The Coddling of the American Mind

by Greg Lukianoff

  Any student who was already feeling like an outsider might well feel a flash of negativity upon reading the word “mold.” But what should one do with that flash? There is a principle in philosophy and rhetoric called the principle of charity, which says that one should interpret other people’s statements in their best, most reasonable form, not in the worst or most offensive way possible. Had Olivia been taught to judge people primarily on their intentions, she could have used the principle of charity in this situation, as Karith Foster did in the situation described in the previous chapter. If a student in Olivia’s position was in the habit of questioning her initial reactions, looking for evidence, and giving people the benefit of the doubt, that student might get past her initial flash of emotion and avail herself of an invitation from a dean who wanted to know what she could do to address the student’s concerns.

  That is not what happened. Instead, Olivia posted Spellman’s email on her Facebook page (about two weeks after receiving it) with the comment, “I just don’t fit that wonderful CMC mold! Feel free to share.” Her friends did share the email, and the campus erupted in protest.6 There were marches, demonstrations, demands given to the president for mandatory diversity training, and demands that Spellman resign. Two students went on a hunger strike, vowing that they would not eat until Spellman was gone.7 In one scene, which you can watch on YouTube, students formed a circle and spent over an hour airing their grievances—through bullhorns—against Spellman and other administrators who were there in the circle to listen.8 Spellman apologized for her email being “poorly worded” and told the crowd that her “intention was to affirm the feelings and experiences expressed in the article and to provide support.”9 But the students did not accept her apology. At one point a woman berated the dean (to cheers from the students) for “falling asleep”10 during the proceedings, which the woman interpreted as an act of disrespect. But it is clear from the video of the confrontation that Spellman was not falling asleep; she was trying to hold back her tears.

  The university did not fire Spellman, but neither did its leaders publicly express any support for her.11 Faced with the escalating anger of students—amplified by social media and then by national news coverage—Spellman resigned.12

  As this was happening, another conflict over an email was unfolding at Yale.13 Erika Christakis, a lecturer at the Yale Child Study Center and associate master of Silliman College (one of Yale’s residential colleges), wrote an email questioning whether it was appropriate for Yale administrators to give guidance to students about appropriate and inappropriate Halloween costumes, as the college dean’s office had done.14 Christakis praised their “spirit of avoiding hurt and offense,” but she worried that “the growing tendency to cultivate vulnerability in students carries unacknowledged costs.”15 She expressed concern about the institutional “exercise of implied control over college students,” and invited the community to reflect on whether, as adults, they could set norms for themselves and handle disagreements interpersonally. “Talk to each other,” she wrote. “Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.”

  The email sparked an angry response from some students, who interpreted it as an indication that Christakis was in favor of racist costumes.16 A few days later, a group of roughly 150 students appeared in the courtyard outside Christakis’s home (within Silliman College), writing statements in chalk, including “We know where you live.” Erika’s husband, Nicholas Christakis, was the master of Silliman (a title that has since been changed to “head of college”). When he came out to the courtyard, students demanded that he apologize for—and renounce—his wife’s email.17 Nicholas listened, engaged in dialogue with them, and apologized several times for causing them pain, but he refused to renounce his wife’s email or the ideas it espoused.18 Students accused him and Erika of being “racist” and “offensive,” “stripping people of their humanity,” “creating an unsafe space,” and enabling “violence.” They swore at him, criticized him for “not listening” and for not remembering students’ names. They told him not to smile, lean down, or gesticulate. And they told him they wanted him to lose his job. Eventually, in a scene that went viral,19 one student screamed at him: “Who the fuck hired you? You should step down! It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! It’s about creating a home here. . . . You should not sleep at night! You are disgusting!”20

  The next day, the president of the university sent out an email acknowledging students’ pain and committing to “take actions that will make us better.”21 He did not mention any support for the Christakises until weeks after the courtyard incident, by which time attitudes against the couple were entrenched. Amid ongoing demands that they be fired,22 Erika resigned from her teaching position,23 Nicholas took a sabbatical from teaching for the rest of the year, and at the end of the school year, the pair resigned from their positions in the residential college. Erika later revealed that many professors were very supportive privately, but were unwilling to defend or support the Christakises publicly because they thought it was “too risky” and they feared retribution.24

  Why did students react so strongly to the emails from Dean Spellman and Erika Christakis, both of which were clearly intended to be helpful to students? Of course, there was a backstory at each school; there were incidents of racism or other reasons why some students were frustrated with the administration.25 The protests were not just about the emails. But as far as we can tell, those backstories don’t involve Spellman or Christakis. So why did students interpret the emails as offenses so grave that they justified calls for their authors to be fired? It’s as though some of the students had their own mental prototype, a schema with two boxes to fill: victim and oppressor. Everyone is placed into one box or the other.

  Groups and Tribes

  There’s a famous series of experiments in social psychology called the minimal group paradigm, pioneered by Polish psychologist Henri Tajfel, who served in the French Army during World War II and became a prisoner of war in Germany. Profoundly affected by his experiences as a Jew during that period in Europe, including having his entire family in Poland murdered by the Nazis, Tajfel wanted to understand the conditions under which people would discriminate against members of an outgroup. So in the 1960s he conducted a series of experiments, each of which began by dividing people into two groups based on trivial and arbitrary criteria, such as flipping a coin. For example, in one study, each person first estimated the number of dots on a page. Irrespective of their estimations, half were told that they had overestimated the number of dots and were put into a group of “overestimators.” The other half were sent to the “underestimators” group. Next, subjects were asked to distribute points or money to all the other subjects, who were identified only by their group membership. Tajfel found that no matter how trivial or “minimal” he made the distinctions between the groups, people tended to distribute whatever was offered in favor of their in-group members.26

  Later studies have used a variety of techniques to reach the same conclusion.27 Neuroscientist David Eagleman used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the brains of people who were watching videos of other people’s hands getting pricked by a needle or touched by a Q-tip. When the hand being pricked by a needle was labeled with the participant’s own religion, the area of the participant’s brain that handles pain showed a larger spike of activity than when the hand was labeled with a different religion. When arbitrary groups were created (such as by flipping a coin) immediately before the subject entered the MRI machine, and the hand being pricked was labeled as belonging to the same arbitrary group as the participant, even though the group hadn’t even existed just moments earlier, the participant’s brain still showed a larger spike.28 We just don’t feel as much empathy for those we see as “other.”

  The bottom line is that the human mind is prepared for tribalism. Human evolution is not just the story of individuals com
peting with other individuals within each group; it’s also the story of groups competing with other groups—sometimes violently. We are all descended from people who belonged to groups that were consistently better at winning that competition. Tribalism is our evolutionary endowment for banding together to prepare for intergroup conflict.29 When the “tribe switch”30 is activated, we bind ourselves more tightly to the group, we embrace and defend the group’s moral matrix, and we stop thinking for ourselves. A basic principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds and blinds,”31 which is a useful trick for a group gearing up for a battle between “us” and “them.” In tribal mode, we seem to go blind to arguments and information that challenge our team’s narrative. Merging with the group in this way is deeply pleasurable—as you can see from the pseudotribal antics that accompany college football games.

  But being prepared for tribalism doesn’t mean we have to live in tribal ways. The human mind contains many evolved cognitive “tools.” We don’t use all of them all the time; we draw on our toolbox as needed. Local conditions can turn the tribalism up, down, or off. Any kind of intergroup conflict (real or perceived) immediately turns tribalism up, making people highly attentive to signs that reveal which team another person is on. Traitors are punished, and fraternizing with the enemy is, too. Conditions of peace and prosperity, in contrast, generally turn down the tribalism.32 People don’t need to track group membership as vigilantly; they don’t feel pressured to conform to group expectations as closely. When a community succeeds in turning down everyone’s tribal circuits, there is more room for individuals to construct lives of their own choosing; there is more freedom for a creative mixing of people and ideas.

  So what happens to a community such as a college (or, increasingly, a high school33) when distinctions between groups are not trivial and arbitrary, and when they are emphasized rather than downplayed? What happens when you train students to see others—and themselves—as members of distinct groups defined by race, gender, and other socially significant factors, and you tell them that those groups are eternally engaged in a zero-sum conflict over status and resources?

  Two Kinds of Identity Politics

  “Identity politics” is a contentious term, but its basic meaning is simple. Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at The Brookings Institution, defines it as “political mobilization organized around group characteristics such as race, gender, and sexuality, as opposed to party, ideology, or pecuniary interest.” He notes that “in America, this sort of mobilization is not new, unusual, unAmerican, illegitimate, nefarious, or particularly leftwing.”34 Politics is all about groups forming coalitions to achieve their goals. If cattle ranchers, wine enthusiasts, or libertarians banding together to promote their interests is normal politics, then women, African Americans, or gay people banding together is normal politics, too.

  But how identity is mobilized makes an enormous difference—for the group’s odds of success, for the welfare of the people who join the movement, and for the country. Identity can be mobilized in ways that emphasize an overarching common humanity while making the case that some fellow human beings are denied dignity and rights because they belong to a particular group, or it can be mobilized in ways that amplify our ancient tribalism and bind people together in shared hatred of a group that serves as the unifying common enemy.

  COMMON-HUMANITY IDENTITY POLITICS

  The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., epitomized what we’ll call common-humanity identity politics. He was trying to fix a gaping wound—centuries of racism that had been codified into law in southern states and into customs, habits, and institutions across the country. It wasn’t enough to be patient and wait for things to change gradually. The civil rights movement was a political movement led by African Americans and joined by others. Together, they engaged in nonviolent protests and civil disobedience, boycotts, and sophisticated public relations strategies to apply political pressure on intransigent lawmakers while working to change minds and hearts in the country at large.

  Part of Dr. King’s genius was that he appealed to the shared morals and identities of Americans by using the unifying languages of religion and patriotism. He repeatedly used the metaphor of family, referring to people of all races and religions as “brothers” and “sisters.” He spoke often of the need for love and forgiveness, hearkening back to the words of Jesus and echoing ancient wisdom from many cultures: “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend”35 and “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”36 (Compare King’s words to these from Buddha: “For hate is not conquered by hate; hate is conquered by love. This is a law eternal.”)37

  King’s most famous speech drew on the language and iconography of what sociologists call the American civil religion.38 Some Americans use quasi-religious language, frameworks, and narratives to speak about the country’s founding documents and founding fathers, and King did, too. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” he proclaimed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, “they were signing a promissory note.”39 King turned the full moral force of the American civil religion toward the goals of the civil rights movement:

  Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”40

  King’s approach made it clear that his movement would not destroy America; it would repair and reunite it.41 This inclusive, common-humanity approach was also explicit in the words of Pauli Murray, a black and queer Episcopal priest and civil rights activist who, in 1965, at the age of fifty-five, earned a degree from Yale Law School. Today a residential college at Yale is named after her.42 In 1945, she wrote:

  I intend to destroy segregation by positive and embracing methods. . . . When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind.43

  A variant of this ennobling common-humanity approach played a major role in the movement that won marriage equality for gay people in several statewide elections in 2012, paving the way for the Supreme Court to rule that gay marriage would become the law of the land. Some of the most powerful advertisements of those 2012 campaigns used King’s technique of appealing to love and shared moral values. If you want to experience the emotion of moral elevation, just go to YouTube and search for “Mainers United for Marriage.” You’ll find short clips showing firefighters, Republicans, and Christians, all appealing to powerful moral principles, including religion and patriotism, to explain why they want their son/daughter/coworker to be able to marry the person he or she loves. Here’s the transcript from one such ad, featuring an Episcopal priest and his wife:44

  HUSBAND: Our son Hal led a platoon in Iraq.

  WIFE: When he got back he sat us down and said: “Mom, Dad, I’m gay.”

  HUSBAND: That took some getting used to, but we love him and we’re proud of him.

  WIFE: Our marriage has been the foundation of our lives for forty-six years.

  HUSBAND: We used to think civil unions were enough for gay couples.

  WIFE: But marriage is a commitment from the heart. A civil union is no substitute.

  HUSBAND: Our son fought for our freedoms. He should have the freedom to marry.

  This is the way to win hearts, minds, and votes: you must appeal to the elephant (intuitive and emotional processes) as well as the rider (reasoning).45 King and Murray understood this. Instead of shaming or demonizing their opponents, they humanized them and then relentlessly appealed to their humanity.

  COMMON-ENEMY IDENTITY POLITICS

  The common-humanity
form of identity politics can still be found on many college campuses, but in recent years we’ve seen the rapid rise of a very different form that is based on an effort to unite and mobilize multiple groups to fight against a common enemy. It activates a powerful social-psychological mechanism embodied in an old Bedouin proverb: “I against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world.”46 Identifying a common enemy is an effective way to enlarge and motivate your tribe.

  Because we are trying to understand what is happening on campus, in what follows in this chapter, we’ll be focusing on the identity politics of the campus left. We note, however, that developments on campus are often influenced by provocations from the right, which we will discuss in chapter 6. Provocations from the right mostly come from off campus (where the right is just as committed to identity politics as is the left).

  There has never been a more dramatic demonstration of the horrors of common-enemy identity politics than Adolf Hitler’s use of Jews to unify and expand his Third Reich. And it is among the most shocking aspects of our current age that some Americans (and Europeans), mostly young white men, have openly embraced neo-Nazi ideas and symbols. They and other white nationalist groups rally around a shared hatred not just of Jews, but also of blacks, feminists, and “SJWs” (social justice warriors). These right-wing extremist groups seem not to have played significant roles in campus politics before 2016, but by 2017 many of them had developed methods of trolling and online harassment that began to have an influence on campus events, as we’ll discuss further in chapter 6.