From the ARCHIVE Tribute to Andrew Silow-Carroll: Jonathan Haidt Against “The Coddling of the American Mind”
David Shasha
Jonathan Haidt Against “The Coddling of the American Mind”
In SHU 861 I included an article on Jordan Peterson and the resurgence of Conservatism by Yoram Hazony:
Peterson, a vile Right Wing academic celebrity who is now doing his lectures on what could be considered the Rock concert circuit, is also mentioned in the following article by the great Pankaj Mishra:
Peterson has become one of the most prominent Right Wing enemies of PC culture in the benighted age of Trump.
NYU Professor Jonathan Haidt has become another go-to anti-PC scourge, as we can see from the following 2011 New York Times article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/science/08tier.html
Haidt and his writing partner Greg Lukianoff published a much-discussed article in The Atlantic back in 2015:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
The article has now been expanded into a book, both called “The Coddling of the American Mind.”
The duo did a book event at Politics and Prose in DC back in September that was broadcast on C-Span’s Book TV:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?450784-1/the-coddling-american-mind
Haidt has, like Peterson, become an academic celebrity who is being deployed by a lot of old White people to attack the current climate of “Safe Spaces” and “Micro-Aggression” on college campuses.
As I have not been on a college campus for many years, I cannot speak with any authority on exactly what is going on and how things might have changed over time.
But I do know that Haidt’s Social Science flow charts, case studies, and taxonomies are as much a part of the problem as the apparent PC hysteria. There is not only the problem of Social Science and its number-crunching soullessness, but there is the ever-expanding Corporate University and – most importantly – the way it is undermining the Humanities.
Indeed, Haidt and Lukianoff make much of case studies and examples of campus “horrors” to frighten the old White people in the audience, but they never once discuss Culture – meaning, they do not discuss Literature, Music, Film, Art, and the rest of it.
As I have already said, while I am not conversant with the specifics of campus life today, I do teach young people and find that, because of the Haidts and the Petersons of the academy, there is currently a fatally impoverished Cultural-Intellectual climate. This has to do with Social Media and economics, but it also has to do with the encroachment of Social Scientific models of reality, which have sought to eviscerate the classical Humanistic education.
It is interesting to note how the first wave of this anti-PC polemic came from Conservative dogmatists like Allan Bloom and Charles Murray:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_(political_scientist)
Back in the Reagan years, it was the great Henry Louis Gates Jr. who best addressed the problem they presented in the battle over the Canon:
https://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/26/books/whose-canon-is-it-anyway.html
But today the polemic is being given a “Liberal” imprimatur by clever marketers like Haidt; slick operators who know how to sell their product to a nervous public, and who avoid the larger Cultural issues like the “Idiocracy” and its connection to Poptrash and Hip-Hop.
Indeed, the “Idiocracy” is everything:
I have discussed the problem of Poptrash and Hip-Hop in the following article which attacks New York Times music writer Jon Caramanica:
But Haidt, as I have said, obstinately chooses to avoid the Cultural discussion, seeking to stick closely to his Social Science absolutism.
There is a modicum of elitism in this debate, given that much of it comes from the hallowed precincts of academia and its “Peer Review” incestuous echo-chamber.
It is not that there are not problems with a generation of spoiled children entering Higher Education on their way to Silicon Valley and Wall Street, but that those problems have long been connected to the dumbing-down of the curriculum, as well as the reductive nature of Social Science; long the enemy of creative Artistic and Humanistic thinking.
Back in 2001 I wrote a lengthy essay on American Education which discussed the seminal ideas of Richard Hofstadter and Diane Ravitch:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v5nq6euk-KpK4V_mudVJjg_V21rm5VALNRL_eYtcKCQ/edit
I discuss there the development of Progressive Education in this country and the debased tradition of Anti-Intellectualism.
It is critical to engage in this discussion on American Education if we are to get to the root of the current problems with Social Media and PC dogmatism and the concomitant ills they have generated, in a social networking system mired in cruelty, violence, and dysfunction.
We have sadly seen a degrading of the Humanities with a corresponding increase of pseudo-scientific research into human issues, which have long been addressed by our creative arts.
So, without seeming to know it, Haidt is part of the very problem he is dealing with.
David Shasha
From SHU 884, March 6, 2019