A student illustrated the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning (Always trust your feelings) at the large town-hall meeting when she used her own anxiety as evidence that something was very wrong at Evergreen: “I want to cry, I can’t tell you how fast my heart is beating. I am shaking in my boots.”105
And of course, the entire episode was an illustration of the Untruth of Us Versus Them (Life is a battle between good people and evil people). The protesting students and their faculty supporters engaged in a giant game of common-enemy identity politics by interpreting a politically progressive college and its politically progressive leadership and faculty as exemplars of white supremacy in action. As one student who refused to join the protesters later put it while testifying before the college trustees, “If you offer any kind of alternative viewpoint, you’re ‘the enemy.’”106
Evergreen State College is not typical. With the exception of the “Milo riot” at UC Berkeley, its meltdown into anarchy in the spring of 2017 is more extreme than anything else that has happened in recent decades on an American college campus, as far as we know. We have presented its story in detail because it is a warning to everyone who cares about students or universities. The Evergreen story shows what is possible when political diversity is reduced to very low levels, when the school’s leadership is weak and easily intimidated, and when professors and administrators allow or even encourage the propagation of the three Great Untruths.
In Sum
Humans are tribal creatures who readily form groups to compete with other groups (as we saw in chapter 3). Sociologist Emile Durkheim’s work illuminates the way those groups engage in rituals—including the collective punishment of deviance—to enhance their cohesion and solidarity.
Cohesive and morally homogeneous groups are prone to witch hunts, particularly when they experience a threat, whether from outside or from within.
Witch hunts generally have four properties: they seem to come out of nowhere; they involve charges of crimes against the collective; the offenses that lead to those charges are often trivial or fabricated; and people who know that the accused is innocent keep quiet, or in extreme cases, they join the mob.
Some of the most puzzling campus events and trends since 2015 match the profile of a witch hunt. The campus protests at Yale, Claremont McKenna, and Evergreen all began as reactions to politely worded emails, and all led to demands that the authors of the emails be fired. (We repeat that the concerns that provide the context for a witch hunt may be valid, but in a witch hunt, the attendant fears are channeled in unjust and destructive ways.)
The new trend in 2017 for professors to join open letters denouncing their colleagues and demanding the retraction or condemnation of their work (as happened to Rebecca Tuvel, Amy Wax, and others) also fits this pattern. In all of these cases, colleagues of the accused were afraid to publicly stand up and defend them.
Viewpoint diversity reduces a community’s susceptibility to witch hunts. One of the most important kinds of viewpoint diversity, diversity of political thought, has declined substantially among both professors and students at American universities since the 1990s. These declines, combined with the rapidly escalating political polarization of the United States (which is our focus in the next chapter), may be part of the reason why the new culture of safetyism has spread so rapidly since its emergence around 2013.
This concludes Part II of this book. In these two chapters, we examined some dramatic events that occurred on American college campuses in the two years after we published our article in The Atlantic, laying out our concerns about cognitive distortions on campus. The new campus trends make a lot more sense once you understand the three Great Untruths and can spot them in action. In Part III, we’ll ask: Why, and why now? Where did the three Great Untruths and the culture of safetyism come from, and why did they spread so quickly in the last few years?
PART III
How Did We Get Here?
CHAPTER 6
The Polarization Cycle
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Isaac Newton’s third law of motion
We began this book with a presentation of three Great Untruths—ideas so out of tune with human flourishing that they harm anyone who embraces them. In Part II, we narrated a variety of campus events that have attracted national and sometimes global attention, and we showed how some students and professors involved in these events seem to have embraced the Great Untruths. Now, in Part III, we widen the lens and look at how we got here. Why did a set of interrelated ideas—which we have called a culture of safetyism—sweep through many universities between 2013 and 2017? Students who graduated from college in 2012 generally tell us that they saw little evidence of these trends. Students who began college at some elite universities in 2013 or 2014 tell us they saw the new culture arrive over the course of their four years. What is going on?
There is no simple answer. In Part III, we present six interacting explanatory threads: rising political polarization and cross-party animosity; rising levels of teen anxiety and depression; changes in parenting practices; the decline of free play; the growth of campus bureaucracy; and a rising passion for justice in response to major national events, combined with changing ideas about what justice requires. We believe that it is impossible to understand the state of higher education today without understanding all six. Before we present these threads, however, we must make two points explicitly and emphatically.
The first point is that there are different threads for different people. Part of the complexity of our story is that not all of the threads have influenced each person and group on campus equally. The rising political polarization in the United States, in which universities are increasingly seen as bastions of the left, has led to an increase in hostility and harassment from some off-campus right-wing individuals and groups. Some of these events qualify as hate crimes and are targeted especially at Jews and people of color. We discuss that thread in this chapter. Rising rates of teen depression and anxiety affect both boys and girls but have hit young women particularly hard (as you’ll see in chapter 7). The rise in overprotective or “helicopter” parenting and the decline of free play (chapters 8 and 9) have negatively affected kids from wealthier families (mostly white and Asian)1 more than kids from working class or poor families. The increase in the number of campus administrators, along with the scope of their duties, may be having an effect at all schools (chapter 10), but new ideas and stronger passions about social justice may matter most on campuses where students are more engaged politically (chapter 11).
The second point is that this is a book about good intentions gone awry. In all of the six chapters in this part of the book, you’ll read about people primarily acting from good or noble motivations. In most cases, the motive is to help or protect children or people seen as vulnerable or victimized. But as we all know, the road to hell can be paved with good intentions. Our goal in Part III is not to blame; it is to understand. Only by identifying and analyzing all six explanatory threads can we begin to talk about possible solutions, which we do in Part IV.
The Boiling Point
In the last two chapters, we told many stories about students and faculty reacting to words in ways that seemed inappropriate, over-the-top, and in some cases, aggressive. Whether about a response to an email, an effort to shout a speaker down, or a petition to denounce a colleague, the stories in this book have mostly presented problems on campus that arise from a part of the political left. Sometimes the targets were on the right (such as Heather Mac Donald and Amy Wax), but more often the targets were themselves on the left (such as Nicholas and Erika Christakis, Rebecca Tuvel, Bret Weinstein, and the professors who taught the humanities course at Reed College). If we were to limit our analysis to events on campus, this would be most of the story. A set of new ideas about speech, violence, and safety has emerged on the far left in recent years,
and the debate on campus is largely a debate within the left, pitting (mostly) older progressives, who generally have an expansive notion of free speech, against (mostly) younger progressives, who are more likely to support some limitations on speech in the name of inclusion.2
But if we step back and look at American universities as complex institutions nested within a larger society that has been growing steadily more divided, angry, and polarized, we begin to see the left and the right locked into a game of mutual provocation and reciprocal outrage that is an essential piece of the puzzle we are trying to solve in this book. Allison Stanger, the Middlebury professor who suffered a concussion at the hands of protesters, said exactly this in a New York Times essay titled “Understanding the Angry Mob at Middlebury That Gave Me a Concussion.”3 In it, she wrote:
In the days after the violence, some have spun this story as one about what’s wrong with elite colleges and universities, our coddled youth or intolerant liberalism. Those analyses are incomplete. Political life and discourse in the United States is at a boiling point, and nowhere is the reaction to that more heightened than on college campuses.
She next listed several of the ways in which President Trump had insulted or offended members of marginalized groups while inspiring hateful speech among many of his followers, and added: “That is the context into which Dr. Murray walked [where he] was so profoundly misunderstood.”
We agree with Stanger that the national political context is an essential part of any story about what has been happening on college campuses in recent years. Things are indeed at a “boiling point” in the United States. You can see the temperature rising in the next two figures.
Figure 6.1 comes from the Pew Research Center, which in 1994 began asking a nationally representative sample of Americans about their level of agreement with a set of ten policy statements, and repeated the survey every few years. The policy statements include “Government regulation of business usually does more harm than good,” “Immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing, and healthcare,” and “The best way to ensure peace is through military strength.”4 Pew computes how far apart members of different groups are on each issue, then takes the average of the absolute values of those differences across all ten statements. As you can see in the line near the bottom marked “Gender,” men and women are just about the same distance apart in 2017 (7 points) as they were in 1994 (9 points). Only two of the lines show a clear increase. People who attend religious services regularly are now 11 points away from those who never attend, compared to just 5 points apart in 1994. But that 6-point increase is dwarfed by the 21-point increase in the distance between Republicans and Democrats over the same time period, nearly all of it occurring since 2004.
Issue Polarization
FIGURE 6.1. The distance between Republicans and Democrats, on a set of 10 policy questions, has grown very large since 2004. Differences by race, gender, education, and age have not changed much since 1994. (Source: Pew Research Center.)
If the people on the “other side” are moving farther and farther away from you on a broad set of moral and political issues, it stands to reason that you would feel more and more negatively toward them. Figure 6.2 shows that this has been happening. Every two years, the American National Election Study measures Americans’ attitudes on a variety of topics. In part of the survey, the researchers use a “feeling thermometer,” which is a set of questions asking respondents to rate a variety of groups and institutions on a scale where 0 is defined as “very cold or unfavorable” and 100 is defined as “very warm or favorable.” The top two lines in the graph show that when Republicans and Democrats are asked to rate their own party, the lines are in positive territory and haven’t moved much since the 1970s.5 The bottom two lines show what they think about the other party. These lines have always been in negative territory, but many will be surprised to see that the cross-party ratings weren’t all that negative from the 1970s until 1990—they hovered in the 40s. It’s only in the 1990s that the lines begin to drop, with a plunge between 2008 and 2012 (the years of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street).
Affective Polarization
FIGURE 6.2. Affective partisan polarization. Americans’ feelings toward their own party have barely changed since the 1970s, but Americans have become increasingly “cold” or hostile toward the other party since the 1990s. (Source: American National Election Study,6 plotted by Iyengar and Krupenkin, 2018.)
Why is this happening? There are many reasons, but in order to make sense of America’s current predicament, you have to start by recognizing that the mid-twentieth century was a historical anomaly—a period of unusually low political polarization and cross-party animosity7 combined with generally high levels of social trust and trust in government.8 From the 1940s to around 1980, American politics was about as centrist and bipartisan as it has ever been. One reason is that, during and prior to this period, the country faced a series of common challenges and enemies, including the Great Depression, the Axis Powers during World War II, and the Soviets during the Cold War. Given the psychology of tribalism that we described in chapter 3, the loss of a common enemy after the collapse of the Soviet Union can be expected to lead to more intratribal conflict.
A second major reason is that, since the 1970s, Americans have been increasingly self-segregating into politically homogeneous communities, as Bill Bishop showed in his influential 2008 book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. Subsequent research has shown that we live in increasingly economically and politically segregated communities right down to the city block.9 The two major political parties have sorted themselves along similar lines: as the Republican Party becomes disproportionately older, white, rural, male, and Christian, the Democratic Party is increasingly young, nonwhite, urban, female, and nonreligious.10 As political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Masha Krupenkin put it, “The result is that today, differences in party affiliation go hand in glove with differences in world view and individuals’ sense of social and cultural identity.”11
A third major reason is the media environment, which has changed in ways that foster division. Long gone is the time when everybody watched one of three national television networks. By the 1990s, there was a cable news channel for most points on the political spectrum, and by the early 2000s there was a website or discussion group for every conceivable interest group and grievance. By the 2010s, most Americans were using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, which make it easy to encase oneself within an echo chamber. And then there’s the “filter bubble,” in which search engines and YouTube algorithms are designed to give you more of what you seem to be interested in, leading conservatives and progressives into disconnected moral matrices backed up by mutually contradictory informational worlds.12 Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.
A fourth reason is the increasingly bitter hostility in Congress. The Democrats controlled the House of Representatives for about sixty years, with only brief interruptions in the mid- to late twentieth century, but their dominance ended in 1994, when the Republicans swept to victory under Newt Gingrich, who became Speaker of the House. Gingrich then imposed a set of reforms intended to discourage his many new members from forging the sort of personal relationships across party lines that had been normal in previous decades.13 For example, Gingrich changed the work schedule to ensure that all business was done midweek, and then he encouraged his members not to move their families from their home districts, and instead fly to Washington for a few days each week. Gingrich wanted a more cohesive and combative Republican team, and he got it. The more combative norms then filtered up to the Senate as well (though in weaker form). With control shifting back and forth several times since 1995, and with so much at stake with each shift, norms of civilit
y and possibilities for bipartisanship have nearly disappeared. As political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt put it, “Parties [have] come to view each other not as legitimate rivals but as dangerous enemies. Losing ceases to be an accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a catastrophe.”14
These four trends, plus many more,15 have combined to produce a very unfortunate change in the dynamics of American politics, which political scientists call negative partisanship. In a recent review of data on “affective polarization” (the degree to which members of each party feel negatively toward the other party), Iyengar and Krupenkin summarize the change like this:
Prior to the era of polarization, ingroup favoritism, that is, partisans’ enthusiasm for their party or candidate, was the driving force behind political participation. More recently, however, it is hostility toward the out-party that makes people more inclined to participate.16
In other words, Americans are now motivated to leave their couches to take part in political action not by love for their party’s candidate but by hatred of the other party’s candidate. Negative partisanship means that American politics is driven less by hope and more by the Untruth of Us Versus Them. “They” must be stopped, at all costs.
This is an essential part of our story. Americans now bear such animosity toward one another that it’s almost as if many are holding up signs saying, “Please tell me something horrible about the other side, I’ll believe anything!” Americans are now easily exploitable, and a large network of profit-driven media sites, political entrepreneurs, and foreign intelligence agencies are taking advantage of this vulnerability.
The Coddling of the American Mind Page 14