains of post-modern thinking that have a tendency to deny any knowledge of any real world and to presume that everything is not only interpretation but interpretation based on uh power claims for competing groups and the intersectionality theory you know i just finished writing the preface to the new version of the 50th anniversary version of the gulag archipelago yes it was quite something and i was trying to synthesize solzhenitsyn's arguments about why the russian revolution went so badly south immediately after it began and it's it's very interesting to think about it from this intersectionality perspective because as you guys just pointed out it's it's not an unreasonable proposition that people have a multi multiple group identities now perhaps there's some use in considering that because you can think of the ways that people have different advantages and disadvantages but one of the real pernicious uh side effects of that kind of thinking especially when it's conjoined with a viewpoint that divides the world into victim and victimizer is that you can take any one person and maybe generate 20 group identities for them and you can find at least one identity along which they're privileged and that means that not only can you ignore them as a consequence of them speaking only on behalf of their power but you have a valid reason for persecuting them and that's exactly what happened in the soviet union as long as i could find one dimension along which you were an oppressor then you were done wow and yeah great grandson right right well they were the best example of that we were peasants who made good in in any other country were searched and uh that's where my family comes from and in any other country you know my family's story would have been because we went from being serfs to being lawyers and judges within a single generation and my grandfather was in kiev polytechnic studying to be your professor when world war one uh you know broke out and of course people like me uh success stories in any other country we were shot in the back of the head by the millions right right well and you were actually the working-class success stories because when was when was serfdom eradicated in in in russia uh 1861 right right so people were basically slaves up to that point and some people made very rapid uh leaps in status within a single generation or two and those were the kulaks that were eradicated by the by the soviets after world war one then that of course that's what led to the huge starvation and massive starvations of of the 19 late 1920s and 1930 and early 1930s so it was a complete catastrophe so all right so we you you put together a bunch of symptoms you know you said well microaggression theory i'm no admirer of daryl it's daryl wing sue yes i think that that i read his book i thought it was absolutely appalling in all in all possible manners um there's the the kind of oppression theory and intersectionality the idea that we're in a patriarchal tyranny and then one of the things that you pointed out at the beginning of this interview was the unknown effect of social comparison with these new social technologies social media technologies right because we're really at a we're really laid vulnerable to these new technologies because we have no idea what effect they have on adults let alone young people and so do you think that is actually making young people feel that the world is a more dangerous place and and requiring them to to seek protection oh yes we think that's a big part of it the objective facts about mortality crime physical safety are that life gets safer and safer death rates go down um so you know steve pinker and many others have chronicled the decline of violence um but we react to the world not as it is we react to the world as we perceive it through the filters that we're given and if if you remember the old the movie from the 1980s or 90s it was the bowling for columbine no boys but uh michael moore's movie bowling for columbine where he traces out why americans are so paranoid compared to canadians let's say and he blames it all on cable tv putting stories of crime in our face all right so i think there's a lot of truth to that now imagine social media channeling not just stories of crime but whichever side you're on politically you now get filtered through of all of the stupid things that any person says in our country of 330 million people every day someone on the left says something incredibly stupid and offensive and every day somebody on the right says something's you know and there's a video and so if you're being so if you're rewarded for forwarding outrage things that outrage your side you're rewarded for forwarding that and we're all forwarding it um we're all drowning in outrage stories and one of the things that that sells or that sells in terms of getting retweets is stories of aggression or violence or racism or whatever it is people trampling on your side's sacred values so if you're exposed constantly to stories of you know if you're up if you're on the left you're exposed to stories of right nazis and you think that uh uh you know half the country is nazi um this is gonna have a big effect on your perceptions even if even if the reality is social progress even if the reality is increasing safety so we do think that um the reason why so many things are going haywire not just in america but in many countries um is the internet and social media all hitting us at the same time globalization is the other factor a little more distant but i think they're intersect intersecting interacting in all kinds of interesting ways that we don't yet understand we talked about polarization on the right and on the left and one of the things that struck me and maybe i'm wrong about this is that i've been particularly concerned about the rise of the radical left and that's probably because i've been immersed in a university milieu and as you already pointed out the left is over represented at least among the social scientists and the humanities and i suspect as well the administration in the universities and then i see as well people being concerned about the rise of the radical right but i certainly don't see the radical right as posing a threat in the universities and i can't see what sort of threat the radical right is posing because i can't get numbers right so like there are lots of stories about alt-right types and about neo-nazis and white supremacists but they seem i mean there was a white supremacist rally in washington about a month and a half ago and i think they got 16 people on a bus on the white supremacist side and several thousand counter protesters and so i i'm wondering to what degree the radical right is uh like i don't know where they are exactly so do you have thoughts about that yeah definitely in my work um i talk about this as being the most recent trend and we talk about this in the book and it's not necessarily the radical right um but uh we've seen some of the uh what i've talked about is kind of like we have this sort of effort chamber on the left at the universities and there is a sort of an echo chamber on the right as well and those two have been uh sort of colliding with each other with each other so we've definitely seen an uptick in fire of liberal professors getting in trouble for what they say on the internet what they say on twitter or facebook or you know going on fox news for example and we talk about a couple um examples of that in the book now this is so recent that we're not going to have real data on it but it definitely is a noticeable change for those of us who work on the front lines yeah so it's important to look at the timing here because we hear this a lot too you know whenever we talk about something people will point out well what about the alt-right and what about the nazis um and when when we started this when greg first noticed what was going on in 2013 2014 and then our article came out 2015 the right had nothing to do with it nobody had heard of the alt-right practically uh they weren't trolling on campus so whatever the origins of the problem on campus it is not a reaction to the right now in 2016 um the you know the alt-right got a lot more attention and they got much more sophisticated at trolling and as i read a little bit about trolling in the new york times began to cover it it became really clear um all you need is a few people with a you know kind of a perverse sense of humor and a few anonymous internet accounts and they can provoke a gigantic reaction from the group that they want to provoke and so i think in 2016 we saw the right and into 2017 that's when we start actually seeing the cases of right-wing movements to get professors fired um there's a some really nasty stuff coming out of various sites on the right flooding people's inboxes with rape threats and death threats and racist rants so there's a lot of nasty stuff coming from the right towards professors in 2017 and since then it wasn't happening as far as it wasn't anything new it wasn't really part of the story early on so we covered this in chapter six the polarization cycle uh the problem we believe is not originally uh from from the right although now they are part of the polarization cycle right so you can conjure a specter out of the darkness in that manner i mean one of the things i've seen on youtube and and the other uh commentary sources that i've been monitoring is a real increase in anti-semitic comments oh yeah and it's hard to tell of course it's hard to quantify that but um they're appallingly common um on on youtube and and on twitter as well um and some of them are coded you know i think it's it's commonplace now to put your comment in three brackets which indicates a an anti-semitic origin or uh emphasis and so that's very pernicious but again we have no idea how many people are actually engaging in this and it's a very difficult thing to to come to terms with because like when i look at the united states i think and more power to you that your political dialogue is actually quite balanced there's a fair bit of power on the left and there's a fair bit of power on the right um the radical left seems to be overrepresented in universities and that's something that's unique i can't get a handle on the white supremacists and nazi types i mean i think nazis are vanishingly rare i really believe that the white supremacist types as well but but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's not growing it isn't being cultivated in some sense that's right but then the question is how much should we react to it so so i'm jewish my mother told me when i was growing up that america is the promised land for the jews it's not israel you know we always talk about israel as the promised land i was raised to believe that america is the promised land for the jews uh sure there was some anti-semitism my parents they moved to scarsdale new york and they were they could not join certain country clubs big deal they were jewish clubs there were wasp clubs that's the way things were it was it wasn't perfect but compared to what compared to the rest of the world thank god my grandparents got off the boat in new york and didn't go on to buenos aires or any any place else that was settled originally by the spanish um so america is not an anti-semitic country now what do we make of the fact that now we're seeing all this anti-semitic stuff what i make of it is that there are a few who are organizing and doing this and am i triggered by it no i i because i grew up where occasionally you'd come across a swastika like scratched into the bathroom stall you'd find the f word you'd find obscenities you'd find a drawing of a penis and you'd see a swastika and my reaction was you know yuck or bad and then i would go on with my day it wasn't a trigger but if we teach kids now if you find something on the internet be triggered and of course you will always find something on the internet i i i will say that and this is just anecdotal but my i speak a lot of times in california um and some of the the sort of anti-israel bleeding into uh anti-semitism is something that i've i've seen really dramatic performance it's almost as if it's become stylish to be so anti-israel you're almost anti-semitic at least certain circles and i spoke it now like the british labor party for example for example yeah so the 50 i spoke at the 50th anniversary of the start of the free speech movement way back in 2014 i spoke in berkeley and i'll be damned if my speech was not in a room with a lot of anti-semites in it and there was even a guy who was trying to address this saying like oh and people want to call us anti-semitic and that's so wrong and then he finished that sentence we're saying but it's undeniable that the poison hand of zionism destroys everything it touches and i was like okay okay that's that's uh i think i can understand why they're calling you that so i i definitely i don't think it's in people's heads that that this uh this uptick is is real but i i've noticed it most pronounced for some reason uh in california okay so here's a idea too so you know one of the things that happened in germany in the 1920s was a polarization process right obviously much more severe than the one that we're going through but i wonder if when the political spectrum polarizes that ethnocentrism of a certain sort rises and drives something like anti-semitism so maybe because maybe when the left and the right are relatively close together people aren't so obsessed with their group identities or the extreme types aren't but then when the polarization process starts everybody locks harder into the group identities and then anyone who's uh i don't know if it's anyone who's an outsider is viewed with excess suspicion but see because the situation with with jewish people is complicated too because they're often successful so i don't know if it's some perverse interaction between ethnocentrism and resentment for the for the successful that's that drives anti-semitism during polarization processes i'm trying to get get a finger or get a you know trying to put my finger on it i think what you're what you're reaching for here is this phenomena that you suddenly see these bursts of intolerance what triggers them and here i turned to karen stenner a political scientist didn't work at princeton now she lives in australia but she wrote this brilliant book the authoritarian dynamic published in 2005 and what she says in there is that authoritarianism is not a stable personality trait it's a dynamic in which some people about 20 or 30 percent of the population um when they perceive that society is coming apart that is you know i study morality we need a sense of shared moral order there are times when we feel that the moral order is secure violations are punished everything's fine there are other times when we feel things are coming apart it's chaos it's babble when that's happening people who have this predisposition to authoritarianism it's like there's a button on their head that gets pushed and they then become intolerant against all outsiders and so she does experiments where she gives a story about you know maybe it's mexican immigration but it turns that that then makes you know if you present in a threatening way as donald trump does that doesn't just turn people against mexicans it turns them against lgbt americans so it's a general dynamic of stamp out dissent stamp out the outsiders get back to the purity of our group so when we have times of increasing um prosperity when we have peace when there's a sense of progress the pie is growing um there is some sense that we are we have something in common then things get much calmer but a number of events uh you know financial crisis may have contributed the sense that there is not a growing pie but i think again social media has made it so that if you are prone to this and then you sign up to any group that is concerned uh about immigration or anything else you will now be surren you will become flooding into you really powerful videos designed to press that button over and over and over again and before you know it america goes from having you know 50 nazis to having 500 maybe even 5 000. it's not 5 million i really don't think there are five you know whatever it's not like two or three percent of the country are nazis so so we've got to somehow learn to get used to the fact that we've got to somehow get back to judging by sort of the average or the overall rather than the individual extremes because now we will be faced with the individual extremes forever yeah and also while we're recommending books amy chu as political tribes talks a lot about this too and it's really a really interesting stimulating read well partly what i've been trying to do in my lectures so i'm traveling around lecturing to people and doing this to some degree on youtube as well is to emphasize the existence of the common center for me that's a return to classic liberal and to some degree classic conservative values i mean some intermingling of those so some emphasis on traditional um well traditional phenomena like like monogamous marriage but also the idea of the sovereignty of the individual as part of that common landscape that unites us and that seems to be quite useful um although i would go let's keep going on i think this is a very important point um that if you go down the identitarian path there is no clear endpoint nobody can point to where this will end in a good way um so what's what's so interesting and here's one of the most encouraging signs uh is that just in 2018 we are seeing an explosion of books written by people who are not straight white males who are saying identity politics practiced in this way is a dead end we need to we need to really emphasize what we have in common so i'll just read you i've just started collecting a file i'll put this online someplace soon here are some of the books here's some of the really interesting things coming out just recently amy chua's book political tribes as greg mentioned uh francis fukuyama has a new book identity the demand for dignity and the politics of resentment just came out last week uh anthony abby has been writing brilliantly about identity politics uh jonathan rouch uh is gay i guess he's conservative but he's uh he's been writing again very uh about amy chewin about other reasons why identity politics is a dead end uh john mcwhorter uh has been writing brilliantly about how uh anti-racism has become a religion uh how we need to you need to get you know stop focusing on uh on that in that way um in britain there are a number of of uh people of caribbean origin have been writing about this i just had dinner last week with irshad manji has a book coming up don't label me so this is wonderful that we're seeing all of these people just about all of them identify as being on the left none of them are straight white males and they're all saying we need to rethink this so we're thrilled because in our book in chapter three we distinguish between common humanity identity politics which is what martin luther king did and many of the civil rights leaders which yes you need to demand rights for groups that don't have them but you do it by appealing to our common humanity versus common enemy identity politics which is what intersectionality tends to devolve into it doesn't have to be but it often is bastardized into let's all unite against them yeah yeah well you know in canada we've been pursuing a multicultural policy and our prime minister was famous for saying that canada has no identity which i think is an absolute catastrophe of an idea i mean if you think about the multicultural landscape of the planet it certainly produces wars along with diversity so the question is how do you bring people from different communities into a universal community and maintain peace and it seems to me that you do that essentially by concentrating on the sovereignty of the individual as the fundamental marker for human identity rather than rather than the group and i was thinking about intersectionality um which i think by the way is a painfully obvious idea you know the idea that you could be classified among many group dimensions and and that there's social status uh consequences to all of those and that they interact um but i think intersectionality is actually the discovery of the fatal flaw of identity politics because if you fragment people down if you allow their group identities to multiply and interact then you get to the point where each individual is a unique nexus of group identities and i actually think that that's what western culture discovered over the last several thousand years that the logical end point is the individual and if you take everyone's advantages and disadvantages into account optimally then what you do is you treat them as individuals like there isn't anyone else like them in some sense except in terms of their common say divine value or something approximating that that's right if you followed it to its logical conclusion then the worst aspects of identitarianism would vanish because as you say everybody ultimately becomes a group of one unfortunately of the 20 or 30 dimensions on which one could categorize people it's really only three that matter it's straight white males that's really where it's at so well that's worth digging into you know because that that's actually illustrative i would say to some degree of the actual motivations it's like there is all these identities and hypothetically there's nothing to distinguish them in terms of primacy even in terms of their effect say on socioeconomic outcome so then it seems to me to be a victim victimizer narrative that's driving the idea that it's straight white males that in some sense have the have the phenomenal upper hand which is another thing i don't really buy i mean most of the dangerous jobs are done by men and so in terms of who's you know in terms of who has power and wealth you know straight white men i mean i think we can plead guilty to that that the world is not perfectly equal across all categories we certainly can't just be bad um but i think what we're seeing now in very sharp relief since the sarah john controversy in the new york times recently is this red wine i think it was brent weinstein said a year or two ago there there are some people who see inequality and want to end it there are other people who see inequality and want to reverse it at the time i thought well that's interesting i wonder if that's true but i think the sarah john controversy where the new york times hired a young korean-american uh person to join the op-ed the editorial page and it was discovered that she had all these nasty anti-white uh anti-white tweets and the fact that there was a discussion debate like many people fit would say oh by definition there's no such thing as anti-white racism it's okay to say terrible things about white people it's okay here's the key thing it's okay to look at someone and based on the way they look dislike them and treat them badly and if you think that's okay then this is the problem this is common enemy identity politics because we think that's horrible we shouldn't be judging people based on their race then that's you're probably a supporter of common humanity identity politics as we are i i i actually would like to slightly push back against the idea that it's just straight white met men anymore i felt like i always feel like unfortunately sort of like the stamford palo alto uh you know san francisco bay area is unfortunately way ahead on these trends and i think one of the reasons why you are seeing pushback from a lot of members of minority members as well is partially because for a long time at least among the friends i know who really believe in this and almost like a religious kind of way um they're they're extremely guilty about simply being cisgender as in non-transgender um that you you'll you'll see sort of this call-out culture applied to uh black straight black men for example so i do think that we we've been falling deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole where people are realizing wow so this is just a permanent situation of guilt and shame about an identity that i have no control over that can't possibly be right well the other thing we should point out too is that even if you do make allowances for the fact that let's say uh on average straight white men are doing rel or have done relatively well economically it's also very much worth pointing out that it's a tiny minority of straight white men who have been doing spectacularly well you know so you have a pareto distribution problem within each with with each within each ethnic identity group and so to say that because on average the socioeconomic status of a given group is higher than the status of another group all the people who are members of that group are disproportionately benefiting is actually a rather uh in i would say a rather motivated and resentful analysis because it is always a tiny proportion of people in a group that are doing spectacularly well and then then you have to do something else which is you have to look at that proportion that are doing spectacularly well and you have to decide about how many of them are doing well because they actually deserve it and how many of them are doing well because they're inappropriate rent seekers and i would say because our culture is pretty damn functional and because we do generate a lot of wealth along with the inequality that there's a fair number of people who are doing disproportionately well who are doing that by benefiting everyone else and we're not very careful about making those sorts of distinctions and they're actually crucial that's right so that's what we do so in chapter 11 we we go into social justice and many people uh have claimed social justice is a meaningless term it's thrown around in certain ways people can't define it um but after digging into it we decided that it actually is meaningful but we have to we have to break it down into its component parts and so we go into what is the psychology of justice and if you focus on distributive justice are people getting what they deserve based on their inputs everybody recognizes when people are being cheated that they're you know like in america now a lot of low-wage workers the companies have found ways to skimp on benefits and pay so that is a violation of distributive fairness people recognize that that is wrong if that is disproportionately affecting one race or if people are being cheated because they are members of any identity group that is a violation i would say of social justice or of justice applied to identity groups that we think is a very important concept similarly procedural justice if the criminal justice system ends up for whatever reason giving better representation to some groups than others or uh treating people differently at any point that is a violation of justice which can plausibly call a violation of social justice what we push back against is the shift in recent years to this obsessive emphasis on outcomes it's what most of the social justice argument seems to be on campuses you just say look men are overrepresented you know among coders well they're not overrepresented among all other functions at google and apple if you look everywhere else in the company they're you know it's 50 50 or very close it's only in certain job classifications where there's a disparity and so people take that as ipso facto proof of systemic sexism and what we really push back hard on is saying that's lazy that's unfair that's inaccurate that's an invitation those disparities are an invitation to look closer and if you see that the pipeline is 50 50 but the outcome is well then you've got a strong case but if the pipeline from grad programs and computer science is exactly the same as the representation among coders at google and apple well you know you have to do something to show that people are being treated differently so we think there's a lot of bad thinking done in the service of prosecuting one's political agenda within the culture war um and that a lot of people don't know how to stand up to it and one thing that i find interesting that this should become a blasphemous argument is personal preference particularly when people talk about genders i mean the if you've ever actually read um for example the speech they got larry summers in so much trouble his final conclusion is it's probably mostly that uh these are not a lot of these jobs are not um are jobs that a lot of the theoretical physical things they don't have a lot of appeal to women he he basically he comes down on preference some reason saying that there might actually be a reason why you know veterinary science is overwhelmingly limited and some of some of these uh you know mathematical fields are overwhelmingly men it might have something to do with that uh some you know some small difference in what people actually like doing somehow the funny thing too is so the biggest the london times just did an article this week on two papers that came out it was quite an interesting article because one of the papers came out showing once again that the personality differences between men and women are largest in the most egalitarian societies and they actually get quite large by psychological standards in countries like holland and in or the netherlands and also in the scandinavian countries which are the most egalitarian countries but the biggest difference between men and women and also one that grows in more egalitarian countries is in interest and that that difference is more than a standard deviation it's like one and a half standard deviations and so it's more than enough to count account for the disparity between male engineers and and our sorry female engineers and male nurses and the fact that it grows as societies become more egalitarian is actually a death blow to social constructionist theory that's right so let's go into this in a bit of detail because i think this is this is a really helpful area where i think we have a good idea what's going on and we can see why it's so hard to find find the truth here um so when i taught at uva i had a lecture on on sex and gender and i went into sex differences and the clear finding for many decades is that if you look at differences in ability between men and women they're very few and far between men are better at spatial rotation women on some measures are a little better at social skills and at language so there are some differences but they're few and far between if you look at the differences in what kids like and what they choose to do when there's no adult watching they're huge little boys and girls play radically differently my my wife and i we we once gave up my triplet nephews and they were four year old four years old we gave them a bag of plastic dinosaurs and the two boys grabbed the dinosaurs and they start battling they're bashing them together and the girl takes two dinosaurs and she says don't ever leave me mommy i won't leave you baby so right but the point is girls and boys play really differently and if you if they're supervised by adults the differences get smaller whereas if you let kids play on their own the differences get bigger differences in interest are huge and that's a crucial finding yeah that's right jordan i'd like to ask you what why did why is this why do you think this is treated so much like a heretical blasphemous thought that must be immediately shot down there's merely i think that i think that you zeroed in on the proper issue before when you talked about the equity doctrine now one of the things i've been trying to figure out is how we know when the left goes too far now we know when the right goes too far when they start making ethno-nationalist claims of superiority it's something like that and and claiming that all the good things should happen to one ethnic or racial group okay no we're you're outside the domain of reasonable political discourse at that point now obviously the same thing can happen on the left but when it happens is not so obvious there's no smoking pistol but i think emphasis on equity which is code word for equality of outcome is actually the smoking pistol if you had to pick one no okay i would disagree with you on that that can't be a smoking pistol emphasizing equity can't be a smoking pistol what i think we mean by smoking pistol is when someone makes an argument in good faith trying to understand some phenomenon in the world and they suffer social consequences that's the smoking pistol and that's why okay i think maybe we might be talking about two slightly different things i'm i'm trying maybe not i'm i'm trying to figure out where the where the tipping point is in thought on the left it makes things spiral out of control and you guys talked about the equality of outcome doctrine as as the wrong first of all it doesn't allow for multivariate analysis right which is a big problem so it oversimplifies things radically if there's a difference in outcome then ipso facto there's a victim victimizer uh narrative driving it or reality driving it and i think that the the the fundamental problem on the radical left is exactly that and that's the reason that they don't like the literature on gender differences because you can point to gender differences in outcome and you can use them as proof for the oppressive nature of society but if you look into it and you find out that that's actually not proof that some of the differences even some of the differences in outcome are being driven by things like biological difference in interest then it radically weakens that central axiomatic claim of fundamental oppression and so that's viewed as an existential threat by people for whom that's the cardinal presupposition that's how it looks to me i think that is correct because i am struck you know i since since writing the righteous mind i always like to analyze things in terms of what's sacred what do people think what organizes them they circle around it that binds them together there are a lot of things that people hold sacred you know on all sides but i am struck by the fact that in the academy it's not just questioning sacred values of any sort it's specifically questioning diversity policies that seems to be the most dangerous thing to do and that does fit with what you said that it's like there's a big project that we're all engaged in and we're working hard against the enemy and we're fighting the fight and if one of us steps out and says well actually maybe we're wrong on this point bang we got to shoot him we can't got to shoot him yeah that would be proportion that probability would be proportionate to the centrality of the axiom that's exactly i think the central axiom here that's that's it's causing all the trouble is the insistence that the best way to well two insistences one is that the best way to characterize western society is as an oppressive patriarchy that's right yes and and the second is that the best way to characterize people is by their group and those two things interact and so uh the gender data is particularly a horrifying i would say to people who hold those axioms because you can well for two reasons one is because the gender differences actually exist and they do account for differences in outcomes but even worse and this is a catastrophe i think for the social constructionists is that as you put egalitarian social policies into play that the very differences that you hate get bigger and that's and this needs to be said a thousand times because it really is it's it's a fatal blow to the social constructionist egalitarians and even to the concepts they're using because one thing we could also ask is like well if it turns out that men and women are as different in egalitarian societies as boys and girls are in their unsupervised play which i think is a reasonable analog then we're going to have differences in outcomes that are going to be magnified by the very policies that the egalitarians are putting in place yeah and then we also might ask too is inner truly uh in the society that we want to set up maybe wouldn't we want it to be the case that people's free choice would determine their occupational outcomes and then we have to put up with a certain degree of inequality of outcome and think in a complex way about it i wanted to get back just to the point where we were talking about about sacredness um and what and they're one of the stories we talk about in the book is one that i know you're very well familiar with the rebecca tuvel story um which she wrote a paper i'm talking about you know an academic paper talking about well if we accept transsexuality what what what implications does that have for someone like rachel dolezal who actually what kind of wants to decide whether what um she claimed that she was black but she wasn't is she allowed to do that feels black inside right and um and and both john and i are very we've really tried to sort of like be very reasonable as possible aggressively reasonable um but in that in this one we uh we we liken it to emil durkheim's definitions of witch hunts because it really unfortunately really fit because you not only do you have this kind of like you know nor like normal interesting intellectual exercises of an academic article making an interesting point um she is treated absolutely like a blasphemer and so badly that people are signing letters condemning her while at the same time emailing saying oh this is really terrible what happened to you um and it's just absolutely bizarre it's scary situation that's why i said that the smoking gun what proves that there's a problem is when there are social consequences to making a good faith argument right if you're out in the public square if you're in the comments section on youtube of course people are trying to destroy you what we're trying to do in universities is it's really unique and important thing which is create an environment in which people are expected to challenge each other we're not supposed to be there to be agreeable and it all makes sense it all it's all okay because it's in the surface service of finding truth and as soon as people who are taking part in that process are shamed punished excluded their calls to expel them or punish them as soon as that happens now we have more of a sort of like you know east german mindset where people are not thinking about what's true they're thinking about you know what will what will avoid getting me in trouble what am i allowed to say am i allowed to say and of course it's made worse by the fact of what will get me incredible praise for being throwing myself as a true believer yeah but a tremendous amount of it though is motivated by the desire to avoid being shunned and and and treated as the violator of a taboo because that and that's exactly what's happening is that that there are there are new taboos so then part of the question might be too why is there such an insistence that the culture we live in is a patriarchal tyranny which is also a collapse of complexity right i mean obviously our culture has its flaws it it tends towards um rigidity and tyranny like all cultures do but comparatively speaking as we've talked about before by by world standards today or by world standards historically it's a pretty damn free and and productive culture but we have this tremendous emphasis on the idea that it's fundamentally a patriarchal tyranny and that if you uh question that then you're treated as a taboo violator so then the question is well what the hell is driving this insistence that it's a patriarchal tyranny with with uh kate millet you know you see who originated at least in part patriarchy theory you see that she had a very she had an alcoholic and abusive father and so i think that's quite interesting because i think there are psychological dynamics here at work i i wonder to what degree the people who are pushing this theory um have had very disturbed interpersonal relationships gendered relationships and that that's that's what would you say driving the the collapse of their political viewpoint into a single dimension like a single oversimplified dimension you see that sort of oversimplified thinking when you look at at psychopathological complexes you know like with with uh with women with eating disorders in particular well men too but that's rarer everything collapses to a single uh single dimension of evaluation something like thin equals beautiful or thin equals good and then that drives everything and so and and then i also think maybe is is this also a challenge to to cultural tradition an actual intellectual challenge say well we think that your your your way of of of of operating within the culture is too tyrannical and we're going to throw everything we can at you in an attempt to make you prove that that's not true but i can't get any further underneath it than that let's talk about that so you're a clinical psychologist so i think your first impulse is let's look to the person's formative experiences why do they think this way i'm a social psychologist so i think in terms of if there's some new or some interesting social movement what are the social forces and pressures on them that led them to think this way i also uh read a lot think a lot about evolution i like to think and this is what first drew me to you you wouldn't be when i met in 1994 we both loved carl jung and i love jung's idea of archetypes interpreted from an evolutionary point of view yeah like why do we dream about dragons why do so many cultures have dragons well actually you know our ancestors you know 60 million years ago actually were in a world of dinosaur like that's a pretty cool idea i don't know if it's right anyway um human beings have a tendency to think in a manichaean style it's effortless it's default for us to divide the world up into good and evil and that's why the third great untruth in our book is the untruth of us versus them life is a battle between good people and evil people yeah it's very easy it's not hard to teach this to people so uh so we think that is innate as a possibility and then the question is why are some movements now teaching this and why is it making more progress in in some areas of the university now than it was 10 or 20 years ago um so i think that to answer your question if you're engaged in a in a radical program radical means you want to tear things down you want radical change uh you you need to demonize the country the structure you want to tear down you need to say that america is the worst america is a paragon of racism and sexism and of course we have our problems you know most of us think that things have been getting steadily better since the 19th century um but you're committed to saying that america is the worst so there was an interesting study uh published a few months ago you probably heard about this uh it ranked america as like the like the 12th worst country on earth for women it was behind you know eritrea and sudan and you know north korea you know it was the one of the worst places on earth to be a woman and you know just on the smell test you know really like um you know i don't want to go into why that's so wrong but the methodology it was it was judged by i can't remember what it was but it's by obviously it was in the judgment of like human rights activists or something like that rights activists are generally many of them and amer just american human rights activists it was something like that they are not weighing up statistics on how women fare around the world they're being asked what are the worst countries for women and if you're engaged in the project of critiquing america you're motivated to say that america is the worst and that's what you can explain that ranking well at minimum it justifies your continued activism and if that's what you've staked your career on then that's also necessary i also think that's one of the things that's driving all the things that we're talking about is that we've produced a committed activist class that has been heavily subsidized for 30 years and they're always in need of reasons to justify their continued existence i mean as as we all are of course but but this is a situation where that's become dangerous the committed activist class um i think this is important also to focus on for a moment um because in discussions of this we're all supposed to praise the students political activity we're all supposed to praise activism um and you know pepsi tried that disastrous commercial of just like you know random beautiful people being activists because if you have a bullhorn bullhorn that's political activity that's kylie jenner okay that's all right that's right right right right yeah so i think there is an idea among young people this is i think more true on the left that to be political is to be protesting yeah just telling me like why is it that the right when they're upset about something they go and they get people elected to the school board and they change the rules like the right i think is more pragmatic in its politics the left is more expressive and i think this is the point that mark lilla has been really well yeah um and so ultimately it ends up backfiring but i think that the the the the respect that we accord to activism pure and simple i think that should be rethought and yeah i think so yeah universities are are might be about to do that uh one president of a major uh university in this in this region recently said uh something like to the effect that universities are becoming ungovernable now there's a lot of reasons for that they face a lot of pressures but the student activism the fact that it's it's it could be at anything it's not like addressed at injustice it's addressed at like something in the dining hall something spit that a student it's because there are protests about almost anything i think many administrators are realizing what have we done what kind of frankenstein monster have we created by incentivizing and praising this kind of of of of activism um i've been talking to politicians in canada about the possibility of making a distinction between education and activism and political activism so you know in canada if you're a charitable organization you can't engage in political activism now it's very difficult to distinguish right between what might constitute education and what might constitute activism but the idea that there's something intrinsically moral and noble about about about complaining about the evil people in the world is definitely something you know in literature in the humanities used to be the antidote to that to some degree because one of the things that characterizes great literature as opposed to second great literature is that if the literature's great the battle between good and evil occurs in the hearts of each protagonist right it's a psychological issue and not a sociological issue exactly i'm turning here to the and we already talked about soldier and instance of one of our three opening quotes the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being right right and that is what we should be teaching students to complexify situations to the extent that we teach them no it's simple if you know the category you know their moral valence and you know they're bad and the extent that we're teaching students to think in this way we are harming them we are setting them up for failure we are ill-preparing them for citizenship in a democracy and we are harming the future of our country and i probably have a little bit of insight into this as a as a first amendment lawyer um as someone who spent a lot of time defending the rights of protesters and i've and i've dealt with you know very many protesters who are protesting utterly sensible things um that i'm like absolutely more power to you but also i've talked to other people who i felt like were tilting it windmills or um i i mean i one time represented a group that was or helped represent a group that believed that the us should have no navy um and i remember sort of talking about so it's not that you think we should spend less on military but that we should literally have no navy and that was the argument and i would ask some of my activist friends in in san francisco some of them were doing i think you know absolute lords work particularly with criminal justice and that kind of stuff who are just the best people ever met but in other cases i'd see sort of activists sort of groups that were you know for example i you know i opposed the uh the second iraq war um but i had friends who also opposed it who would immediately go into uh and 911 was a uh uh was a conspiracy to allow for the and i'm like why why are you moving it to like that next argument where you're going to lose more people and the perception was that we have to keep the temperature at boiling point we have to keep it at 212 or else um people will lose interest and i actually said pinker is actually more correct on this is that we're actually creating partially through some of some of the the post-modernist thoughts that you critique we're creating a situation in which actually progress is more or less hopeless and all you can really do is shout about it which actually makes people more cynical and does less to achieve your your goals whereas as pinker likes to point out if we actually look at well what did we do that actually works and try to keep doing that that's probably a better bet for how you keep actual progress going well the perverse thing there too is that i i believe this to be true um john you mentioned that there's been a variety of books coming out maybe i could get that list and post them in the description of this youtube video that might be useful but there's also a whole string of books that's been published lately uh including stephen tinker's book enlightenment now showing that the rate of economic progress around the world especially with regard to lifting the abjectly poor out of poverty is is increasing at an unparalleled rate and that might be a secondary benefit to the collapse of communism since 1989 a lot of things are driving it but certainly some of it is the spread of ideas of individual sovereignty and the use of free market policies by developing countries just as we see the the landscape for poor around the world to be radically improved we're in this process in the west of criticizing our fundamental principles to the point where we're we're driving a dangerous level of polarization and so that's a very perverse and strange situation and difficult to contend with so all right let's let's switch a bit here one okay so while we see the problem the problem is that we're still sketching it out and trying to articulate it but it's something like the rise of a a victim victimizer culture that might be driven by young people's increasing sense of vulnerability as a consequence of the unexamined effects of social media the the polarization driven by a tendency for a dying media to come to concentrate on extremism uh the domination of the intellectual discourse in the universities by the left and the radical left all these things are playing together and and they're causing a certain amount of trouble like the rise of this excessive safety culture that has negative psychological consequences all right that's all dangerous what in the world do we do about it jonathan you have the heterodox academy so so that's that that's something you've put into practice that was designed to increase viewpoint diversity do you think that's what's your sense of that what what's the consequence of that yeah so uh so the problem is you know as you said as we say in the book there's six different separate contributing factors all coming together the solution is not easy let's break it down into what do we need to do to get our universities functioning better what do we need to do to raise kids who are more resilient and more able to deal with difference um let's focus on those two so let's so let's start with the universities so uh i co-founded heterodox academy if you go to hedrocks academy.org um with nick rosencrantz uh law scholar and chris martin grad student so in sociology and then a bunch of other social psychologists because we were concerned that this is just a faculty initiative that discussions among professors of psychology and research in psychology was showing signs that certain hypotheses wouldn't be investigated other interpretations were favored we were seeing signs and almost all of us were on the left or center there are there's only two conservative social psychologists that i know of um we were concerned about research quality that's all it was and so we ended up putting up this site it went live on about september 10th 2015. totally unrelated to that greg and i had been writing the atlantic article totally separate track and then um all hell broke loose at halloween in 2015 and it became clear this isn't just a faculty issue the problem on campus is a culture issue in which in which student this new form of student activism this new form of student that belief in fragility is affecting how we do our research how we educate so all the problems are interrelated uh but to focus on the faculty issue what we're doing at heterox academy originally when i was running it i thought the issue was well we have no political diversity we need to get more we need to encourage more conservatives and libertarians to get phds and then we need to help them get jobs that's what i thought originally um but over time the problem has morphed uh and it's become clear we do actually have some diversity in every field not everybody is on the left a lot of people are in the center or libertarian or they say i can't be put in a box and what we have to do is encourage those people to feel that they can speak up they can question dominant ideas they can be a little subversive they we have to make it so they're not afraid of social consequences for speaking up so that's the way that i was thinking about it now uh in janet last january i turned over head rocks academy i heard an amazing woman deborah masik she's a professor at harvey mudd college she is leaving that job to run head rocks academy full time deb studies relationships she's a great teacher she is moving the organization to focus more on helping helping campuses recreate that climate that we all know and love i mean you know we i love being a professor i love universities um deb is focusing on how do we prepare students and so we've talked a lot about this in the book what do you do at orientation what are the norms you make clear about speech and free speech of course we need to do training in diversity and inclusion and sexual violence all that stuff but how many schools train for free speech yeah pretty much none of them and the fact that we don't mention any of these deep thought philosophies or concepts though the deep philosophical underpinnings of academic freedom freedom of speech but there's just so much we can complain about students not knowing them but nobody's actually talking about that for sure well and it's been really interesting on this lecture tour to find out how receptive people are to exactly that kind of message you know and i've been beating the drum let's say for um for more conscious understanding of the relationship between meaning and personal responsibility because one of the things we also teach students is that the proper focus for them is the violation of their intrinsic rights as if the upholding of those rights is going to provide them with a sustaining meaning in life but i don't believe that that's true i think that what's what's more true is that most people find a sustaining meaning by adopting a fairly heavy burden of personal responsibility partly for themselves and partly for their family and partly for the broader community and that that that just seems to have dropped out of the public discourse in its entirety and then also what could be taught to incoming students is this clinical doctrine that we've been describing which is well how do you make yourself stronger well you expose yourself voluntarily to challenges that are outside of your domain of current competence and that often involves confronting things that not only that you think are frightening but that you might also think are disgusting because that's what happens with obsessive-compulsive disorder treatment you know and disgust obviously runs uh uh motivates some of this political polarization that's right and somebody alerted me somebody a civil rights scholar uh told me about how the marchers in the 60s how they trained and here they are going in to you know staging protests going in doing sit-ins facing real violence and some of them were actually killed the way they prepared for it was others would shout racist slurs at them they would be prepared for it they would expose themselves to the worst and then when the worst happened at least it was less painful than had they not encountered it so again over and over again we see are you is your goal to toughen yourself up is your goal to become stronger and more able to deal with the world as it is or is your goal to demand that somebody make the world other than it is yeah which is the which is the more reliable path to success in life yeah i mean both john and i um you know as the president of fire and both roulette grow and through heterodox we're both trying to also figure out ways to get to people well before they set foot on a college campus now certainly i think it's kind of unforgivable that most universities don't teach about some of these deep philosophies and concepts in orientation but you should already be learning about some of these ideas when you're uh when you're in um in high school so one thing that john did that i'm totally jealous of is they did a a graphic novel version of uh part of chapter two of on liberty about freedom of speech um as a great way to to tell a generation of students about and i i also just love um on liberty uh particularly about freedom of speech as a lawyer because i'm like this guy man can this guy argue like that being able to defend the decision to defend blasphemy uh to go up against blasphemy prohibitions in 1859 but then managed to say and by the way you know you know who suffered under blasphemy laws um uh jesus uh and socrates you're right right and guess who enforced them marcus aurelius also one of your heroes and it's like oh you just won the case you are you're a world-class arguer yeah so let me suggest that uh viewers uh go to amazon and look up all minus one uh or you can go to headerdocsacademy.org mill where you can get a free version of pdf or you can uh we have a three dollar kindle version of it as well as the printed art book great let's put that in the description as well great so yeah so every so high school any high school that wants to teach about free speech assign this it's extremely readable by high school students it's just chapter two cut by fifty percent and ill and mills metaphors are illustrated yeah okay okay well so the free speech issue too so i mean one of the um one of the concepts that i've been wrestling with is you know we have to produce hierarchies in order to accomplish tasks collectively and we have to accomplish tasks because they're suffering to address and real problems to solve so we're going to produce hierarchies and hopefully the hierarchies are predicated on merit in relationship to the solution of the problem and so the right-winger types are more inclined to support hierarchical structures because of their psychological uh predisposition and the left wingers are more likely to be concerned about the fact that the hierarchies inevitably dispossess because they'll produce unequal distribution of resources okay so then you can imagine that the political landscape is a battleground a permanent battleground between those who stand for the hierarchies and note that they have their utility but are perhaps blind to their proclivity to become tyrannical and those who are more sensitive to the claims of the dispossessed and worried about the proclivity of tyranny of hierarchies to become um predicated on nothing but power right okay now at some points the hierarchy is going to be weak and need to be strengthened and at other points there has to be more clamor on the side of the dispossessed and the reason you have free speech as far as i'm concerned is because it's the mechanism that keeps those two to opponent process pro opponent process process is balanced and so it's a core it's the core element of a free society because it's actually the process by which the society maintains and improves itself across time it's not just another value among many values oh sorry there's just two points that i always feel like i need to make about that is one um the founding fathers uh were really good evolutionary psychologists um and one thing that i love about working in constitutional law is just how both pessimistic and optimistic it was at the same time about human nature those very tensions were the tensions that you know alexander hamilton and madison were so concerned about like how do you how do you balance out these natural human human nature whereas today you know what we're supposed to claim there isn't there isn't any such thing as human nature um the other thing is i have a slightly different philosophy on on freedom of speech it's actually much simpler that than a lot of sort of like the more sort of like platonic platonic ideal of truth which is simply that it's always valuable to know what people really think and as simple as that sounds it does mean that when people say well you certainly certainly you shouldn't be listening to conspiracy theorists and what they what they have to say about stuff and i'm like if it's a popular conspiracy shouldn't you have some clue about like what some some chunk of the population actually thinks about things and i think that we uh that understanding what people you despise actually think and believe is always of value because the the project itself is a project of human knowledge knowing human beings as they actually are not as we wish they were well it's even it's even self-protective to use that terminology it's like if i want to know what you're going to do and i do especially if i happen to be near you or have to or have to interact with you repeatedly if i know what you think then i can understand how you're going to act and and if i don't know how you how you think partly because you're not allowed to express it then you're an opaque mystery to me and the probability that we're going to engage in conflict goes up tremendously so i mean there are multiple reasons for for the for protecting the the sanctity let's say a free speech now one of the things that really distresses me about the postmodern slash neil marxist philosophy is that there isn't any room in that philosophy for the idea of free speech you know this is something i've come to understand more deeply over the last two years when you're talking to someone from that theoretical perspective they can't engage in the in a discussion about free speech because it doesn't fit into their uh world view because all there is there isn't sovereign individuals engaging in a discussion about the nature of reality there's avatars of their power group unconsciously making claims on behalf of their privilege and that there's never free speech there because you're not a free agent you're not even a real entity as an individual and and that's a far more pernicious assault on free speech than mere objection to it as you know uh a right wing as something that's been hijacked by the right wing to to validate their powers you know their their particular privilege so let's talk about this because this is one of the main arguments that we get back is um free speech is just a way for the powerful to retain their power yeah it didn't help our causes certainly like greg's cause when the nazis started having rallies for free speech like that's really not what you want but so great what's what's your response when people say free speech is just helps the powerful it drives me nuts because it's a fundamental misunderstanding of history and government and political philosophy and i've had this argument with um stanley fish and it seemed like a total shock to him um i'm sure he thought of it before but um you don't need a special protection of of an individual right um in a democracy um uh for the majority you first of all that's great rich people and powerful people under any system of government well rich people some under communism you know don't do so well um once they take over but after they take over you know like the kgb people can make themselves totally rich but rich and powerful people are always going to be fine um if you set up a democracy um the majority is always if there's a consistent majority the majority is always going to be fine you only need a special protection of freedom of speech for minority points of view i know i know it's absolutely amazing that that's not absolutely basic and john roush it was really interesting you know roush has a lot of arguments on this that are so interesting because he says it's like listen if you've reached the point where there's enough enough of the people who are worried about your well-being that they're willing to pass a law in a majoritarian country to get you protected it probably means the real dark days are behind you um and one of the things that we've talked about me and roush is that if we passed an anti-sort of uh hate speech law say in the late 1960s it would have frozen in place kind of attitudes about homosexuality which you you know as a gay man very concerned about and i think we would have ended up with a law that looked a lot more like what you see in russia that actually ends up being used against uh gay people that then then rather be sort of progressive law that we hope it would be but time and time again the idea that you like by the way i'm going to i keep on trying to put this out just in a very practical way it's like so you want laws that define that allow the government to stop hateful speech and you want trump to have those powers and somehow this is right that's the there's an old military doctrine which is uh whatever weapon you design your enemies will have in 15 years and and if you start putting restrictions on something like free speech as as benefit to your ideological position and you don't imagine that you might be out maneuvered in their use by your enemies then you're not sufficiently awake right so and i did a lecture a year and a half ago which was a left-wing case for free speech and i just thought that was self-evident for the reasons that you put forward which is well the powerful and you can use left-wing terminology here the powerful have an a-prior monopoly on speech obviously and so you want to put protections in place so that the dispossessed who you hypothetically champion get a chance to put their viewpoint forward and it's really it's quite a mystery that that that's not merely axiomatically obvious now yeah well you know if nazis are calling for free speech uh if the easy thing to do is say okay well then it must be bad yes well okay so tell me let's go back to the book so how you you said earlier when we talked before the interview that it had been on the new york times bestseller list and it seems to be selling well what are you hoping what do you see happening as a consequence of your essay in the atlantic and and as a consequence of the book and what do you hope will happen like say over the next year if we're going to be optimistic about where we're headed what's going to happen yeah so i i have felt for the last two years that we're kind of in an emperor's new clothes situation where most people who are paying attention most people are involved in universities or in education realize there's something wrong but they don't understand what it is and nobody wants to appear insensitive people don't want to stand up and critique if it seems that you're pushing back against against historically marginalized groups in particular so there's been so university administrators we've spoken a lot of college presidents that overwhelmingly what i would call liberal left not illiberal i i don't know of any college presidents who are illiberal but they're often afraid to stand up for what you i'm sure you did you met somebody wasn't going to ever green state university oh i'm sorry yes that's right evergreen that's right yeah that's right that's right so there's been a lot of desire to change a lot of desire to restore some sense of order and community on campus that we can do our work and do our teaching and but what i'm hopeful that our book will do is give everyone a common set of concepts and and sort of a look into how this thing plays out if you if you don't do anything to to stop it going down this this rabbit hole um my hope for the book is that the parenting stuff is all is new that is a lot of people have been following what's going on on campus but they don't realize this is now happening in high schools and earlier so my hope is that every every school principal from elementary school through high school and then every college president will get a copy of the book in the mail or given to them by a donor and so okay jordan jordan's large audience i hope that you will buy a copy of the book and give it to the principal of your kids elementary school and certainly maybe we can put that in the description as well makes a great gift to the people who are educating your children right i'll i'll write that down right now yeah and reaching parents out that that's always the first constituency we talk about because you know we hear from parents uh over and over again as parent and as parents ourselves there's this kind of like um uh there's a sense that something's really going wrong in k-12 education certainly there's something going wrong and just the process of parenting where most of people feel kind of well it seems like a lot of parents feel sort of helpless because they they don't they have that pluralistic ignorance problem they don't know that everybody else you know are having the same problems and as soon as you actually get the conversation starting we can get to parents we uh we have a real fighting chance okay okay okay all right well um what and what do you think like are you optimistic or pessimistic about where this is going at the moment yes no kidding that's exactly headache a little bit of both yeah i'm very pessimistic about the national situation i think polarization is going to get worse for a while um and so i think we have to think about how do we adapt our institutions to life in an increasingly polarized country so um you know if if you know if politics is is dominating everything and it's getting nastier and nastier it would be great if when you go into a restaurant you don't have to think about is this a democrat restaurant or republican resident when you go in to buy a pair of sneakers you don't have to think about is this a democrat paris sneakers or republican pair of sneakers so we may be going to the root to everything is polarized everything's political that would be terrible if universities succumb to that if this is a democrat university or you know republican that would be terrible um so i think on the national level i'm very pessimistic but i think that there is enough recognition that this that we're all exhausted this is this is going out of control but i think we will have a look it'll be possible to to get a constituency to say our elementary schools our middle schools our high schools and universities they have work to do um we need to reform what we're doing in ways that are better for the kids we all love our kids we all want our kids to be resilient um so i like greg i'm very optimistic that that the trend towards overprotective parenting which has just been continuing on and on i i'm very optimistic that that will reverse once people see those graphs once people and you talk to parents of teenagers even if their kid isn't depressed seven of their kids friends are depressed or anxious yeah well okay so let me ask you about that a little bit uh and maybe we'll end with this um i've been trying to figure out why this overprotectiveness epidemic has emerged and so i took the social psychological route of analysis instead of the psychological because i do know you should look at situational factors before you look at in personality factors let's say generally speaking well here's some demographic trends um fewer kids so maybe parents don't make their kids resilient maybe siblings do you know because there's a lot of there's a lot of uh uh what would you call status competition between siblings and if you're special or unresilient your siblings are going to have a field day with you and so you know maybe we can't raise kids that are resilient unless they have three brothers and sisters or something like that that makes a lot of sense but my recollection when uh was it so uh what was it uh the guy who wrote birth order what was that book uh 1990s my recollection is that the effects of birth order are actually very small and so whether you're first or last whether you're an only child or not so research going back very far those effects are pretty small so i would not put this big change on the fact of declining families because you don't have siblings rather declining families means there just aren't that many kids in the neighborhood yeah right well that's the other issue sure sure is more significant okay okay so then next thing next thing might be um older parents you know we don't know how optimally stupid you should be when you're when you're a parent and it might be that you might need to be somewhat narcissistically entranced with your own life to ignore your children enough to allow them to develop independent resilience you know and if you're if now let's say you don't have a child till you're well let's say 40 you only have one or two so they're pretty damn precious and you've been waiting a long time and now you're more conservative because you're older because you will be and you have endless resources to devote to this extraordinarily valuable individual so so if if it's if it's the consequence of a switch in demographics and and and older parents then it's going to be a harder thing to rectify as a consequence of transformation of attitude that nick gillespie from reason that's that's his his major major theory on this stuff and at the same time you know i i you have to say some things that really have changed and definitely what when i was a kid i grew up first i'm a first generation american grew up you know very very pretty poor um the uh uh but the the idea that kind of like there's a sort of like uh the stratification in the us in terms of income is getting so dramatic and the way you can get to that life raft is getting into a princeton or a stanford or uh or a harvard um that that's not entirely in in people's heads and so but unfortunately the way we thought that the best way to do that is to build the sort of rocket ship hyper invested in you know you have two kids and you you treat them both like heat seeking missiles and you completely eliminate any autonomy they have over their lives they get up at six and they're scheduled until they go to bed um it turns out that this is visibly um dysfunctional at the same time it's why we interviewed julie left guy haynes who wrote a book called how to raise an adult about how you know freshmen are showing up at stanford um depressed partially because they have no sense of locus of control right in charge of their life so i think there is there is electricity here's a really stunning statistic that we found in researching the book it's no surprise that men if you compare if you go back to the 1950s and 60s look at how men spend their time and compared to today it's no surprise that men are spending more time in child care more time with their kids that's great we all think that's great what do you think has happened to women women were very rarely working in the 50s and 60s and so look the number of hours they spent doing child care involved their children back then do you think it's gone up or down since the 50s and 60s now that most women are working answer up right spending more time with their kids and there are very few kids now so you have mom and dad both spending more time with their one or two kids who are over supervising over investing there are not a lot of kids out in the neighborhood and investing poorly investing that's right that's right because we're investing in oh what annette laro calls concerted cultivation yep the two the two okay so here's another here's another conundrum so one of the things that struck me is that a lot of this gender play that you see gender role play that you see in among adolescents now older adolescents and young adults in universities so the gender bender and gender fluidity and i'm calling them games for a reason they remind me of pretend play with an insistence by the player that everyone joins the game and i've been thinking well maybe we're seeing a delayed reaction to the eradication of fantasy play in early childhood as a consequence of the introduction of technological devices because you know the developmental psychologists know very well that children have to engage in a lot of fantasy play and then if you introduce technology that that interferes with that or supersedes it then the fantasy play doesn't occur you're playing with different roles when you're engaged in fantasy play so i'm also wondering you know because i noticed even when i had kids which is now quite a long time ago often when i took them to the houses of other people with kids instead of letting the kids go off and cause a bit of trouble and then settle into a spontaneous fantasy play episode they put on a video but now that's like 20 times as bad because all these kids have access to endless electronic devices and we don't know what that's doing to the early childhood play and so well so anyways those are some of the sociological forces that i thought might be at work that are driving this hyper protectiveness and it isn't obvious to see how to reverse them um because they're not happening consciously in some sense right it's not like everybody decided that they were going to hyper protect their children yeah but i think social norms are very powerful and if everybody else acts like letting your kid walk a dog is dangerous you'll be less likely to let your kid walk the dog um it should be possible to reverse that what we're hoping will emerge from this book in our discussions of the book is the norm that if you're not letting your kid out you're harming your kid almost like a vitamin deficiency yeah i'd like to know you know it's like a doctor star if pediatricians and actually pediatricians just put out a big report on the importance of play that kids need a lot more play than they're getting yep about this is vitamin p and how much vitamin p did your kid get today and parents and vitamin p is not it doesn't count if you're there with them right i just think yeah right now so um so if we start if if pediatricians start asking how much vitamin p did you could get last week and only tell me about the unsupervised times doesn't count so we do that you look at the idea because you know so your your point about the shrinking families is right and that's irreversible we're never going to go back to large families uh we have to adapt to that and if you really want your kid to be successful you'll back off that's the idea we have to get across okay so we could close by thinking look your your kid's going to have to encounter the full tragedy of life as they mature and become adults and so what you're trying to do i got i mean there are all sorts of things you know so what when nietzsche said what did doesn't kill you makes you stronger the principle is true but it's not literally true so the research on adverse childhood experiences and that those are the serious kind of things and we talk a fair amount about that we're not advocating for that kind of for anything like anything that we that would count as a as an ace but certainly for goodness sakes you know the ability to get in fights with with other kids and and resolve them among themselves we got rid of that and now we have a generation that's looking upwards in a form of moral dependency whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger so he certainly knew that something didn't kill you right so it's a matter of optimal exposure to challenge you know and and it's by challenging your kids not by protecting them that you make them resilient and they need to be resilient because life is actually difficult and so you know one of the things that's been gratifying to me too is that during my lectures i've been telling people that the idea that they're okay the way they are especially if they're young is an appalling idea what they could be concentrating on is who they could be exactly and one of the really positive elements to the notion of optimal challenges that it's really um it's encouraging for people to know that you're willing to let them take a risk because you have enough faith in their ability to learn and prevail that that supersedes the risk that's right that's right absolutely all right well thank you guys very much i appreciated the discussion uh we'll get this up as soon as i get it edited which shouldn't be too long and if you would be so kind as to send me all the url links you'd like me to post in the description then i would be more than happy to do that and uh good luck with your the continued sales of your book and with all your other endeavors as well and hopefully uh good sense will prevail and we can do something to reverse this polarization and to and also maybe to reduce the safety culture on in the education system that would really be something that's my grandmother would have said yes thank you jordan thank you jordan okay good to see you both

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 422,844

Rating: 4.9134455 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, the coddling of the american mind, trigger warnings, greg lukianoff, social justice, safe spaces, free speech, social justice warrior, political correctness, social psychology, viewpoint diversity, jonathan haidt, identity politics, jordan b peterson lecture, SJW

Id: eqCNTopdBBs

Length: 101min 54sec (6114 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 19 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/torontoLDtutor]

Haidt disagrees with Peterson at about 19:00. Haidt does not agree that postmodern neomarxist academics are a primary cause for the current political correctness / victimhood movements. He instead sees these as entirely student-led. It's a curious disagreement, but not too surprising to anyone who has followed Haidt, for he has been far more timid than Peterson in his claims. I myself am not convinced by Haidt. Based on my own experiences with radical academics and based on the Twitter feeds of the many whom I follow, it seems undeniable that they are instrumental in driving the harmful changes at universities. I don't know whether Haidt is wilfully diminishing their role (because he wants professors and admin to join Heterodox Academy) or if he is simply naive or in denial, but it's about time to see him admit this major disagreement head on. It has been looming since their first interview.

[u/[deleted]]

/u/joyyal66 More for you. I've been saying for about a year that the problem at Universities is NOT exaggerated and it is a definite issue. Now we have the data to back up that idea. This video gets into conjectures on what gave a rise to the problem, but the problem exists nonetheless.