"What is troubling isn’t just the idiocy of the legislation, but that Luxon didn’t instinctively understand that it wasn’t the role of the state to monitor children’s screen time."

"The perverse outcomes resulting from adults seeking to protect children range from the mildly idiotic ... to the morally questionable ... Last week our current Prime Minister and the MP for Tukituki (Hastings), Catherine Wedd, added to this list with a proposal to prevent those under 16 from accessing social media.

"This will prove popular. Foolish ideas often are. Leadership is knowing when to say no ...

"Professor Jonathan Haidt has compiled compelling research on the malign impact of social media on young minds. [In actual fact, not at all compelling - Ed] ...

"Thanks to the work of Haidt and others, responsible — and even irresponsible — parents know of this issue and act accordingly. If we were governed by a party that believed in Individual freedom and choice, personal responsibility and limited government, that is where this story would end. ... [Instead] girls being mean to each other on Snapchat requires central government legislation ...

"What is troubling isn’t [just] the idiocy of the legislation, but that Luxon didn’t instinctively understand that it wasn’t the role of the state to monitor children’s screen time. ..."

~ Damien Grant from his column 'Banning under 16s from social media will prove popular. Foolish ideas often are'

Let's not ban social media for sub-16-year olds

WHEN AUSTRALIA PASSES LEGISLATION, we're often not far behind.

Australia's Orwellianly titled Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act was passed last year. 

The Act's aim is to ban under 16-year olds from social media.

The social media ban was rushed through Parliament with no real inquiry into the nature of the problem it was supposed to solve or the likely effects of a ban. Evidence from mental health experts on the question of whether and how social media use is harmful is at best inconclusive, as far as I can determine.
    But the advocates of a ban haven’t worried too much about that. They’ve relied on casual correlation and on the testimony of instant experts, with no particular expertise in the mental health of young people. ... most notably Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt.

Twenge peddles bullshit based on so-called "generational analysis"— on the assumption that being a "millennial"/"Gen Z"/"Gen Y"/"Gen Jones" is any more effective than astrology. (Indeed, as one review of her latest book concludes, "for serious scholarly work, five-year birth cohorts, categorised by race, gender and class background, are much more useful. For entertainment purposes, astrology is just as good and less divisive.”)

Jonathan Haidt is other alleged expert relied upon. Haidt was good on teenagers' need for more independence — here he is not only bad at the data, but is arguing against his own earlier conclusion. In Mike Masnick's summary of the situation:

Six years ago, NYU social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt co-authored 'The Coddling of the American Mind. 'In the book, he and Greg Lukianoff argued that parents are doing a real disservice to their kids by overprotecting (coddling) them, rather than giving them more freedom and allowing them to make mistakes and learn.
    This year, he’s back with a new book, 'The Anxious Generation,' arguing the exact opposite in the digital world: that social media and smartphones have made kids under-protected, rewiring brains and increasing teenage depression rates.
    Haidt tries to address this obvious contradiction in his book with the standard cop-out of the purveyor of every modern moral panic: “This time it’s different!” He provides little evidence to support that.

"Unfortunately for those seeking an easy solution," says Masnick "the data doesn’t support Haidt’s conclusions."

[A]s a quick summary: he’s wrong on the data, which undermines his entire argument. Almost every single expert in the field who does actual research on these issues says so. Candice Odgers ripped apart his misleading use of data in Nature. Andrew Przybylski, who has done multiple, detailed studies using massive amounts of data going back years, and keeps finding little to no evidence of the things Haidt claims, has talked about the problems in Haidt’s data. Ditto Jeff Hancock, at Stanford, who recently helped put together the National Academies of Sciences report on social media and adolescent health (which also did not find what Haidt found).
    Indeed, one thing that came up in looking over the “strongest” research in the book was that (contrary to some of Haidt’s claims), data outside of the US on suicide rates seem to show they’re often (not always) going down, not up. Even worse, the data on depression in the US showing an increase in depression rates among kids is almost certainly due to changes in screening practices for depression and how suicide ideation is recorded.
    As my review notes, though, the problems with the data are only the very beginning of the problems with the book. Because, in the first part of the book, Haidt misleadingly throws around all the data, but in the latter part, he focuses on his policy recommendations.

It's those very policy recommendations that Australia has just followed! 

It's not just pseudo-psychology based on bad data: "even his former co-author, Greg Lukianoff, pointed out that Haidt’s proposals clearly violate [the US's] First Amendment."

So fast and loose on both data and free speech!

CANDICE ODGERS IS ONE researcher whose data, she says, from "studies on the impact of phones and social media on children, including a 'study of studies,' conclude that social media is good for some kids, helping them find like-minded individuals. It’s mostly neutral for many kids, and problematic for only a very small group (studies suggest less than 10 percent)." In other words, as she notes in her review of Haidt’s book 

the evidence suggests the causality is likely in the other direction.

Ouch.

A recent debate pitted Odgers against Haidt, where — as he watched his argument crumble — he had to admit that she knows the data better than he.

This matters, because this bullshit will be coming here soon. You can count on it.

A judge in a Florida court this week summarises how absurd the bullshit is.  Masnick commentates the brawl:

The transcript reads like a master class in dismantling moral panic arguments. When Florida’s lawyers stood up in court to defend the law, they reached for what they clearly thought was their strongest argument: “Well, Your Honor, it is well known in this country that kids are addicted to these platforms.”

But Judge Mark Walker, chief judge of the Northern District of Florida, wasn’t buying what Florida was selling. His response cut straight to the heart of why these kinds of claims deserve skepticism, and some of it was based on his own childhood experience on the other side of a moral panic:

MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: Well, Your Honor, it is well known in this country that kids are addicted to these platforms. This is a mental health —

THE COURT: It was well known when I was growing up that I was going to become a Satanist because I played Dungeons & Dragons. Is that — I don’t know what really that means. You can say that there’s studies, Judge, and you can’t ignore expert reports that say X.

The D&D reference isn’t just an amusing comeback — it’s a federal judge explaining through personal experience why courts shouldn’t accept “everybody knows” arguments about harm to children. After all, lots of things have been “well known” to harm children over the years. It was “well known” that chess made kids violent. Or that the waltz would be fatal to young women, or that the phone would prevent young men from ever speaking to young women again. I could go on with more examples, because there are so many.

When Florida’s lawyer tried to argue that social media was somehow different — that this time the moral panic was justified — Judge Walker was ready with historical receipts:

MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: Kids weren’t reading comics — millions and millions of kids weren’t reading comics eight hours a day. Millions and millions of kids weren’t listening to rap music eight hours a day. There’s something different going on here, and there’s a consensus —

THE COURT: The problem, Counsel, that’s a really bad example, the comics, because there is an entire exhibit in Glasgow where they barred comics in the entire country because somebody decided that comics were turning their youth against their parents and were causing them to engage and worship the supernatural and stuff.

So, I mean, I guess that was the point the plaintiffs were making is from the beginning of time, we’ve targeted things under some belief that it’s harming our youth, but doesn’t necessarily make it so.

But, go ahead.

That trailing “but, go ahead” is savage. I think I’d rather curl up in a ball and try to disappear in the middle of a courtroom than “go ahead” after that.

"Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths"

"There are at least two ways to explain why liberal girls became depressed faster than other groups at the exact time (around 2012) when teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones and the girls joined Instagram en masse. The first and simplest explanation is that liberal girls simply used social media more than any other group.... But I think there’s more going on here ... there’s something about the messages liberal girls consume that is more damaging to mental health than those consumed by other groups.
 

   ""[T]een mental health is not and must not become a partisan issue... [but we can't ignore that] 'progressive institutional leaders have specifically taught young progressives that catastrophising is a good way to get what they want'.... on the other side of the political spectrum, there was 'the most insensitive culture imaginable, which was the culture of 4chan.' The communities involved in gender activism on Tumblr were mostly young progressive women while 4Chan was mostly used by right-leaning young men ... The two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred ...
    "The young identity activists on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility, and trauma all the more tightly, increasingly saying that words are a form of violence, while the young men on 4chan moved in the opposite direction: they brandished a rough and rude masculinity in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy..

 

   "... I think the messages young, liberal women are hearing (every day, around the clock) are doing them no good.
    "Seemingly learning to view every single interaction through an intersectionalist lens, while searching for the ways in which you're being victimised by everyone on the planet who disagrees with you, makes you depressed. Crazy.
    "The 4Chan backlash was always inevitable (and is equally self-pitying and responsibility-denying).
I really feel for kids today. Instinctively I know the answer is to retreat from it all and engage with the world in a more physical, productive way, but opportunities to do that are dwindling'....

    "Thinking of ourselves as oppressed or infirm may inadvertently cultivate what psychologists call an external locus of control. Locus of control is a psychological concept articulated in the 1950s by Julian Rotter. Those with an internal locus of control experience themselves as able to influence outcomes that affect them. Those with an external locus of control feel that most of what happens to them is beyond their ability to affect.

    "Though both external and internal loci of control confer advantages and disadvantages, research has shown that having an internal locus of control is associated with less stress and better health, whereas having an external locus of control is correlated with anxiety disorders. Importantly, an internal locus of control appears to be a decisive factor in determining whether one will be psychologically resilient. As a society, therefore, it is in our interest to cultivate an internal locus of control, and indeed, the popular notions of grit and mindset are undergirded by locus of control theory. However, some [online and educational] environments [have been] fostering its opposite.....

    "In conclusion, I believe that Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014. Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths:
    "They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1).
    "They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).
    "They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3)....

     "[And yet c]reating a society in which we are encouraged to confront anxiety and face difficult realities matters not just for the mental health of individuals, but also for our collective well-being. In the world that soon awaits us, humankind will desperately need those individuals willing to rise from their beds. The challenges that loom ahead will require us to set aside timidity, weakness, and victimhood and claim instead agency and boldness, no matter how grim the odds."

~ composite quote from Lisa Marchiano and her article 'Collision with Reality: What Depth Psychology Can Tell us About Victimhood Culture,' Jonathan Haidt, from his article 'Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest,' and comment by Ria Parkinson [hat tip Paul Litterick and Ria Parkinson]

[UPDATED] "If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us." #QotD

A statement signed by 150 people incl. Deirdre McCloskey, Wynton Marsalis, Garry Kasparov, Steven Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Noam Chomsky, J.K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, and Salman Rushdie has expressed concern over the increasing illiberalism in the US and around the world, signing on to speak up for the Enlightenment value of free speech.

Their Open Letter on Justice and Open Debate was released online overnight, and will be appearing in the Letters section of Harper's magazine’s October issue. Astonishingly, even this tepid defence of the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, has managed to flush out on social media the cancel-culture zealots from both "wings" ...

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.
    The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.
    This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us. 

Elliot Ackerman
Saladin Ambar, Rutgers University
Martin Amis
Anne Applebaum
Marie Arana, author
Margaret Atwood
John Banville
Mia Bay, historian
Louis Begley, writer
Roger Berkowitz, Bard College
Paul Berman, writer
Sheri Berman, Barnard College
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Neil Blair, agent
David W. Blight, Yale University
Jennifer Finney Boylan, author
David Bromwich
David Brooks, columnist
Ian Buruma, Bard College
Lea Carpenter
Noam Chomsky, MIT (emeritus)
Nicholas A. Christakis, Yale University
Roger Cohen, writer
Ambassador Frances D. Cook, ret.
Drucilla Cornell, Founder, uBuntu Project
Kamel Daoud
Meghan Daum, writer
Gerald Early, Washington University-St. Louis
Jeffrey Eugenides, writer
Dexter Filkins
Federico Finchelstein, The New School
Caitlin Flanagan
Richard T. Ford, Stanford Law School
Kmele Foster
David Frum, journalist
Francis Fukuyama, Stanford University
Atul Gawande, Harvard University
Todd Gitlin, Columbia University
Kim Ghattas
Malcolm Gladwell
Michelle Goldberg, columnist
Rebecca Goldstein, writer
Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
David Greenberg, Rutgers University
Linda Greenhouse
Kerri Greenidge, historian
Rinne B. Groff, playwright
Sarah Haider, activist
Jonathan Haidt, NYU-Stern
Roya Hakakian, writer
Shadi Hamid, Brookings Institution
Jeet Heer, The Nation
Katie Herzog, podcast host
Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College
Adam Hochschild, author
Arlie Russell Hochschild, author
Eva Hoffman, writer
Coleman Hughes, writer/Manhattan Institute
Hussein Ibish, Arab Gulf States Institute
Michael Ignatieff
Zaid Jilani, journalist
Bill T. Jones, New York Live Arts
Wendy Kaminer, writer
Matthew Karp, Princeton University
Garry Kasparov, Renew Democracy Initiative
Daniel Kehlmann, writer
Randall Kennedy
Khaled Khalifa, writer
Parag Khanna, author
Laura Kipnis, Northwestern University
Frances Kissling, Center for Health, Ethics, Social Policy
Enrique Krauze, historian
Anthony Kronman, Yale University
Joy Ladin, Yeshiva University
Nicholas Lemann, Columbia University
Mark Lilla, Columbia University
Susie Linfield, New York University
Damon Linker, writer
Dahlia Lithwick, Slate
Steven Lukes, New York University
John R. MacArthur, publisher, writer
Susan Madrak, writer
Phoebe Maltz Bovy, writer
Greil Marcus
Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center
Kati Marton, author
Debra Maschek, scholar
Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois at Chicago
John McWhorter, Columbia University
Uday Mehta, City University of New York
Andrew Moravcsik, Princeton University
Yascha Mounk, Persuasion
Samuel Moyn, Yale University
Meera Nanda, writer and teacher
Cary Nelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Olivia Nuzzi, New York Magazine
Mark Oppenheimer, Yale University
Dael Orlandersmith, writer/performer
George Packer
Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University (emerita)
Greg Pardlo, Rutgers University – Camden
Orlando Patterson, Harvard University
Steven Pinker, Harvard University
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Katha Pollitt, writer
Claire Bond Potter, The New School
Taufiq Rahim, New America Foundation
Zia Haider Rahman, writer
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin
Jonathan Rauch, Brookings Institution/The Atlantic
Neil Roberts, political theorist
Melvin Rogers, Brown University
Kat Rosenfield, writer
Loretta J. Ross, Smith College
J.K. Rowling
Salman Rushdie, New York University
Karim Sadjadpour, Carnegie Endowment
Daryl Michael Scott, Howard University
Diana Senechal, teacher and writer
Jennifer Senior, columnist
Judith Shulevitz, writer
Jesse Singal, journalist
Anne-Marie Slaughter
Andrew Solomon, writer
Deborah Solomon, critic and biographer
Allison Stanger, Middlebury College
Paul Starr, American Prospect/Princeton University
Wendell Steavenson, writer
Gloria Steinem, writer and activist
Nadine Strossen, New York Law School
Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., Harvard Law School
Kian Tajbakhsh, Columbia University
Zephyr Teachout, Fordham University
Cynthia Tucker, University of South Alabama
Adaner Usmani, Harvard University
Chloe Valdary
Lucía Martínez Valdivia, Reed College
Helen Vendler, Harvard University
Judy B. Walzer
Michael Walzer
Eric K. Washington, historian
Caroline Weber, historian
Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers
Bari Weiss
Sean Wilentz, Princeton University
Garry Wills
Thomas Chatterton Williams, writer
Robert F. Worth, journalist and author
Molly Worthen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Matthew Yglesias
Emily Yoffe, journalist
Cathy Young, journalist
Fareed Zakaria

UPDATE: And ... "the reaction to the Harper's letter on Cancel Culture [including here, on this very blog!] proves why it was necessary...

Free Speech Under Attack: "The Thug's Veto"

So "legal advice" about protestors threatening unspecified violence has managed to give Massey University  a "Health and Safety" reason to shut down a planned Feminism 2020 Conference at the University -- hosting which despite the threats against it had previously given some of us to describe the University using words like "courageous." Turns out we were wrong.  "Cancellation of the event," blathers the University statement on the cancellation, "is the only way to eliminate the risk to health and safety and to ensure that the university would not be in breach of its health and safety obligations." 

Commenters were quick to observe that you can mark this down as both the inevitable outcome of the failed Free Speech Coalition litigation against Auckland Council -- which has now cemented into legal precedent this Health and Safety excuse -- and another example of the Thug's Veto.

A timely moment then to post this brief excerpt from the just released book Free Speech Under Attack, from one my three chapters in the book, this one explaining the re-emergence of this phenomenon: 'The Thug's Veto' ...

The Thug's Veto

When we dehumanise and demonise our opponents, we abandon the possibility of peacefully resolving our differences, and seek to justify violence against them.

    ~ Nelson Mandela

Want to shut down your opposition without answering their ideas? Want to deplatform a speaker without letting them speak? Achieve your aim in two easy steps by exercising what’s become known as the Thug’s Veto. “A 'Thug's Veto' is when violent and/or threatening activists and/or protest groups … force the closure, cancellation or disruption of an event that they don't agree with by means of intimidation or threats of violence and chaos.”[i]

We saw this in 2019 when threats by Peace Action Aotearoa prompted the cancellation of a speaking event by two controversial Canadians. These were not threats to take lightly: the ill-named group’s notoriety was earned by having placed a fake bomb in a crowded Wellington theatre, in order to have a film screening cancelled.

As a logical fallacy, the Thug’s Veto is the violent equivalent of ad hominem. It plays the man without the ball, leaving unanswered the ideas that speakers express, and their bones often battered and bruised.

The practice used to be called a ‘Heckler’s Veto.’[ii] Appropriate to our age, it has now been updated to be more violent.

It was first used in the modern form in 2001 after the pro-Palestinian professor, Dr Sami Al-Arian, appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News TV show. So incensed were viewers by what they heard that they send death threats to Al-Arian and protested at the University of Southern Florida, from which he was promptly sacked. The university argued “that Dr Al-Arian’s presence constituted an intolerable “disruption” to campus operations, making his termination necessary.”[iii] In response, Alan Charles Kors, editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), sent an open letter to the university arguing:

The University cannot and must not remove a professor because some portion of the public demands it on the basis of his purported political beliefs, his protected associations, and other wholly unproven suspicions. To do so would allow a “heckler’s veto” and would open the floodgates to arbitrarily firing all professors when some individuals, especially individuals willing to portray themselves as criminals, decide that they do not like the way that a professor talks, thinks, or appears. Indeed, it would create a new category, the “USF thug’s veto,” which actively encourages the threat of violence to accomplish the dismissal of professors disliked by any portion of the public. This is not only unconstitutional, but, indeed, endangers the core of freedom at any institution of higher learning and the very rule of civilised law itself….[iv]

That argument seems exactly right. “This is not about Sami Al-Arian or his political views,” Kors told the press. “This is about the devastation of free speech and academic freedom at USF and the destruction of constitutional protections at a public university.”

That devastation has continued, with protestors in recent times shutting down events from Arkansas to Auckland, and from Oxford to Oklahoma.

If the New Censors have their way, the Thug’s Veto may become the most widely accepted way to deplatform your opposition.[v]

. . . 

[To read on, order your copy of Free Speech Under Attack today!]

---

NOTES[i] ‘Thug’s Veto,’ Urban Dictionary
[ii] “The [US] Supreme Court first recognised the term in Brown v. Louisiana (1966), citing the work of First Amendment expert Harry Kalven Jr., who coined the phrase. The term is also used in general conversation to refer to any incident in which opponents block speech by direct action or by ‘shouting down’ a speaker through protest. Although some scholars refer to a string of heckler’s veto cases, the idea appears across a wide range of cases in First Amendment law as a label critical for any claim, made in defence of the government’s suppression, that speech inciting hostile reactions may be restrained.” Patrick Schmidt, ‘Heckler’s Veto,’ First Amendment Encyclopaedia.
[iii] ‘The University of South Florida Betrays the Rule of Law: The “Thug’s Veto” and the Ongoing Case of Sami Al-Arian,’ FIRE website, January 29, 2002
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Jonathan Haidt observes that there is also a parallel sort of ‘Victim’s Veto’ giving the easily offended power to silence speech. If “giving offence” is deemed off limits, then anyone claiming offence, especially on behalf of their group, is able to shut down any speaker they choose. This is creating am especially chilling effect on campuses, he says. To free up campus debate, he argues for a return to the common law notion of the “reasonable man” defence: i.e., if a “reasonable person” would not be offended by Statement ‘x,’ then Statement ‘x’ is okay.

. 

"Children, like many other complex adaptive systems, are antifragile. "Safetyism deprives young people of the experiences that their antifragile minds need, thereby making them more fragile, anxious, and prone to seeing themselves as victims." #QotD

"Children, like many other complex adaptive systems, are antifragile. Their brains require a wide range of inputs from their environments in order to configure themselves for those environments. Like the immune system, children must be exposed to challenges and stressors (within limits, and in age-appropriate ways), or they will fail to mature into strong and capable adults, able to engage productively with people and ideas that challenge their beliefs and moral convictions. Concepts sometimes creep. Concepts like trauma and safety have expanded so far since the 1980s that they are often employed in ways that are no longer grounded in legitimate psychological research. Grossly expanded conceptions of trauma and safety are now used to justify the overprotection of children of all ages—even college students, who are sometimes said to need safe spaces and trigger warnings lest words and ideas put them in danger...
    "Safetyism deprives young people of the experiences that their antifragile minds need, thereby making them more fragile, anxious, and prone to seeing themselves as victims."

~ Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, from their book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

. 

Fixing those fragile campus kids

“Safe spaces” on uni campuses where students’ delicate sensibilities are protected.

Sensitive wee flowers so terrified of being “micro-aggressed” they bully anyone their feelings tell them might “trigger” them.

Mob rule on campuses demanding “freedom” from ideas or even events that might challenge them.

Self-infantilising students everywhere are finding ideas so scary they're demanding you check your privilege and check out of their personal and public spaces:

• A Colorado University anti-racism rally was recently cancelled because the organisers are white.
• Free yoga classes at the University of Ottawa were recently cancelled  because yoga is now apparently inappropriate cultural appropriation.
• Students at Yale spit on other students and try to get their professors ousted because said professors don’t believe it’s their job to police Halloween costumes for political correctness.
• Cambridge University students demanding that anti-abortion speakers be barred from speaking on campus
• University College London’s students’ union (UCLU) voted to ban Nietzsche reading groups on the grounds the ‘far-right, fascist ideology’ threatened the ‘safety of the UCL student body and UCLU members.’

So well-satirised in this wonderful short film, from the UK to the USA to Australia to little old NZ “University has become the place for teenagers to go when they wish to delay being an adult, rather than being the bridge to independence it was once considered to be.”

So what can be done?

Recently on Sam Harris’ podcast, Douglas Murray said something amazing. He said:

The surprising thing is not that young people would rebel. Young people have always rebelled. That’s what young people do. The surprising thing is why the adults give in.
    I think this is far more relevant today than in 1968. The amazing question that hovers over Yale University is why the adults take it and the kids run rampage over Yale University. And this is the really large problem which Islamists and other terrible people are simply taking advantage of.
    Somebody needs to say to the girl shrieking at her professor, 'If you cannot cope with Halloween costumes, then you’ve got no place at a university, because you’re going to have no chance at dealing with quantum physics or Shakespeare or Heidegger if Halloween spooks you out this much. You’re a useless person, and you’re going to go into a useless career, because if you’re a lawyer, and you’ve gone to Yale, but you’re too sensitive to hear about rape cases, you're not going to be able to represent anyone in a court of law. You’re no use to law. You’re no use for literature because you might read a novel that will trigger you. You’re no use for the sciences. You’re no use for anything.'
And that’s what the adults should be saying.

They should. But how do we fix the problem? And how do we find young folk who are any use to law, to literature, to science?

At root, “post-modernism, deconstructionism and progressive education have caused today's rebellion against the mind,” so in the end you have to blame the philosophers for the campus insanity. But fixing the philosophy requires new philosophers on campus ready and able to challenge the regressive post-modernists. Which means, independent young thinkers.

Where are they going to come from in our mollycoddled over-nannied world?

Here’s another answer. Jonathan Haidt, the NYU Professor who co-authored the explosive Atlantic piece,”The Coddling of the American Mind,” was asked “how to prevent another wave of kids on campus who can’t handle reading a disturbing book, or sharing the campus with a visiting speaker whose views contrast with their own.” In an article titled “Revenge of the Coddled” he responded that we have to “think young.” So obviously, education committed to encouraging independence in young children such as Montessori education is crucial. But there’s so much, says Haidt, that parents themselves can do:

Children are anti-fragile. They have to have many, many experiences of failure, fear, and being challenged. Then they have to figure out ways to get themselves through it. If you deprive children of those experiences for eighteen years and then send them to college, they cannot cope. They don’t know what to do. The first time a romantic relationship fails or they get a low grade, they are not prepared because they have been rendered fragile by their childhoods. So until we can change childhood in America, we won’t be able to roll this back and make room of open debate.
    My biggest prescription is that in every hospital delivery room, along with that first set of free diapers, should come the book: Free-Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy. If everyone in America read the book Free-Range Kids the problem would be over in 21 years, when the first set of tougher kids filled our universities.

Free-Range Kids author Lenore Skenazy reaffirms that

the way to raise resilient kids is to be sceptical about the message we get all the time that they are just moments from doom: An encounter that will haunt them, a loss that will derail them, or an unsupervised couple of minutes that will result in their disappearance. Our society obsesses about the way kids can die in an instant, and ignores the fact that 99.9999% of them won’t, and most of THOSE will emerge no worse (and possibly better) for the wear.
    Haidt’s premise is that by avoiding more and more of our “fear triggers” (like, “She’ll die if she goes around the corner without me!”) we give those fears more power. They grow, and so does our kids’ anxiety.
    I love safety, but it’s true that once we let our kids do things on their own, the pride and confidence that they feel and that WE feel goes a long way to restoring “normal anxiety” back to its set point, instead of the red alert it is on today, all the time.
Including on campus.

[Hat tip Monica Beth]

On political behaviour

If you’re trying to understand the ramifications of and behaviour behind all the various reports released yesterday then fear not, because Don Boudreaux has extracted a pertinent quote from Jonathan Haidt’s excellent 2012 book, The Righteous Mind:

Alpha-male chimps are not truly leaders of their groups.  They perform some public services, such as mediating conflicts.  But most of the time, they are better described as bullies who take what they want.

Politicians are not very far removed genetically from chimps, politics being “the province, not of civilized men and women but, rather, of brutes in suits.”

Understand now?

[Hat tip On Liberty Street]