No offence: how to save generation snowflake

Today, young people are under great pressure from social media, academics and economic prospects
Jacob Lund

We live in strange times, to the point where this opening sentence could now come with a trigger warning. This month, students defaced a mural at Manchester University featuring Rudyard Kipling’s poem If in a protest against his “racist” work. They replaced it with a piece by Maya Angelou, to take a stand against “black and brown voices” being written out of history. Meanwhile, a professor at Bath University has been advised to dump any use of the phrase “as you know” in lectures to minimise the risk of unnerving students who aren’t up to speed.

Attitudes like these have been called “vindictive protectiveness” by the authors of a new book, The Coddling of the American Mind. In it, free speech campaigner and lawyer Greg Lukianoff and psychologist Jonathan Haidt take issue with the culture of self-care and safe spaces, while also treating students as the victims, rather than the cause. They cite one professor who has written an anonymous essay titled I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me. So, before you drop the “snowflake” bomb, consider their third perspective.

Fragile vs anti-fragile

Young people today are “under enormous pressure to perform academically”, argue Lukianoff and Haidt, while “all teens face new forms of harassment, insult and social competition from social media”. Economic prospects, against a backdrop of globalisation and automation, are not rosy.

The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt is out in September (ES Local Feed )
ES Local Feed

We have fallen into a fallacy “callout culture” in which mental fragility is given too great a weight, amidst a rise in “safetyism”.

“When students are reacting to real problems, they are more likely to engage in thought patterns that make the problems seem more threatening, which makes them harder to solve,” they argue. “Human beings need physical and mental challenges or they deteriorate.” By treating each other as fragile, we’re building a poorer population, the book argues.

Like an immune system, we need stress to learn, adapt and grow. Maybe you’re not stressed enough?

Triggered

True, the number of skilled provocateurs and “trolls” booked on campuses has spiked since 2016. Milo Yiannapolous even named his 2017 speaking tour Milo’s Troll Academy Tour. But the idea that students should not be exposed to “offensive” material is now a majority position. One of the great untruths of the age, they argue, lies in the misapprehension of feelings.

We should confront our feelings and those of others, critically. No-platforming, for instance, is a non-confrontation. “Wouldn’t our relationships be better if we all did a little less blaming and dichotomous thinking, and recognised that we usually share responsibility for conflicts?” they say.

Us vs them

Tribalism comes naturally. “The bottom line is that the human mind is prepared for tribalism,” write Lukianoff and Haidt. “Human evolution is not just the story of individuals competing with other individuals within each group; it’s also the story of groups competing with other groups — sometimes violently.”

The impulse is to stay within your set. “But being prepared for tribalism doesn’t mean we have to live in tribal ways,” Lukianoff and Haidt say. The human mind contains evolved cognitive “tools” but we don’t use all of them all the time. We can choose.

When distinctions between groups are emphasised rather than downplayed it “immediately turns tribalism up, making people highly attentive to signs that reveal which team a person is on”.

Break the cycle

Start as early as you can. “It was foolish to think one could clear the road for one’s child before the internet,” the authors argue. Now it is impossible.

Children need to develop a normal immune system, rather than an allergic response.

This is a multi-step journey, partly by bike — the authors advocate bicycle riding to and from “junkyard playgrounds” to encourage them to take small risks.

Encourage your children to engage in a lot of “productive disagreements”, they advise, which is easy for them to say — they haven’t met your kids. Don’t think about people as good vs evil — give them the benefit of the doubt. Above all, think positively.

The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt is out in September, £20, Allen Lane

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