This is a book about wisdom and its opposite. It is a book about three psychological principles and about what happens to young people when parents and educators—acting with the best of intentions—implement policies that are inconsistent with those principles. We can summarize the entire book by contrasting the three opening quotations and the three Great Untruths.
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PSYCHOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE |
WISDOM |
GREAT UNTRUTH |
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Young people are antifragile. |
Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child. |
What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. |
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We are all prone to emotional reasoning and the confirmation bias. |
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. |
Always trust your feelings. |
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We are all prone to dichotomous thinking and tribalism. |
The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. |
Life is a battle between good people and evil people. |
In Part I, we explained the three psychological principles and showed how some recent practices and policies on many campuses encourage students to embrace unwisdom rather than wisdom. In Part II, we showed what happens when students embrace all three untruths, within an institution that has low levels of viewpoint diversity, weak leadership, and a high sense of threat (caused in part by a real escalation of political polarization and provocations from off campus). In Part III, we showed that there is no simple explanation for what is happening. You have to look at six interacting trends: rising political polarization; rising rates of adolescent depression and anxiety; a shift to more fearful, protective, and intensive parenting in middle-class and wealthy families; widespread play deprivation and risk deprivation for members of iGen; an expanding campus bureaucracy taking an increasingly overprotective posture; and a rising passion for justice combined with a growing commitment to attaining “equal outcomes” in all areas. In Part IV, we offered suggestions based on the three psychological principles for improving childrearing, K–12 education, and universities.
We discussed some alarming trends in this book, particularly in the chapters on America’s rising political polarization and rising rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide. These problems are serious, and we see no sign that either trend will be reversing in the next decade. And yet we are heartened and persuaded by cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker’s argument, in Enlightenment Now, that in the long run most things are getting better, quickly and globally. Pinker notes that there are many psychological reasons why people are—and have always been—prone to catastrophizing about the future. For example, some of the problems we discuss in this book are examples of the “problems of progress” that we described in the Introduction. As we make progress in such areas as safety, comfort, and inclusion, we raise our expectations. The progress is real, but as we adapt to our improved conditions, we often fail to notice it.
We certainly don’t want to fall prey to catastrophizing, so we should look for contrary evidence and contrary ways to appraise our present circumstances. Here’s a powerful antidote to pessimism—a quote that was first brought to our attention by science writer Matt Ridley in his 2010 book, The Rational Optimist:
We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason. . . . On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?1
Those words were written in 1830 by Thomas Babington Macaulay, a British historian and member of Parliament. Britain’s best days were certainly not behind it.
Pinker and Ridley both base their optimism in part on a simple observation: The more serious a problem gets, the more inducements there are for people, companies, and governments to find innovative solutions, whether driven by personal commitment, market forces, or political pressures.
How might things change? Let us sketch out one possible vision, drawing on some “green shoots” that we already see. These are countertrends that may already be under way today, as this book goes to press in May 2018.
1. Social media. Social media is a major part of the problem, implicated both in rising rates of mental illness and in rising political polarization. But after two years of scandals, public outrage, and calls for government regulation, the major companies are finally responding; they are at least tweaking algorithms, verifying some identities, and taking steps to reduce harassment. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, there is likely to be far more pressure applied by governments. Parents, schools, and students will respond, too, gradually adopting better practices, just as we adapted (imperfectly) to life surrounded by junk food and cigarettes.
Green shoots: Facebook2 and Twitter are both hiring social psychologists and putting out calls for research on how their platforms can change to “increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation.”3 We hope to see some substantial changes in the next few years that will reduce the polarizing, depression-inducing, and harassment-supporting effects of social media. A partnership between Common Sense Media and the Center for Humane Technology (founded by a coalition of early employees at Facebook and Google) is working with the tech industry to lessen the negative effects of device use, especially for children. Their campaign, The Truth About Tech, informs students, parents, and teachers about the health effects of various technologies, and aims to reform the industry so that tech products are healthier for users.4
2. Free play and freedom. The adolescent mental health crisis has finally caught the attention of the public. As more parents and educators come to see that overprotection is harming children, and as we move further and further away from the crime wave of the 1970s and 1980s, more parents will try harder to let their kids play outside, with one another, and without adult supervision.
Green shoots: In March 2018, Utah became the first state to pass into law a “free-range parenting” bill—and with unanimous bipartisan support.5 As we noted in chapter 8, parents in some localities currently run the risk of arrest for letting their children out without supervision. The Utah law affirms children’s right to some unsupervised time, and parents’ right to not be arrested when they give it to them. As more states pass laws like these, parents and schools will be more willing to try out policies and practices that give kids more autonomy and responsibility.
3. Better identity politics. With the rise of the alt-right and white nationalism since 2016, more scholars are writing about the ways in which emphasizing racial identity leads to bad outcomes in a multiracial society. It has become increasingly clear that identitarian extremists on both sides rely on the most outrageous acts of the other side to unite their group around its common enemy. This process is not unique to the United States, a fact that can be seen in Julia Ebner’s new book, The Rage: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far Right Extremism. Ebner, an Austrian researcher at the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue, did harrowing fieldwork befriending members of ISIS and members of far-right groups, such as the English Defense League. In an interview, she summarized her conclusions:
What we have is the far right depicting Islamist extremists as representative of the whole Muslim community, while Islamist extremists depict the far right as representative of the entire West. As the extremes [pull more people from] the political center, these ideas become mainstream, and the result is a clash-of-civilizations narrative turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy.6
Green shoots: More writers from many backgrounds are calling for a rethinking of identity politics. Turkish American political scientist Timur Kuran,7 Chinese American law professor Amy Chua,8 and gay author and activist Jonathan Rauch9 (among many others) have been sounding the alarm about how the common-enemy identity politics of the far right and far left feed off one another. These authors are looking for ways to short-circuit the process and shift to a common-humanity perspective; they generally arrive at some version of the basic social psychology principles we’ve discussed in this book. Here is Rauch, reviewing and praising Chua’s recent book, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations:
Psychological research shows that tribalism can be countered and overcome by teamwork: by projects that join individuals in a common task on an equal footing. One such task, it turns out, can be to reduce tribalism. In other words, with conscious effort, humans can break the tribal spiral, and many are trying. “You’d never know it from cable news or social media,” Chua writes, “but all over the country there are signs of people trying to cross divides and break out of their political tribes.”10
The Dalai Lama has long urged such an approach, based on the same social psychology. In May 2018, he tweeted this:
I’m Tibetan, I’m Buddhist and I’m the Dalai Lama, but if I emphasize these differences it sets me apart and raises barriers with other people. What we need to do is to pay more attention to the ways in which we are the same as other people.11
4. Universities committing to truth as a process. The University of Chicago has long been an outlier in the intensity of its academic culture. (It proudly embraces the unofficial motto “Where fun goes to die.”12) When safetyism was sweeping through many other top American universities, it had less effect at Chicago. It is no coincidence that the best recent statement on freedom of expression was drafted there (see Appendix 2).
Green shoots: Many universities are adopting the Chicago Statement and are beginning to push back against the creep of safetyism. If that stance works out well for them and if those schools move up on various rankings and lists, then many more universities will follow suit.
Putting this all together: We predict that things will improve, and the change may happen quite suddenly at some point in the next few years. As far as we can tell from private conversations, most university presidents reject the culture of safetyism. They know it is bad for students and bad for free inquiry, but they find it politically difficult to say so publicly. From our conversations with students, we believe that most high school and college students despise call-out culture and would prefer to be at a school that had little of it. Most students are not fragile, they are not “snowflakes,” and they are not afraid of ideas. So if a small group of universities is able to develop a different sort of academic culture—one that finds ways to make students from all identity groups feel welcome without using the divisive methods that seem to be backfiring on so many campuses—we think that market forces will take care of the rest. Applications and enrollment at those schools will surge. Alumni donations will increase. More high schools will prepare students to compete for slots at those schools, and more parents will prepare their kids to gain admission to those schools. This will mean less test prep, less overprotection, more free play, and more independence. Entire towns and school districts will organize themselves to enable and encourage more free-range parenting. They will do this not primarily to help their students get into college but to reverse the epidemic of depression, anxiety, self-injury, and suicide that is afflicting our children. There will be a growing recognition across the country that safetyism is dangerous and that it is stunting our children’s development.
Some of the earliest colleges in Britain’s American colonies were founded to train clergy. But as a more distinctively practical American culture developed, schools were increasingly founded to train young people in the skills and virtues that were essential for a self-governing civil society. In 1750, as he was founding the school that later became the University of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin wrote this to Samuel Johnson:
Nothing is of more importance to the public weal, than to form and train up youth in wisdom and virtue. Wise and good men are, in my opinion, the strength of a state: much more so than riches or arms, which, under the management of Ignorance and Wickedness, often draw on destruction, instead of providing for the safety of a people.13
This is a book about education and wisdom. If we can educate the next generation more wisely, they will be stronger, richer, more virtuous, and even safer.