Review: The Coddling of the American Mind
In their 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff document the decades-long accumulation of unintended consequences that produced the dismaying social and cultural trends plaguing the United States today. In order to explain these trends, the authors develop six explanatory threads, each of which is detailed with an easily digestible mix of statistics and selected anecdotes.
Explanatory threads:
- Rising political polarization
- Rising levels of teen anxiety and depression
- Changes in parenting practices
- Decline of free play
- Growth of university bureaucracies
- Rising passion for justice in response to major national events, combined with changing ideas about what justice requires
From my perspective, the central explanatory thread is the shift towards overprotective parenting. Haidt and Lukianoff explain that children, like many other systems such as our immune system, are anti-fragile and require exposure to challenges and stressors (within reasonable limits) to mature into mature, strong and capable adults, and the desire of parents to protect their children from any and all risk often does more harm than good. This has far reaching effects and plays a role in each of the other explanatory threads. For example, overprotective parents will be less likely to allow children to engage in free play, which is essential for developing the “art of association” referred to by Tocqueville in his Democracy in America. It is unsurprising then that children robbed of the opportunities to develop the skills needed for smooth social interaction become adults who contribute to political polarization rather than minimize it, or more often anxious or depressed by the trials of life. It can be difficult to say how much protection is necessary and how much is superfluous, but Haidt and Lukianoff make a strong case that we (as society) have gone too far.
To help solve this dilemma, Haidt and Lukianoff provide a useful framework. They collect their explanatory threads into three great ‘untruths’ and contrast these with three great truths drawn from epigraphs at the beginning of the book. Remembering these great truths, and the pitfalls of the untruths, will help us become better human beings and citizens.
Three Great Untruths:
- What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
- Always trust your feelings.
- Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
Three Great Truths:
- Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child. - Folk wisdom, origin unknown
- Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded. But once mastered, no one can help you as much, not even your father or your mother. - Buddha, Dhammapada
- The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago